Late Escapism and Contemporary

Neoliberalism

This book suggests that escapism – the desire to leave one’s physical or
emotional circumstances for an ideal alternative – is a way to understand
the social conflicts that structure our world. Considering this phenomenon
across psychology, labour and cultural studies, the author engages with crit-
ical theorists such as Lukács, Fromm and Marcuse to examine how escap-
ism appears in our minds, workplaces and utopian imaginaries from fiction
to music. In this study, escapism emerges as a constitutive feature of the late
capitalist lifeworld – a feature that must be understood in order to create
social change.
Defining escapism as a new field of study, Late Escapism and Contemporary
Neoliberalism: Alienation, Work and Utopia suggests that the phenomenon
has much to teach us about contemporary consciousness and how we resist
and reshape the edicts of neoliberalism. As such, this book will appeal to
scholars of cultural and critical theory, social movements and political
sociology.

Greg Sharzer is Assistant Professor – Teaching Stream in Centre for Teaching

and Learning at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada, and author
of No Local: Why Small-Scale Alternatives Won’t Change The World.
Late Escapism and
Contemporary Neoliberalism
Alienation, Work and Utopia

Greg Sharzer
First published 2022
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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business
© 2022 Greg Sharzer
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been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sharzer, Greg, author.
Title: Late escapism and contemporary neoliberalism : alienation,
work and utopia / Greg Sharzer.
Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY :
Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021003243 (print) | LCCN 2021003244 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781138242319 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032040912 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781315278735 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Escape (Psychology) | Neoliberalism.
Classification: LCC BF575.E83 S53 2021 (print) | LCC BF575.E83
(ebook) | DDC 158--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003243
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003244

ISBN: 9781138242319 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781032040912 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781315278735 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
For Hyangmi
Table of contents

Foreword viii
Acknowledgements xvii
References xviii

1 What is escapism? 1

2 Escapism and negative humanism 41

3 Work and protective escapism 72

4 Dystopias and utopias 112

5 The uses of escapism 146

Index 176
Foreword

When I was 21, I had a summer job in a small factory making plastic sports
equipment, such as hockey sticks, ping pong bats and badminton racquets.
Every day, I fed plastic tubes into a stamping machine that would cut them into
a wedge shape, onto which I would fit a plastic hockey blade. Or I would wipe
toxic glue onto ping pong bats before pressing rubber pads onto them. The
monotony was oppressive, I poured easily-flammable toluene into plastic cups
with no protective gear, the average wage was $12 an hour, and my racialized
co-workers divided themselves into a hierarchy of skin colour, from light to
dark, making the latter bear the brunt of racist jokes. As a self-described rad-
ical, I considered myself to be among the vanguard of super-exploited work-
ers who were suffering from “false consciousness.” But where was the socialist
fraternity I read, debated and marched about? On the bus to work I read State
Capitalism in Russia, the seminal work on the rise of a new Soviet ruling class,
but surprisingly, very few opportunities arose to talk about the Stalinist infla-
tion of digger production. The days dragged on, and when I got home from
work I was too tired to do anything but watch Jean-Luc Picard lead the star-
ship Enterprise through its continuing mission, on which I noticed that almost
no one was racist or exploited. My fellow activists were effusive on strikes in
France and how to fight the Nazis in Lewisham in 1977, but had very little con-
crete advice on how to deal with a toxic work environment.
That environment was largely due to the boss, Vince (all names changed),
who yelled at people for making mistakes, or for possibly making mistakes
in the future. His outbursts were so over-the-top that, as a creative writ-
ing student, I began writing them down for inspiration. So, for example,
when Vince wanted to motivate the workforce before assigning a big order,
he would call whoever was on the shop floor over to one of the grey-green
presses and tell us, “I was nice before, but now I’m not taking any more
shit. You can’t possibly understand the problems I have. I have very little
faith that you guys can do this. Prove me wrong.” He had an undergraduate
degree in business administration and fancied himself a leader, so every
word in the last phrase was drawn out and emphasized, as if proving him
wrong was a vital task. One time he threatened to pull my fingernails out if
I made a mistake. It was just banter, of course.
 Foreword ix
I became friendly with Gus, my foreman, an Iranian guy with two kids
who earned his $14 an hour – a whole $2 wage premium above myself, the
temporary summer help – by being the object of the boss’s daily tirades.
He was an immigrant with two kids to support and, I discovered to my
joy, a socialist who had a fine arts degree. One day we were discussing –
guardedly – how irrational the workplace was, and he told me, “You may
think that when you graduate, working life will be different for you; well, it’s
all like this.” And then: “You can get through this because you can think,
‘Tomorrow, I’ll be gone.’ Me, I have to live with the fact that I’m here tomor-
row, the next day, next week, next year.” And he would look back down
at his work. When I told Vince I was going back to school at the end of
August, he was genuinely surprised. He wanted me to come back on week-
ends, because I had a steady hand and could stamp the company logo onto
plastic tennis balls without smearing it. I demurred.
When I was 28, I worked as a secretary in a large public institution. I
figured out that although the work was relatively easy and my boss was not
unkind, there was no future in it. I decided to collect my savings, up stakes
and travel. I told a supervisor, a handsome, charismatic man in his 40s
universally seen as the workplace comedian. He lost his smile and said, “I
would love to travel but I can’t go anywhere. That’s why I eat.” The implied
“to excess” after those words was not visible.
When I was 31, at a different institution, I was overseen by one of those
supremely talented administrators without whom offices would fall apart: a
woman who had been there for 20 years, knew everyone and could organize
every procedure, quickly and without error, from an expense claim to a card
signing. She was pleasant, smart and well-respected; one day she called out
from her desk beside mine, “Wouldn’t it be great if life had an erase button,
like a tape deck?”
These were neither particularly bad jobs, nor were my co-workers unu-
sual. That was the point, it dawned on me: they were normal. In every one of
the dozens of workplaces I inhabited, there was a common dream: leaving.
Colleagues wanted to start their own businesses or retire, but they stayed
because they needed the money. Yet as I shunted between survival gigs,
grad school and activist circles, I found these experiences went unnoticed.
In seminars, I learned that the wretched of the earth formed communities
of resistance or rose up against their oppressors. No one talked about what
they did the rest of the time. In my experience, workers neither resisted nor
celebrated their work: they just got on with it, while they dreamed of being
somewhere else. “Day-dreaming is the lot of the weak,” Lenin (1924/1972)
warned in Two Utopias. He was defending the early utopian socialists as “a
harbinger of the class which, born of capitalism, has by now… become a
mass force which can put an end to capitalism and is irresistibly advancing
to this goal.” Did this mean that all the workers I had met – and myself, chief
among them – were either weak, projecting their own demoralization onto
the world at large, or stupid, standing in the way of history?
x Foreword
There had to be another way of seeing what I had come to recognize as
escapism. These experiences, and many others like them, cured me of my
nascent workerism: the idea that there is a heroic working class straining
to break its shackles, only held back by the brute force of the state and the
betrayals of its leaders. I realized that the working class’s heroism is rarely
about open resistance; most of the time, working class heroes get up every
day and go to work. Escapism, not struggle, is what organizes their mental
environment; without it, life appears very bleak indeed. Being exploited and
oppressed does not lead to automatic resistance; rather, those who do not
like their present situation find that the path of least resistance to exploita-
tion and oppression is to avoid it.
This is often coupled with an intense longing for the past, real or
imagined, experienced directly or by proxy, as those who feel the need for
escapism often wonder how they ended up in their current circumstances.
Many feel attuned to what has been lost and thus outcast, but escapism does
not solely come from a position of marginality. What marks escapism is its
ubiquity: everyone is doing it. But because it is shameful, no one can admit
to it, at least not without a rueful averted glance and the assertion that it is
only temporary, and that we will return to reality soon enough. A near-total
practice can be radically democratic, but only if it is in the open – hence the
need for a conversation about escapism, to delve into how alienated subjects
signal their distance from reality.
This is not very exciting. A good narrative demands conflict, whereas the
dilettantes who evade the monumental clash between capital and labour
are not only servile but boring. Why bother studying that? Osborn (1937),
defender of Freud to the interwar British Stalinists, suggested ruefully that
“the tendency to morbid introspection, to minute analysis of mental states
as a refuge from the urgent reality of social problems… marks the cultural
decadence of bourgeois intellectuals.” Heaven forfend anyone would wish to
seek refuge from urgent reality, which often seems more amenable to morbid
introspection than to change. But it is the thesis of this book that escapism is
not passivity, at least not entirely: it is a form of activity that helps shape the
world. In that, it is as radical as reality itself, to paraphrase Lenin. Everyone
survives or flourishes within the confines of their social position. No one
acts without theory or an understanding of the world, however inchoate. It
is also the thesis of this book that escapism forms a near-universal theory
for most people because of the material circumstances they find themselves
wanting to flee. Thus class is an organizing concept for this investigation.
It is not a static measure of wages, social standing or occupational auton-
omy, though it encompasses all three. Rather, class is a relationship to what
Marx called the means of production: the private ownership of the com-
modities that capitalism organizes, from fields and factories to offices and
shops. Most people – a term this book will use interchangeably with work-
ers, who make up the vast majority of people – sell their capacity to work for
a wage or salary. And they have nothing else to fall back on, no property or
 Foreword xi
investments to open up a life of leisure, art or adventure. Class is best under-
stood as a relationship of power, bounded by those who have the ability to
dictate who has control over the means of production and who is excluded
from it. That power is not abstract: it has concrete effects in shaping the life
paths of workers, and for the purposes of this study, the mental boundaries
of those pathways.
Those boundaries deserve close consideration, because the fundamen-
tal question for anyone desiring social change is why it has not happened
yet. The casual observer might be perplexed by the fact that workers limit
their displeasure to escapism – not liking the forced sale of their labour
power, certainly, but not changing it. The system seems set up to run this
way: Davidson (2017) argues: “all that capitalism requires to do is maintain
a majority of the working class in circumstances which are bearable com-
pared to the imaginable alternatives,” as workers “often lack the conceptual
and linguistic tools to understand their position in this system, let alone do
anything about it.” However, workers’ language forms what Lacan would
call a symbolic order, written in imagination and behaviours. Cederström
and Fleming (2012) argue that work has stepped beyond its bounds in the
workplace and become a mode of existence unto itself, returning to Marx’s
original vision of wage labour as colonizing all aspects of daily life, but
asking for the active, enthusiastic acquiescence of self-branding rather than
grudging consent. To the degree that the system demands obedience, dissat-
isfaction is more and more expressed through escapism.
Without an understanding of entrapment, too much weight gets placed
on the failures of workers to rise up. We can see this mistake in Lyotard’s
infamous essay libidinal economy (1993) where, in his coming to terms with
the Freudian tradition of libidinal drives, he struggles to understand exactly
why people go to work:

if they chose that, if they become the slave of the machine, the machine
of the machine, fucker fucked by it, eight, twelve, hours a day, year after
year, it is because they are forced into it, constrained, because they cling
to life? Death is not an alternative to it, it is a part of it, it attests to the
fact that there is jouissance in it,… in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed
it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed
imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal
identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for
them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed
the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morn-
ing and evening.

Here, Lyotard elides the experience of wage labour on the individual with
its effects on social and spatial organization. He accurately names the hor-
ror of a lifetime’s hard labour; but workers with no autonomy, control or
safety in their workplace do not enjoy work, or even have their expected
xii Foreword
enjoyment frustrated. The relative anonymity and mobility of being a wage
worker does offer some independence, but work itself is not something to
become accustomed to. In his first-hand account of assembly line work at
a Citroën factory, Linhart (1981) describes the complete opposite, as auto
workers come off shift and change into suits:

At last, the men unfold and put on their clothes for outside: a perfectly
clean shirt, often a tie. Yes, it’s a sieve… On one side, the factory: dirt,
worn jackets, overalls that are too big, stained blue boiler suits, slouch-
ing gait, the humiliation of orders to which there is no reply… On the
other, the city: suit, polished shoes, upright walk, and the hope of being
called “mister”.

This is not escape, because the workers know they must return the next day,
but the temporary revolt into style suggests escapism is a chance to recap-
ture a sliver of humanity after the indignities of work and the social world.
Postwar British cultural studies filled many tomes with mods, suedeheads,
punks and skins in their glorious attempts to resist commodification, but
the drive is universal. Consider, for example, that similar movements have
appeared for generations among the sapeurs and sapeuses of the Democratic
Republic of Congo, whose brightly-coloured suits and high-end accesso-
ries, Gondola (1999) suggests, function as resistance to western colonialism.
The prevalence of escapism in something so common and yet particular as
fashion suggests it is not simply one symbolic order among others, but one
of the biggest.
This book is entitled Late Escapism, in a nod to Mandel’s (1976) Late
Capitalism. Readers may wonder whether, like my first book No Local, I
have trouble coming up with titles. This is true – and yet classifying escap-
ism as “late” also allows a periodization. Mandel defined late capitalism
as a back to basics analysis of the capitalist laws of motion, in which its
multiple crises – rooted in overproduction and a declining rate of profit and
reflecting into economics, politics and ideology – cannot be assuaged. This
is not pre-ordained: Mandel regrets the chronological implication of “late,”
as if capitalism was close to ending. “Late capitalism” declares instead that
the contradictions will intensify and the system will not find ways to resolve,
displace or hide them. Mandel argues against the idea

that the system [of late capitalism] is capable of overcoming all the
fundamental socio-economic contradictions of the capitalist mode
of production…. [it] has not, and cannot, accomplish this. In fact, the
alleged ‘integration’ of the working-class into late-capitalist society
inevitably encountered an insuperable barrier – the inability of cap-
ital to ‘integrate’ the worker as producer at his place of work and to
provide him with creative rather than alienated labour as a means of
‘self-realization’.
 Foreword xiii
This is precisely the meaning in which I frame Late Escapism. There is no
inevitable end-point for late capitalism; however, the failure of neoliberal
regulation to restore profitability or create social stability, the rise of a new
gilded age and the all-encompassing crisis of global heating means that
the system’s effects cannot be hidden. Escapism is not an aberration but an
inevitable result of systemic breakdown, in which the stubborn human at
the centre of capital’s vast, crumbling machine forms their own “insuper-
able barrier” simply by dreaming of other places. A quote from Raymond
Williams narrowly lost out on being the book’s subtitle: “desire displaced
by alienation.” The concrete human individual who desires creative expres-
sion, simply because they are human, must channel that creativity into
mediated forms. To paraphrase Ernst Bloch, this is the warm current of
escapism, which is not only a response to social breakdown but an assertion
of humanity.
Chapter 1 considers the conditions that breed escapism, outlining the
depredations of life for many in neoliberal society, with a focus on poverty
and ill health. Addiction is often an outcome of these problems, whether it
be to drugs or over-consumption, and this must be seen as a form of adap-
tive escapism, however harmful the effects are to the addict. Next, Chapter 1
considers the theoretical engagement with escapism, specifically the work
of geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, which is critiqued for its lack of thorough inves-
tigation of the social and historical conditions driving escapism. Right-
escapisms are sifted through next, as constructions of myths of dominance
in response to capitalist dislocation and shifting racial hierarchies. Left-
escapisms are also considered in depth, chiefly for the Left’s inability to take
the subject – and subjectivity – seriously.
Understanding subjectivity requires a model of the Self, which Chapter 2
seeks to ground in the developmental trauma of the capitalist social world.
Marx had a concept of the individual that stayed consistent throughout his
writings. This means that later theories of ideology must preserve a sense
of the alienated individual who is never completely – for lack of a better
word – brainwashed. Althusser helps frame escapism as a kind of counter-
ideology, which suggests that the complete integration of the subject into
the capitalist lifeworld has failed. This helps inform the concept of escapism
as a form of class consciousness: a mediated recognition of exploitation.
In different ways, the psychoanalytic tradition represented by Freud and
Marcuse establishes a Self whose drives react to the demands of the social
world. However, Chapter 2 suggests the Self is best characterized through
Fromm’s ego psychology, which demonstrates the introjection of social rela-
tions into the psyche. The result of this process is a neoliberal social char-
acter, whose goal is to achieve protective, individual dominance over the
market, just like the bourgeoisie of capitalist myth. Concretely, this appears
in developmental trauma as a mind-object and manic defence, both forms
of mastery that prove adaptive to the market in labour-power, as the exam-
ple of Bourdieu’s life trajectory demonstrates, but also form a protective
xiv Foreword
shield against developmental trauma. This kind of escapism demonstrates
in practice the concrete, historical Self that Marx asserted in theory.
Chapter 3 applies these concepts to the experience of work, to show how
escapism is a necessary response to alienation. The “Self that escapes” is
not simply a victim of poverty, addiction and toxic ideologies; workers also
create capitalist society through their own labour power. From a potential
expression of creative capacity, work is turned into something that is forced,
as a simultaneous source of self-respect and erosion of autonomy. This is
made all the more difficult under conditions of precarity, when workers are
forced to compete among each other to find employment or are simply cast
out of the labour market. A way out of this dilemma is often framed as the
dream of being one’s own boss: the fantasy of becoming petty bourgeois, the
tiny class whom Bourdieu describes occupying a middle space between cap-
ital and labour – and occupying an outsized ideological space, as its mem-
bers demonstrate their apparent freedom from necessity. Yet this route is
impossible for most workers, and those who achieve it pay a heavy personal
cost. In the absence of escape up the class ladder, work creates the need
for a contradictory Self that is both present and absent in the workforce,
and escapism forms a protective shielding of the authentic personality. The
absurd example of Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener shows in extreme fash-
ion what happens when that contradiction is laid bare, suggesting both the
limits to escapism as a means to action, and its presence when all other
options are foreclosed.
Escapism finds its proper place in imagined futures. Chapter 4 grounds
fantasy in the psychoanalytic and critical traditions of Freud, Marcuse and
Bloch, paying special attention to the latter’s concept of non-contemporane-
ity, which conceptualizes fantasy as either nostalgia for the past or a rejection
of the present. Grounded in cultural production, these appear in literature as
anamorphic stains, artefacts of differently-imagined realities so strange that
they throw our own into stark relief. Chapter 4 briefly examines the debate
in fantasy and speculative fiction over whether to escape from capitalism’s
symptoms – represented by Tolkien’s feudal idylls – or from the system itself.
Dystopias and utopias are strategies for articulating systemic critiques, and
this chapter examines examples of both, in which the work of Mark Fisher,
the final novel of Victor Serge, the anti-capitalism of TV series Sapphire and
Steel, the life-affirming artificiality of techno and the introspection of hip hop
all demonstrate distance from the present and visions of the future.
It is necessary to resist answering Lenin’s famous question of “what
must be done” with escapism, at least right away, in order to spend suf-
ficient time defining the terms of debate. However, its re-emergence is
inevitable and necessary, because escapism is produced by actual people,
whom the capitalist lifeworld also depends upon for its reproduction and
expansion. Chapter 5 begins by outlining the practical uses of escapism
through a critique of utopian communities and “real utopias.” The latter do
not fare particularly well, because global markets in commodities – chiefly
 Foreword xv
the commodity labour-power – set strict limits on the expansion of alter-
natives. However, escapism remains a form of class consciousness, which
both expresses and demonstrates distance from alienation, and in doing so
creates a way to understand and articulate resistance. We can follow Lukács
(1971) in his fight against the dualism of 19th century utopian socialists,
who separated empirical reality from abstract utopianism: “theory must
presuppose a principle that transcends the concept of both what ‘is’ and
what ‘ought to be’ so as to be able to explain the real impact of the ‘ought’
upon what ‘is’…. The task is to discover the principles by means of which
it becomes possible in the first place for an ‘ought’ to modify existence.” In
this book, escapism is an “ought” in reverse: not a direct wish or a program
but an indication of what needs to change by showing what is considered
unbearable. This can be the basis for both new political subjectivities and
new aesthetic collectivities, as a brief survey of k-pop group BTS’s fandom
suggests. As long as there is alienation, our creative inner drives will form a
negative humanism that creates distance from its present, degraded circum-
stances and reaffirms the presence of a human subject.
This book was produced in fits and starts over many years, as my stint in
academia introduced me to different forms of precarity than the ones I was
used to. I took the initial notes on an intercity bus to work between Seoul
and Suwon in South Korea, my fingers struggling to stay centred over the
keyboard as the vehicle lurched violently forward and back according to the
whims of the tired, angry bus driver. Long passages grew and wilted over
the next few years, serving as fertilizer for more developed concepts. The
bulk of the final text flowered during the lockdown of 2020. During the writ-
ing process, the covid-19 pandemic ravaged the entire planet, with gruesome
impacts depending on one’s class, geographic, gender and racial status. In the
midst of escapism on a scale never seen before, with millions stuck at home
and glued to their computer and phone screens, an anti-escapism arose in
the Black Lives Matter rebellions, sparked by the Minneapolis police mur-
der of George Floyd, a black man arrested and strangled for using counter-
feit currency. The curious convergence of the biggest wave of escapism to
date, and the biggest American protests ever, with echoes around the globe,
suggests a productive relationship between escapism and confrontation and
further justifies studying the former. If the intense, enforced desire to escape
one’s circumstances can grow parallel to sudden outbreaks of mass strug-
gle against a racist capitalism, then it is necessary to pay close attention to
those escapist impulses. In those, our desires wait nascent to be born.
Absences
Defining a new field like escapism studies, as this book loftily aims to do,
involves surveying and synthesizing many different fields. Specialists of
the latter could reasonably claim it does justice to very few. Escapism is
common enough that, once one looks, it appears everywhere. Analytically,
this means sacrificing depth for breadth and, as Thompson (1959) warned,
xvi Foreword
“hasty impressionism is [not] a substitute for the hard work of close political
analysis.” This book tries to meld an older tradition of alienation, crafted
during capitalism’s Golden Era of the 1940s to the 1970s, to the contempo-
rary malaise and panic of our fascist- and virus-inflected world. In its desire
to sweep over so much ground, it sometimes uses thinkers opportunisti-
cally, excising their words from their context and putting them to new ends.
It draws arbitrary lines through multiple fields of inquiry and excludes much
that could properly be included. But for better or for worse, this book must
contextualize escapism, in order to suggest it is a necessary and appropriate
response to the current conjuncture. This means using a rather large broom.
I find the negative humanism implicit in psychoanalytic Marxism to
be a natural framework for escapism, but this does not invalidate other
approaches – it is simply a starting point. A major lacuna is the decades-old
feminist critique of Freud, and newer anti-subjective theories of the subject.
The idea that gender roles are something to escape from – and, more specif-
ically, that the work gender categories do to construct and restrict identity
is resisted through escapist subversions and performances – is central to
established and emerging theories of resistance, particularly those of every-
day life and practices on the margins. Although I believe their absence in
this text does not invalidate escapism as an object of study, I hope future
research – by myself and others – can begin to fill the gap.
Likewise, ludic studies, particularly those of video games, are commonly
tied to escapism. This book’s definition of escapism, as an inevitable and
positive response to alienation, is off-kilter with the popular understand-
ing of the term as simply “not reality.” But gaming’s complexities and dec-
ades-long history deserves its own study using this model.
Marx, Smith and many 20th-century theorists often used the gendered
pronoun “he.” This is contrary to the intention of this text. I ask readers not
to assume a male universal subject, and to assume [sic] after every instance
where the male pronoun appears.
Page numbers from direct quotes appear at the end of citations, in the
order in which they are referenced.
Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges partial funding from the University of Toronto

and the University of Toronto Faculty Association’s Professional Expense
Reimbursement Allowance.
Shirley Yeung provided invaluable expertise in her incisive and thorough
edits of Chapter 1, not only helping me to clarify my meaning but providing
some choice rephrasing that I happily appropriated. I am grateful to Tim
Hansell, Tanner Mirrlees and Tom Robles for their thoughtful comments
on earlier drafts of the chapters, all of which contributed immensely to the
improvement of the final product. I am also thankful to Alice Salt, senior
editorial assistant at Routledge, for her flexibility in pushing back the sub-
mission deadline so many times. Finally, the patience and support of my
partner was invaluable to the completion of what often felt – to both of us
– like a Sisyphean labour. All errors and oversights in this work are my own.
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Osborn, R. (1937). Freud and Marx: A Dialectical Study. London: Victor Gollancz.
p. 27.
Thompson, E. P. (1959). The new left. The New Reasoner, 1(9). p. 6.
1 What is escapism?

To escape is to achieve freedom. From the Latin ex, meaning “out of,” and
cappa, meaning cape, escape means to shed one’s clothing and leave it in
the attacker’s hands: literally, to “get out of one’s cape.” Just like cloaks
themselves – a staple of ancient Roman wardrobes – this athletic manoeu-
vre was common enough to warrant its own word. However, the etymology
of escape seems inadequate to describing systemic, rather than individual
threats. Pandemics, famine-inducing locust plagues, a global economic
depression, the end or at least diminishment of humanity in a tumult of cli-
mate change-induced polar melting, extreme temperatures and agricultural
collapse – anyone needing a reason to escape does not have to look very
far. By definition, these threats cannot be escaped from: they are global,
multiple and intersecting. Humanity is faced with challenges well beyond
the scope of any individual, yet still possesses a basic yearning for libera-
tion. In these conditions, contemporary escapism is the desire to run from
circumstances that do not allow actual change. But while all of humanity is
implicated in these crises, not everyone is trapped by them, and the means
to escape these patterns vary greatly.
The answer to the question “What is escapism?” lies in understanding
the complex interplay of structural and social factors that compose the cap-
italist lifeworld. This is obviously no easy task, but we can begin by first
looking at the social conditions that have generated our need for escapism:
the long crisis of neoliberalism. As this chapter will explore, its effects can
be felt in social development indicators like poverty and disease rates. The
response to this is addiction, in many forms, but addiction itself would not
be so powerful for so many if it was not a response to the trauma of an
alienating lifeworld. It is surprising, then, that escapism is so understudied.
To date, Tuan’s (1998) Escapism remains the only major engagement with
the concept; but as this chapter will show, it substitutes ethics for a social
analysis and arrives at an abstract, and rather conservative view of the role
escapism plays in human nature. Yet even if Tuan’s book fails to properly
engage with history, at least it takes escapism seriously. In this, it remains
far ahead of the escapisms of both Right and Left, which this chapter exam-
ines in some depth: the former are mired in meritocratic and authoritarian
2 What is escapism?
myths, while the Left considers escapism a distraction from the urgent task
of facing reality. That reality must indeed be faced – but to do so, we must
understand why escapism is such a powerful tonic for so many. It is not a
diversion from the social world; rather, escapism constitutes that world.

What happened? The crisis of neoliberalism

The term “escapism” dates back to 1930, and Konzack (2017) suggests it
arises from literary critic John Ransom, in his description of the psychol-
ogy of defeat. In the same light, much of contemporary escapism can be
defined as a nostalgia for a cancelled future, the capitalist realism that
Fisher (2009) so ably dissected. That future lasted roughly 40 years in the
Global North, from post-World War 2 reconstruction to the onset of the
neoliberal era in the early 1980s. In that time, social democracy appeared
throughout capitalist states in the Global North as a brokered compromise
between capital and labour, in which the state would provide universal
services and unions would keep their members productive. Governments
spent counter-cyclically and corporate wealth was taxed and redistributed
at levels that prevented massive wealth inequalities. It was always a partial
solution, prone to inefficiencies and the necessary large-scale bureaucracies
to coordinate public goods. But for those people it included, its universal
coverage delivered public goods like free healthcare, free higher education
(including in the arts), social housing and genuine attempts to democratize
local government.
To be sure, escapism predates neoliberalism, because capitalist instability
and decline predates it, too. Yet social democracy remains in the firmament,
its glimmers appearing in things like libraries, schools and public buildings,
despite its light having burned out a long time ago. This lingering presence
of egalitarianism has left most of us to lament this decline. Hatherley (2009)
acknowledges “a longing for the fragments of the half-hearted post-war
attempt at building a new society … These remnants of social democracy
can, at best, have the effect of critiquing the paucity of ambition and gro-
tesque inequalities of the present.” Social democracy was better for most
people than unbridled liberal economics, but it could not fix an underly-
ing problem: an economy that moves according to the private interests of
corporations engaged in a life-or-death struggle with each other will only
consider the needs of people when pressed to do so. And even then, that
economy does so reluctantly.
The political choice to impose neoliberal policies was intrinsic to capital-
ist growth dynamics and the decline in profit rates, rising wages and mul-
tiple crises of overcapacity they created. In other words, neoliberalism was
an effect, not a cause: the problem was capitalism, not (only) its regulation.
The profitability crisis that unravelled the compromise between capital and
labour appeared as early as the 1960s when, as Benanav (2019) suggests,
economies in the Global North began to deindustrialize, starting a long
 What is escapism? 3
decline of relative productivity and output. This was temporarily solved by
the neoliberal era in which, Harvey (2005) describes, governments began
lowering the overall wage share by assaulting unions and reducing social
spending. Deficits, supposedly the bête noire of neoliberal policy, increased
as corporate tax burdens shrank. Goods previously shielded from the mar-
ket, like housing and healthcare, could be monetized through the sale of
state-owned assets and the availability of cheap credit. The new money in
private hands was funnelled into financial markets. Shaikh (2016) describes
how neoliberalism imposed a free-trade orthodoxy on all economies,
despite the historical evidence that wealthy countries benefited greatly from
subsidies and protectionism. It opened developing markets to international
competition, extending the reach of global financial institutions and regu-
lating developing economies according to the harsh discipline of structural
adjustment. Profit rates did not soar, but they recovered.
Under the new regime, neoliberal debt expansion functioned as a kind of
structural escapism: an attempt by ruling elites to delude themselves that
profits could be sustained eternally. This is, of course, impossible without
regular local and occasionally system-wide shocks. As Marx identified,
crises serve a vital purpose: the system suffers from regular bouts of over-
production, in which more is produced than can be sold. A falling profit
rate can spark bankruptcies, and the resulting economic turmoil eliminates
overcapacity in less-profitable productive facilities. To be clear, this means
too much is being produced for a profitable return, not that everyone has
their needs met. The resulting unemployment lowers the cost of labour. In
other words, capitalism balances its books by removing old machinery and
workers from its ledger. For example, Roberts (2020) argues that the eco-
nomic crisis that followed the Covid-19 pandemic was simply the visible
manifestation of a deeper malaise, in which the persistent low profits that
neoliberalism was supposed to fix led companies to spend more on pro-
duction by using cheap labour, rather than new productive technologies.
Although a product of different circumstances, neoliberalism was also a
response to crisis, which shifted the costs of restoring corporate health to
labour.
Those denied the spoils of privatization and financialization, let alone
higher wages, maintained their standard of living by borrowing. For exam-
ple, in Canada, Rozworski (2018) shows that debt as a proportion of dispos-
able income grew from 105% in 1998 to 170% in 2018 – a figure that increased
to 177% in 2019, according to financial regulators (FCAC). The availability
of cheap credit and speculative bubbles in real estate inflated the asset val-
ues of property owners – at least on paper – without raising wages, which
stagnated. For those who do not own or manage capital, buying into this
dream and putting an imaginary down payment on freedom from insecurity
and constraints is deeply attractive. Rationally, we know debts have to be
repaid; but statistics show that fully 27% of Canadians borrow to purchase
daily living needs like food – even more than Americans, 23% of whom rely
4 What is escapism?
on credit cards for basic necessities, Leonhardt (2019) reports. For those
unlucky enough not to have gotten on the property ladder before housing
speculation became a primary savings vehicle, there are few options besides
living hand-to-mouth, a pay cheque away from disaster. In this fashion, debt
itself functions as a form of escapism, putting off difficult decisions into the
future, in the hopes that finances will improve, or at least not implode.

Poverty
The standard argument against socialism is that capitalism has lifted hun-
dreds of millions out of poverty. This is true in the absolute, non-relative
sense, if one considers capitalism to be a system of development. But devel-
opment in capitalism only happens as a by-product: the goal of the system is
profit, and any social benefit is secondary.
Ideologues will point out that capitalism is the history of wealth crea-
tion, so that from 1820 to 2015, the proportion of the world’s population
living in extreme poverty fell from 90% to less than 10%. In an article sub-
titled “Why everything is not as bad as media tells you”, Niyazov (2019)
musters statistics to show that humanity has conquered disease, poverty,
war and autocracy. These arguments, however, conceal important ques-
tions about distribution and the nature of capitalist power. As Roser and
Ortiz-Ospina (2013) point out, living above the poverty line of $1.90 a
day does not mean a comfortable life. This is a measure of extreme pov-
erty, but different methodologies give a poverty rate of 13.5% in the US.
Aside from data collection issues, there is a methodological problem as
well. Prior to 1820, most humans lived on less than $2 a day because they
had no need of a money economy: capitalism had not straddled the globe
yet, and they could support themselves without relying on the market.
Today this is very different: the working class is truly global, and billions
must sell their labour power – their ability to work – for a wage in order
to buy their vital needs, like housing, education and food on the market.
Those who own their own land as small farmers must produce for the mar-
ket rather than for their own or their communities’ subsistence. Millions
more survive through forms of unpaid or unfree labour. And capitalism’s
inefficiencies and crises also mean that not everyone can find a buyer for
what they are selling.
As such, Ferreira et al. (2015) show that poverty rates have only declined
slightly in the poorest parts of the world, such as South Asia and Africa,
while rates in the middle-income countries of Europe, Central Asia and
elsewhere have actually grown. The US is not a substitute for global trends,
but it has the virtue of being the richest and most proudly capitalist country
on Earth, which should be a good indicator of where we are all headed.
Even before the 2020 pandemic sent incomes for everyone but billionaires
nosediving, the direction was not good. Alvaredo et al. (2017) suggest that
inequality worsened during the neoliberal era: between 1978 and 2015, the
 What is escapism? 5
share of total US national income going to the lower 50% of the population
fell from 20% to 12%, while the top 1% grew its share from 11% to 20%.
Income growth for the former group actually fell by 1%. This is in the con-
text of rising savings by the very rich, the only context in which capitalism
lets any wealth “trickle down” to the working class. Total wealth in the US
as a ratio of net national income rose from 300% in 1978 to 500% in 2015.
Meanwhile public property, as a percentage of overall debt, shrank from
over 10% to negative levels. The income share of the top 1%, which had
declined steadily throughout the 20th century, rebounded sharply with the
onset of neoliberalism.
Finally, it is simply difficult to obtain raw data on poverty from most
low- and some middle-income countries, which by the World Bank’s own
admission “create[s] uncertainty over the magnitude of poverty reduction.”
This inability to accurately gauge poverty reduction must be considered in
tandem with global GDP, which the World Bank (2020) shows rising from
$43 trillion in 1994 to almost $85 trillion in 2019. Even if the majority of
that figure is speculative, based on artificial inflations of wealth and a lien
on future value creation, it is still a major condemnation of a system that
can grow to such heights and yet leave a billion people in absolute poverty.
Capital’s only job is to expand itself, and sometimes it does that well. But
more often, it does not, particularly in places like the US, where unioniza-
tion has declined and various fractions of capital have had unfettered access
to power for decades. The effects are horrendous.

Health
Economic insecurity has taken a staggering health toll on core industrial-
ized nations. In a survey of health indicators from 1990 to 2013, the authors
of “GBD 2013 Mortality” (2015) found that global life expectancy rose from
an average of age 65.3 to 71.5. Intestinal and respiratory diseases and infant
mortality lowered in low-income countries, while heart disease and cancer
lowered in high-income ones. The dramatic increase in some low-income
countries’ life expectancy was due, Torjani (2017) suggests, to improved
government spending on healthcare, not some amorphous notion of devel-
opment or progress. Meanwhile, in the US, Chetty et al. (2016) found a gap
of 15 and 10 years’ life expectancy between the richest and poorest men
and women, respectively. Khazan (2015) showed that mortality rates for
whites between 22 and 56 have been rising since 1999, particularly among
middle-aged white people, who are drinking, using painkillers, getting sick
and even killing themselves more. Among the 50–54 age group, Case and
Deaton (2017) show that the death rate for high school-educated whites was
30% lower than for all black Americans in 1999, and 30% higher by 2015. The
researchers call the rise of white middle-aged mortality “deaths of despair,”
as people lose hope of earning enough to survive, retire, support depend-
ents or manage chronic health problems. None of this should detract from
6 What is escapism?
the health outcomes of American racial and ethnic minorities, who have
won this grim race since records began: Carratala and Maxwell (2020) show
Americans from all non-white groups fare worse almost across the board,
from obesity to asthma to cancer. Ultimately, according to Kochanek et al.
(2017), death rates for eight of the top 10 diseases rose in 2016 for everyone
aged between 15 and 64 and only declined for the elderly.
Given this levelling of health indicators, an obvious priority might be
for individuals to get healthier, quickly. Indeed, Li et al. (2018) found that
simple lifestyle changes – moderation in diet and alcohol, regular exercise
and not smoking – could lower Americans’ risk of dying from heart disease
by 82% and cancer by 65%, while increasing lifespans by a decade. Yet, as
Sample (2018) mused, “Given that the habits of a healthy lifestyle are well
known, the mystery is why we are so bad at adopting them.” This veers
uncomfortably close to the “culture of poverty” arguments so beloved by
earnest sociologists of the 1960s.
Dig deeper, and an early-life explanation appears that links persistent
negative health outcomes and economic instability. As a growing literature
demonstrates, Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) arise from the unsta-
ble contexts in which family dysfunctions such as abuse, neglect, conflict and
substance abuse take place. Kalmakis and Chandler (2014) and Cronholm
et al. (2015), among many others, show that children who grow up in poor
neighbourhoods suffer from more health problems, lack access to healthcare
and education and exhibit a range of negative outcomes more than children
from wealthy places. The effects of ACE include a high risk of biological and
mental illnesses, from asthma and cancer to excessive risk-taking. Scoring
40% or more on the ACE predictor test raised one’s likelihood of a suicide
attempt by 1200%; Derefinko et al. (2019) found that those with four or more
ACE were over twice as likely to abuse prescription painkillers as those with-
out. Constant signals of fear, insecurity and a lack of control – endemic to
living in poverty – hobble the brain’s ability to conduct long-term planning.
This lack of security, Mathewson (2017) explains, overloads our brain with
too many survival tasks to handle the methodical completion of goals.
Poverty is trauma, and its impact resonates throughout one’s life. Slack
et al. (2017) note the complex relationship between race, income and ACE,
suggesting that some factors act independently of the others. However, the
link between low income and ill health later in life is firmly established:
“those with incomes under $25,000 were 45 percent more likely to engage in
health risk behaviors, 227 percent more likely to report poor general health,
and 112 percent more likely to report a severe or chronic condition than
those with higher incomes.” Pinker (2018) shows that those who lost 75%
or more of their savings over two years faced a 20-year mortality rate 50%
higher than others with savings, while those with no savings at all had a
mortality rate 67% higher. The trauma of losing control over one’s expected
security – or having no control in the first place – was the determining, if
not causal factor, once other physical factors like losing housing or health
 What is escapism? 7
insurance were accounted for. Twenty-five percent of American families lost
all or most of their life savings after the 2008 recession, while 50% have no
retirement savings at all, laying this kind of trauma at the feet of a dysfunc-
tional economic system.
Another way to understand these outcomes is to simply listen to those
who grew up poor. One social media survey (Jensen III) asked the latter
to explain their upbringing, and received responses ranging from eating
ketchup sandwiches and skipping meals and field trips to cooking noisily
to block out the noise of their parents crying over unpaid bills. One user
commented on the

deeply rooted belief of wealthier people, that you are safe, that no matter
what happens, you are going to be fine. Even when hit by a huge unpre-
dictable bill that hurts their personal finances, they don’t despair, because
they know the money will return soon … they never know how it is to feel
truly desperate, or terrified of consequences of this little setback.

This passage suggests that those with secure backgrounds are freer to live
in this world, even when it does not treat them well, while those without
security learn early on that society is a conflictual, dangerous place. In other
words, trauma is social; the sum total of ill health, ill housing, crime and
insecurity cannot be understood individually. If these experiences cannot
be avoided, they must be coped with.

Addiction
In a Black Panther Party anti-drugs polemic, in a section entitled Escapism
and Self-Destruction, Tabor (1970) called drugs a way to avoid the pain of
being black in America:

The wretchedness of our plight, our sense of powerlessness and despair

created within our minds a predisposition toward the use of any sub-
stance which produces euphoric illusions. We are inclined to use any-
thing that enables us to suffer peacefully. We have developed an escapist
complex … [which] is self-destructive.

The ruling class encouraged escapism both for its direct profits, and for the
divide-and-conquer strategy that rendered black Americans unable to unite
against a common, white supremacist enemy. The Panthers also named
gang membership, fanatical religiosity and alcoholism as further forms of
escapism, and contextualized them all:

Under its sinister influence, the oppressive, nauseous, ghetto prison is

transformed into a virtual Black Valhalla. One becomes impervious to
the rancid stench of urine-soaked tenement dungeons, unaffected by
8 What is escapism?
the piercing cries of anguish of Black folks driven to the brink of insan-
ity by a sadistic, social system … Yes, under its ecstatic influence one is
made oblivious to ugly realities.

Even in the midst of an inundation of black communities with heroin, and

despite their own internal, no-drugs policy, the Panthers could muster a
nuanced defence of escapism based simply on the ugly realities of their own
lives. This rhetoric is a world away from the moralistic “Just Say No” cam-
paigns that have dominated American political life since the 1980s. Those
are not so far, Stolberg and Herndon (2019) show, from the prisons that
crime bills, pushed by then-senator Joe Biden Jr., helped fill with black con-
victs as part of the “war on drugs.”
Addiction may be as old as humankind, but its contemporary meaning is
wrapped up with the history of capitalism. In the early imperialist period,
Smail (2008) suggests, the importation of psychotropic substances like coffee
and sugar into Europe changed the meaning of addiction from a much-loved
hobby or action to self-inflicted damage. Addiction became an individual,
rather than a social problem, just like capitalist subjectivity itself. By destroy-
ing the formal ties of serfs to the land and its feudal lord or slave master, capital-
ism was the first system to make its subjects internalize its demands. Workers
became “free” to contract with any employer they wished in order to sell their
labour power. This relieved the latter of any other obligation. Any subsequent
problems became the workers’ own fault, and addiction became a way to cope.
There is no more apt contemporary example of addiction as a means to cope
with internalized, systemic dysfunction than the opioid crisis. In West Virginia,
for example, thousands of injured workers were prescribed OxyContin, an opi-
oid-derived painkiller, or oxycodone, its generic brand-equivalent. Pain suffer-
ers began crushing and snorting their meds for a faster high. When the pills
were made scarcer and harder to crush, heroin dealers moved in, leading West
Virginia to the US’ highest overdose death rate of 41.5 per 100,000 people.
In 2007, Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, were fined $600 million
for pushing sales despite knowing its addictive qualities. But as Mann (2020)
shows, company owners the Sackler family simply absorbed the losses and
began more aggressive marketing of the drug. In this way, capital created a
crisis of dangerous work and de-industrialization with very human casualties
and then swooped in to profit from it. The Sacklers knew about the profit to be
made from poor people’s escapism. Talbot (2017), writing on opioid-ravaged
small towns, explains that painkillers feed those who are

trying to escape the reality that this place doesn’t give them anything
… That’s really hard to live with—when you look around and you see
that seven out of ten of your friends from high school are still here, and
nobody makes more than thirty-six thousand a year, and everybody’s
just bitching about bills and watching these crazy shows on reality TV
and not doing anything.
 What is escapism? 9
Being stuck in a place where there is nothing to do but dream of escape may
be a social phenomenon, but it is also deeply personal. It is not a coincidence
that the Canadian Institute for Health information (2019) found that 43%
of those hospitalized for opioid addiction also had another mental illness,
a diagnosis shared by 80% of males 19 and under. The risk of a prolonged
painful death on opioids, simply to escape boredom, only seems perplexing
without an understanding of the powerful need for escapism among those
suffering the most. This can be seen in extremis by those without the option
of escape. Von Knorring and Hultcrantz (2020) outline the plight of refugee
children in Sweden with Resignation Syndrome, the trauma-induced illness
of those denied their right to stay and awaiting deportation, who lose the
ability to speak, move or eat. They have no neurological problems: the roots
of their catatonia lie in trauma, and their despair is social. This trauma-
response is a form of conversion disorder – a psychological pathology with
somatic effects – that observers have described in detail. In his clinical
practice with addicts, cancer patients and the emotionally distressed, Maté
(2003, 2010) hammers home how stress triggers our body’s natural fight-
or-flight response, which evolved to handle acute dangers. Those with no
control over their circumstances shut down; but life in late capitalism pre-
sents individuals with mostly chronic dangers and stressors that “cannot be
escaped either because she does not recognize them or because she has no
control over them.” This leads to a background wash of cortisol and adren-
aline, damaging tissues, the heart and the immune system. The process of
addiction further overloads the internal providers of dopamine and other
neurotransmitters, allowing “the brain’s attachment-reward and incentive-
motivation systems … [to] escape from regulation by the ‘thinking’ and
impulse-control areas of the cortex.” But, on its own, the biological explana-
tion misses the reason addicts need this escape: to dull the pain of their real
histories of abuse and social neglect. Maté explains: “the addiction process
takes hold in people who have suffered dislocation, whose place in the nor-
mal human communal context has been disrupted.” In his autobiography
Poverty Safari, McGarvey (2017) describes the come-down after a high in
similar terms:

Some people don’t get bad come-downs because they are not running
away from anything when they get high … But for me, alcohol and
drugs were a ticket out of my own head, an escape from a racing mind
ravaged by anxiety, fear, resentment and insecurity. The hypervigilance
that had helped me navigate my difficult childhood … [made] it almost
impossible for me to feel relaxed. Drugs relieved me of this burden.

Even the withdrawal effects of drug use are psychosocial. The same burden-
relief holds for video games, sex, food and any other activity that stimu-
lates the reward centres of the brain. The need for addiction is intimately
linked to the need for dopamine and other pleasure neurotransmitters, and
10 What is escapism?
their lack, Maté (2010) argues, is due to the chronic stress that so afflicts
the working class in late capitalism. The activities themselves provide
rewards, but what makes them addictive is the developmental and social
trauma that hobbles the brain’s ability to provide its own rewards. As Taylor
(2016) observes, “Religious and socially progressive movements have often
distrusted such pleasures, calling them escapism, against the supernatural
dimension they prefer and term, peculiarly, ‘reality’… [but b]lunting one’s
ability to feel and see is essential to staying alive.” Escapism becomes the
solution to the trauma of developing and existing in the capitalist lifeworld.
In a scene in Trainspotting 2 (2018), Renton, an ex-addict, draws a direct
link between his affliction and escapism: “It’s not getting it out of your body
that’s the problem, it’s getting it out of your mind. You are an addict… So
be addicted, be addicted to something else.” When asked where he puts that
energy, Renton answers, “Getting away.” The need for flight that he speaks
of is a forced choice, a compulsion borne of the inability to lose the mental
impetus for addiction. For example, the practice of shopping has become
a means to escape the drudgery of wage labour by trading abstract money
for real things, gaining a brief sense of control over a previously impersonal
pile of goods. Naturally, the poor cannot shop to excess because they do not
have money. However, it is telling that poor people fantasize about clawing
back the use-values lost to years of labour within the circuit of consumption.
Beckert and Lutter (2013) show that low-income lottery players, whose lives
“lack autonomy and express feelings of futility,” seek a momentary release
from the tension of meaningless survival, using their inexpensive ticket as
“a trigger for day-dreams, a vehicle for the momentary escape from reality.”
Their fantasies focus on the consumption they have been shut out from, not
dreams of revolution. This conforms precisely to the needs of those who
desire the real comforts – social and physical – that capitalism promises, if
rarely delivers.
Addictive shopping has been recognized clinically for a century; known
as compulsive buying disorder, or oniomania, it was until recently included
in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), and only removed because
what constituted “too much” shopping proved impossible to define.
However, Piquet-Pessôa et al. (2014) note that the behaviour is clear: rather
than enjoying an item, oniomaniacs get excited by “the buying process
itself,” in which “the overpowering urge to buy, the repetitive loss of control
over spending, and the negative emotional state that emerges when not buy-
ing” are mirror images of the craving-high-withdrawal cycle of addicts. The
vulgar economics of supply and demand, in which consumers demonstrate
preference according to quality and price and producers respond appropri-
ately, has no space for oniomania, in which the very process of consumption
dictates demand, rather than any use value.
Consider how Zola (1995) described the first Parisian department stores
in The Ladies’ Paradise, using language of escapism that could apply to
the present-day. The newly renovated department store is a cathedral with
 What is escapism? 11
“iron bridges, thrown across the void … [which] formed … a complicated
lacework through which the daylight passed, the modern realization of
a dream-palace, of a Babel-like accumulation of storeys in which halls
opened out, offering glimpses of other storeys and other halls without end.”
The possibilities for consumption appear spatially endless, much like the
abstract logic of “Babel-like accumulation” itself. This impression is rein-
forced by the store being clad entirely in white: “Through the flow of all
this white … there ran a harmonic phrase, white maintained and devel-
oped in all its tones, which were introduced and then grew and expanded
with the complicated orchestration of some masterly fugue, the continued
development of which carries the soul away in an ever-widening flight.” In
such a setting, “The shoppers’ souls are no longer their own; they drop from
exhaustion, and yet the store continues to accumulate people like it does
commodities.” The sun begins to set, and “It was as if the displays … the
variegated flower-beds blossoming with light silks and foulards, were now
burning in live embers … In the distance, beyond some long shadows, there
were faraway, dazzling departments, teeming with a mob gilded by the sun-
shine.” Zola’s description portrays escapism not as a pleasant distraction
but an all-consuming need, deliberately shaped by the environment to over-
whelm the capacity to reason.
This sense of transcendence, which stokes the sense of the endlessness
of consumer needs, feeds oniomania as the temporary, always-frustrated
drive to eliminate alienation. For those who have the money, shopping is
a high because it is an easy means to an identity. McDonald et al. (2007)
argue that consumption is at the heart of neoliberal identity formation, in
a world where fixed markers such as religious and political affiliations have
fragmented, and powerlessness before global forces is assuaged by a narcis-
sistic focus on self-improvement and self-expression. Zola’s work suggests
this is not a quirk of neoliberalism but much more fundamental to the con-
sumption circuit of capitalism itself. The “purity” of white and the creation
of giant shopping halls spoke to the freedom promised by individual con-
sumption, even if the high was temporary and that promised land remained
just over the horizon. Zola is also attuned to class differences: his staff are
mainly working class women, who risk ostracization from the owner and
male security staff; those with the means to indulge their addiction are
bourgeois women, for whom “it was all regulated and organized with the
remorselessness of a machine: the vast horde of women were as if caught in
the wheels of an inevitable force.” All are victims to the owner’s plans, an
object lesson in how addictions are not sloughed off by capital but turned
into further sales opportunities.
Oniomania would have no power if it did not represent something real. It
addicts not just because of the artful dressing of a store display, but because
commodities represent freedom and autonomy, with the tantalizing pros-
pect of a lifestyle of complete hedonism just around the corner. The fact that
most people cannot afford hedonism turns these commodities into goals
12 What is escapism?
forever out of reach. Yet their super-abundance speaks to what makes us
human: the desire to explore our creativity and own a little piece of what has
been taken from us, unburdened by the need to work to survive.
The lived conditions that addictive behaviours compensate for need not
be as dramatic as grinding intergenerational poverty. Rather, we exist in an
ever-present state of social isolation, which Cain (2018) plaintively describes
through the lens of the ever-increasing demands of survival:

you work long hours, the trains don’t run on time and you had to live
further out to afford a flat, or a room, so you spend even longer trying
to get home, then you don’t feel like cooking, you row with partners or
children or housemates because you are tired and fed up. All the places
to meet others are places to eat or drink, and that costs. Easier just to
shut the door and watch Netflix in the few free hours you have … This
is where the responsibility doctrine kicks in: you should be out there,
running marathons, taking 6 am yoga classes. You’re not looking after
number one. You are isolating yourself.

This condition of social isolation, along with stress and poverty, is only fur-
thered by a dominant doctrine of self-promotion. The relentless self-branding
adopted by millennials is part of neoliberal identity formation, the goal of
which is the formation of what Brown (2015) calls “homo oeconomicus”: a
human that makes all of their decisions according to market rationality.
But this is hardly the fault of workers, who must either continually compete
to obtain short-term or temporary contracts, or labour under the threat of
having to do so. Rasmus (2018) defines this as precarity: jobs with different
wage structures, benefits or relationships to the employer than full-time per-
manent work, such as seasonal or extended temporary contracts. The con-
stant self-sell that precarity requires is exhausting and distressing, and its
mental health effects are still becoming evident, but one which stands out is
the destruction of meaningful connections. The UK government appointed
a Minister of Loneliness in 2018, while the US Surgeon General and the Red
Cross have both issued reports warning of the damage to productivity that
loneliness represents. The Mental Health Foundation (2017) warns that it
has a health impact equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The covid-19
pandemic that forced widespread ‘sheltering in place’ only exacerbated this,
particularly for older adults, as Hwang et al. (2020) show.
Under these conditions, the most powerful mechanism to cope with neo-
liberal selfhood and its isolation is escapism, which Taylor considers logical:
“Wherever someone is coerced with little reward into determined behaviour
or mindset they cannot reasonably avoid, they will persuade themselves of
its necessity and utility in order to relieve stress, and may even come to
champion it.” The balance between enduring stressful circumstances, and
engaging in self-destructive behaviours to cope with them, may appear
absurd to those on the outside. But as a momentary relief from unchanging
 What is escapism? 13
material circumstances, escapism is the consolation prize for being “coerced
with little reward.” Everyday addictions, reactionary politics, junk food and
alcohol “afford a momentary escape from the frustrations and uncertainties
of living in an overcrowded and polluted social prison.”
These few snapshots of capitalist social life show escapism to be embed-
ded in its social and mental fabric. Despite the instability at the heart of
capitalist social relations – the constant melting away of fixed, fast-frozen
relations – life often feels like it is not changing. The same rhythms of labour
and recuperation, day in and day out, lead to the terror of being trapped
with trauma and alienation. It is no accident that progressive fantasies show
a world in which things change. These potentialities suggest a constant need
for escape.
Yet escapism does not exist as an analytical category for most theorists.
Igorevna (2015) surveys the brief psychological literature on escapism to
conclude that, while some researchers have identified positive and negative
models along different axes of stress management and self-expression, “the
phenomenon of escapism must be studied as a more encompassing one…
investigat[ing] it in a wider context, as a universal mechanism allowing a
person to escape the reality for adaptation to real life.” Konzack (2017)
surveys escapism as an analytical term, concluding that its application has
mainly been pejorative, as a tool for the Left to denounce individualism
or for critics to rail against literature that avoids positive, useful critiques.
Fundamentally, this suggests that theorists use escapism to dismiss those
who do not accept their version of reality. For example, in The ABC of
Escapism, a rare mention from 1936, Durkan denounced those who sepa-
rate aesthetics from reality, rather than uniting them in Christ: “The idealist
philosophizes in order to escape reality; the aesthete writes private poems
to be communicated to nobody; the politician’s politics provide either for
the proletariat or the bourgeoisie. … Escapism is the vice of those bigoted
sectarians who cannot have a Catholic mind, because they have no mind.”
Only the saints “have no appetite for illusion.” When a belief in the Church
hierarchy represents reality, and all else means escapism, the term loses all
function. To date, Tuan’s (1998) Escapism remains the only direct, compre-
hensive survey of escapism that tries to understand it as a general phenom-
enon, rather than as an excuse, epithet or symptom of something else. This
is Escapism’s strength and weakness: its materialist roots in geography and
psychological insights provide magnificent insight into “the human condi-
tion,” but as an object of investigation, the human condition it describes
does not apply everywhere equally.

Escapism as violence
Tuan’s Escapism roots the sources of escapism in vulnerability, a sense of
emptiness, the deceptions of relationships and even the silences in conver-
sations. We construct illusions to escape the pain in our life, and pain is, of
14 What is escapism?
course, virtually endless. How could it not be, when power and its atten-
dant cruelty manifest in early childhood and, later, in the depths of human
savagery inscribed into our very being? As Tuan writes, even “[i]n eating…
a human being consumes nature to maintain his bodily integrity; storing
up oneself at this basic level of necessity depends on the evisceration (the
‘explosion’) of the Other.” While this is rooted in inequality, it is aggravated
by “a sadomasochistic propensity that may well be a signature of our spe-
cies.” So far, so Freudian, because for an essay as lyrical as Escapism, it has
a surprising invocation of violence at its core. For Tuan, our own cruelty lies
at the root of our imaginations, used as a displacement activity for power-
lessness, and from which the pursuit of wealth and power arises: “To the one
side is me, semidivine in potency; to the other side are human animals on
whom my potency feeds. My own animality is forgotten, displaced from my
core nature to the core nature of others. How can I die when I have power
over other people’s life and death?”
There is no question that an encyclopaedia of human cruelty would run
to millions of entries, and that if there is a human condition, powerlessness
would be one of its defining qualities. But the problem is that Tuan’s account
slips too easily into an ahistorical ethics, ignoring the social relations that
exacerbate or ameliorate escapism, and in which all forms of violence are
not equal. It is unfortunate but telling that Tuan illustrates escapist, mascu-
linist cruelty with an episode from the Russian revolution of 1917, quoting
a revolutionary who killed his officer: “with shooting you only get rid of a
chap … With shooting you’ll never get at the soul, to where it is in a fellow
and how it shows itself. But I don’t spare myself, and I’ve more than once
trampled an enemy for over an hour. You see, I want to know what life really
is, what life’s like down [that] way.”
One might conclude from this passage that escapism is an expression
of barbarity, an escape from our mutual obligations for care and solidar-
ity unleashed by those trying to make radical change. Yet the historical
context suggests that, if anything, this kind of escapism is a luxury in
which few indulge. Rabinowitch (1976) explains that after the February
Revolution of 1917, which ended the Russian monarchy, the new provi-
sional government carried on the deeply unpopular war against the Axis
powers. Facing hunger, illness, a lack of supplies and a losing campaign,
soldiers were less enthusiastic. Discipline was instilled through terror:
orders came from the very top, including from provisional government
leader Alexander Kerensky, to use machine guns and artillery pieces on
any retreating units. Capital punishment was mandated to maintain dis-
cipline, just as it had been after the 1905 Revolution. During and after the
October Revolution, as the army disintegrated or split along class lines,
officers took special relish in murdering rebellious soldiers. Although the
Bolshevik takeover was largely bloodless in Petrograd, in Moscow, the
counter-revolutionary military cadets (Junkers) surrounded the Kremlin
arsenal and demanded surrender of the pro-Bolshevik soldiers within.
 What is escapism? 15
Serge (1992) reported how their commander went downstairs to plead for
their lives and was immediately stabbed to death. The remaining soldiers
were rounded up and led to a courtyard:

The men still cannot believe that they are going to be shot like this,
without trial, without sense – they have taken no part in the fighting. A
command bellows out: ‘In line now! Eyes front!’ … At a signal, the din
of the three machine-guns blends with cries of terror, sobs and death-
rattles. All those who are not mown down by the first shots dash towards
the only exit, a little door behind them which has been left open. The
machine-guns carry on firing; in a few minutes the doorway is blocked
by a heap of men, lying there screaming and bleeding, into which the
bullets still rain … The walls of the surrounding buildings are spattered
with blood and bits of flesh.

This kind of violence was commonplace and the Red Terror, when it began,
was a response to it. Soldiers and sailors took revenge on the officers who
had demonstrated contempt for human life. In fact, the soldiers showed
remarkable restraint, enduring years of punishments before responding in
kind. Red sailors who mutinied at Sebastopol only shot those officers who
had inflicted cruel punishments and summary executions in the 1905 revo-
lution 12 years beforehand; other officers were left alone. Likewise, Trotsky
(1969) wrote that the Red Army, formed four months after the October
Revolution, first fraternized with enemy troops rather than fighting them,
and only later had to be taught how to resist attacks. Escapism may be a
form of cruelty, sloughing off social norms to do terrible things, as Tuan
suggests, but it is not anti-human; rather, its presence in either word or deed
announces the return of the human after years of oppression, with all the
violence that sometimes creates. As Fanon (1963) famously wrote, revolu-
tionary violence cleanses an oppressed people not only from their oppres-
sors but from their own fears and fantasies.
And indeed, Tuan recognizes this when he recounts the story of the
dancer at the Treblinka death camp during World War Two, who dances to
distract a Nazi guard: “When she takes the gun from the guard and shoots,
that blast is the blast of life.” From such an erudite scholar, this reversal
could hardly be an oversight on Tuan’s part; rather, it suggests a different
metric: that of ethics. For him, myths of religious and artistic transcend-
ence prefigure ethical changes in society, providing reasons to engage rather
than withdraw or explode. Tuan describes art as providing a means to this
engagement, a context in which to identify patterns of existence. The mere
everyday, comprehended by “our feeble and needy imaginations,” needs
transcendence by the “great abstractions and negativities” of religiosity.
This allows us to hold specific and abstract patterns together, providing the
solution to “the incurable human yearning to possess” that rebels when we
run up against our lack of omnipotence.
16 What is escapism?
Tuan’s account is strongest when he posits action – negating a negation
– as a solution. But why not get more specific, and examine how escapism
arises out of particular social formations? Tuan does not attempt this, and
ends with a search for the proper mix of particularity and generalization:
when seeking escape, “it is not a matter of talent, or even of socioeconomic
circumstances, but of a willingness to look in the right direction.” This is
because Tuan’s heaven is ultimately not action but contemplation. While
reproduction of individuals and society happens in reality, “this cannot
be true of heaven. By definition heaven has no poor and sick, no exploited
class, and so no housekeeping, no material caring, no revolutionary fervor
to right wrong, none of those things that make up the bulk of ethical life on
earth and that … give … human beings their sense of belonging, virtue, and
importance.”
It is hard to read the above not as an invocation of “heaven” but its denial:
no ethics, no belonging, just a denial that rests uneasily with Tuan’s direc-
tive to be willing to seek heaven out. If there is no fervor of importance, why
bother? Tuan argues,

Acceptance of one’s place would seem to argue against the urge to

escape that I see as fundamental to being human. The contradiction
is more apparent than real… So much of culture… is escape from the
threats and uncertainties of nature. But the cultural world can itself
be full of threats and uncertainty…. Escape, then, is “diving under the
quilt” – holding on to, or retreating into, warm pockets of custom and
habit.

Here, escapism is framed simultaneously as a flight from reality, with all

the comfort – or ferocity – that can imply, and a transcendence of reality
into spiritual contemplation. In other words, Tuan decides to resolve the
contradiction between what is real and what is desired by denying it exists.
We can use our propensity for avoidance to achieve a greater understanding
of the world around us, he claims. But it is hard not to want more guidance
for this flight, precisely because escapism, in Tuan’s account, can look either
like a descent into “Hell” (the title of one of his chapters) or transcend-
ence, depending on perspective. As the Nazi and Red Army examples show,
the context of escape matters: by understanding the real history of cate-
gories such as Right and Left, acts of escapism can be typified, politicized
and given the material and ideological consideration that Tuan’s rendering
misses, and which they deserve.

Right-wing escapism
The escapism of the Right1 is easy to identify in its rigid, ahistorical catego-
ries. Notwithstanding the tensions and occasional contradictions between
the Right’s various subgroups, the thread tying these movements together
 What is escapism? 17
is the mobilization of loss: a perceived weakening of hierarchical norms of
gender, race, sexuality and sometimes class, feared by those who believe
their social status depends on remaining at the top of those hierarchies.
By conjuring a bygone or mythical social order, the alt-right constructs a
deeply escapist ideological form, a flight from a messy and often painful
everyday existence into an exclusionary fantasy. Consider Firestone’s (2018)
description of an alt-right circle:

They were the kind of ordinary guys I grew up with in a downwardly

mobile, opioid-soaked, white-flight wasteland. I could picture my old
friends, numbing themselves to the banal brutality of the world with liq-
uor and gallows humor, enraged at having been fucked out of a quality
of life their parents had known, which itself wasn’t that great to start.
Now they are getting mad as hell, and who is helping them give their
problems a name?

Combining a Boy Scout-like social group, with barbecues and outdoor

hikes, with a meme culture that ridicules the Holocaust, women’s rights and
violence against trans people, among others, alt-right groups weaponize
escapism into an all-encompassing rejection of a world that fails to match
the mythic hierarchy in their heads. The alt-right’s negativity and nihilism
suggests an upended morality, based on the deep disappointment meted out
by everyday life, which inures them to a politics of compassion.
In this, the alt-right cleave close to Tuan’s definition of violent escapism,
but its hatred of “human animals” invokes race and gender. For example,
the Proud Boys, a network of men’s clubs dedicated to restoring “traditional
values,” saves most of its public ire for feminism, blaming it for upending
gender hierarchies, convincing women not to have children and creating
a culture of second-class “beta” males too weak to assert their rightful
place at the head of the family. Similarly, white nationalists construct an
international mythology of white identity, distinct from and superior to
all other “races.” Oddly enough, the conquerors are simultaneously con-
quered, claiming to be marginalized specifically as white men. But internal
consistency does not matter, as long as the source of hopelessness remains
for those condemned to unemployment and dead-end jobs, or afraid of los-
ing ground as ethnic hierarchies shift. When former US President Donald
Trump called Haiti, El Salvador and parts of Africa “shithole countries”
in widely reported criticism of immigration targets, it was not just the rac-
ism of a ruling class buffoon that gave his remark rhetorical heft but his
statement’s role as a dog whistle to a cross-section of white supremacists
across America and Europe. Dodman (2018) argues that new demographic,
economic and political realities fuel an escapist anger and a nostalgia for
empire, prodded by the same globalizing forces driving those effects. The
threatened decline of their imagined identities is intimately bound up with
the approach of the Other – physically, in terms of migration, and through
18 What is escapism?
the psychic wage of imperialism, as US hegemony continues to project its
power across the globe.
Facing economic crisis and lacking democratic collective alternatives, it
is predictable that a segment of the working class and impoverished petty
bourgeois would turn to fascism. Capital leaves broken eddies of political
culture in its wake, creating acolytes of what Wynn (2018), who immersed
herself in online incel forums to try and analyse their misogyny, ended up
calling a “death cult.” 2020 saw the further addition of what Idle et al. (2020)
call the cosmic right, which constructed intersecting conspiracies about a
human-made covid-19 virus with anti-vaccine and anti-face mask wellness
rhetoric. At the same time, the rise of the American conspiracy Qanon
saw a memeified online escapist fantasy take hold, in which Trump led a
secret campaign against globalist, paedophile child killers embedded in US
government institutions. The lure of these quickly-morphing conspiracies
is their ability to implant themselves as partial truths: private healthcare
does sacrifice human well-being for the sake of profit, and elites really do
act in the interests of a global class of investors and capitalists (although
one can reasonably question whether Bill Gates needs to develop a vac-
cine to implant the world’s population with microchips, when his fellow
tech capitalists long ago convinced everyone to carry a smartphone). But in
an unravelling democratic system that is content to see mass immiseration
while ushering in a new Gilded Age of inequality, the sense of control a
right-wing conspiracy provides to those who feel powerless is predictable.
The need to not only make sense of the world, but to find a hidden structure
visible to the intelligent few, is the hallmark of Right-escapism.
On the one hand, the blame for this can be placed at the feet of the
Spectacle, the mode of production that substitutes ideal images in place of
real human relationships. If our collective truth is, as Debord (2014) argues,
“what appears is good; what is good appears,” but one’s own truth is not
very good at all, the rage and disappointment that creates can lead sufferers
down some very dark paths. But on the other hand, fascism is not a crea-
tion of the media, social or otherwise. In Wiemar Germany, Feshami (2017)
shows, it was the peasantry displaced by industrialization and forced to eke
out an existence in the cities who provided the audience for national social-
ism’s myth of the noble Völk (people) torn apart by evil Jewish capitalists
and Bolsheviks.
Despite the workers’ and peasants’ real immiseration, class conscious-
ness did not follow directly from economic misery, even though, as Reich
(1973), the German Marxian psychoanalyst, argued, “one would expect the
socially wretched working man to revolt against the abuses to which he is
subjected.” In fact, it was those same “wretched masses” who supported
fascism, leading Reich to conclude that “It is a question of the role of ide-
ology and the emotional attitude (emphasis added) of these masses seen as a
historical factor.” The ideology of fascism spoke directly to workers’ emo-
tional conditions. Bloch, the German philosopher of utopia, thought that
 What is escapism? 19
fascism articulated the deep desires of the unconscious better than what
much of the Left offered; his biographer Geoghegan (1996) describes how
fascism “understood the potency and ubiquity of dreaming, and moved
with adroitness in this terrain.” The dream of a nationalist identity allowed
the impoverished German masses an escapist fantasy in which they were tri-
umphant, rather than humiliated. Fascist escapism promised a space freed
from competition with Others, in which status was assured.
To the degree that the Right is a product of capitalist power in decay,
it cannot be escapist, no matter how many myths it spins. There is noth-
ing escapist, for instance, about the border security forces of various states
drawing on a sense of white victimization to target migrants, build bor-
der walls and inflict racist terror. But in addition to the racism, there is an
epistemological problem with right-wing escapism: when exactly was the
golden age? Right-escapists are hard-pressed to identify it. Williams (1975)
finds generations of scholars bemoaning the destruction of rural communi-
ties, which they believe began after World War One, or in mid-19th-century
England, or the 1770s, or feudal times. Finally he asks:

shall we find the timeless rhythm in Domesday, when four men out of
five are villeins, bordars, cotters or slaves? Or in a free Saxon world
before what was later seen as the Norman rape and yoke? In a Celtic
world, before the Saxons came up the rivers? In an Iberian world, before
the Celts came, with their gilded barbarism? Where indeed shall we go,
before the escalator stops?

From here, it is a quick fall to The Fall, in which the last uncorrupted times
happened out of time, when humanity lived by God’s laws alone. Williams
invokes his famous “structures of feeling” that feed the “well-known habit
of using the past, the ‘good old days’, as a stick to beat the present.” The
past can be divided up to smooth over contemporary contradictions, as in
Williams’ example of poetry about rural labourers who stand in for a host of
relations that brought them to life: not foreign conquest and violent enclo-
sure, but an eternal, wizened presence of sons of toil. What Reich called
“the emotional plague in social life” in capitalism spread from the need “to
escape the difficulties of responsibility and the actualities of everyday life
and work by seeking refuge in ideology, illusion, mysticism, brutality, or
a political party.” What makes the Right escapist is not its recognition of
capitalist exploitation, or its compassion for a segment of capitalism’s vic-
tims, who are then given permission to project their rage onto other victims.
Rather, the power of Right-escapism lies in its mobilizing of the myth of a
fantastical way of life, cobbled imperfectly onto the present, in an effort
to simplify and hide the messy contradictions that characterize capital-
ist social life. In doing so, Right-escapism functions as ideology, a partial
truth. The noble lives of the past did indeed exist – but only for the nobility,
a tiny sliver of society.
20 What is escapism?
Right-escapism of the wealthy
In this sense, a natural heir to fascism’s fantasies of fixed hierarchies is a
more traditional Right-escapism, embodied in the capital-owning or bour-
geois class position. This position backgrounds the identitarian concerns of
the far right and foregrounds its freedom to spend.
At its heart, capitalist ideology is quite simple: possess capital, and all
will be well. Capital imagines consumption without labour, growth with-
out externalities and hierarchy without resentment. These are impossible,
but that does not make them false; it simply makes them an expression of
how the bourgeoisie sees itself, and how the classes who yearn for bourgeois
status also wish to see themselves. Capital does nothing on its own; Ollman
(1976) suggests it simply motivates the capitalist, who “endow[s it] with a
conscience and a will.” However, if capitalists disobey the unwilled motive
force of capital, they will soon find themselves no longer capitalists, stripped
of power and security. Thus right-wing escapism dreams of freedom from
the capital-labour relationship, naturally on the side of capital with all its
power intact, but no longer dictated to by the merciless, impersonal forces
of the market. This is the substance of the traditional capitalist dream of an
unregulated society, in which the victors have achieved market dominance
through their good ideas and entrepreneurial spirit.
Using income as a proxy for the ownership of capital, such real-world
victors are termed Ultra-High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWI), defined as
people with net assets worth $30 million USD or more. This is 530 times the
median US household income in 2015, and 813 times US black household
income, reported by DeNavas-Walt and Proctor (2015). Even as far back
as 2016, according to Knight Frank’s Wealth Report, UHNWI numbered
1,875,000, a 61% increase from 2005, with a projected 41% increase by 2025.
Those unfortunate not to make the UHNWI cut can console themselves
with being part of a still-select group, the global 13 million-strong category
of millionaires, reflecting a 67% increase since 2005. Asia, North America
and Europe will each add another million to their respective cliques over
the next 10 years.
With great wealth comes great shopping, and the oniomania of luxury
consumption is both an important driver of capitalism, and an actual
escape, not mere escapism. From 1994 to 2014, The Economist (2014) shows
that the global number of luxury consumers rose 300%, to 330 million peo-
ple. Zola’s swathes of white linen are, today, merely packaging for objects
such as jewellery, yachts and planes, which are bought as investments. Real
estate is used as a temporary sink for capital and then flipped, launching
that capital back into circulation. Through the ceaseless flow of investment
dollars, wealthy consumers gain use-value and exchange-value in their buy-
ing: their addiction is rewarded. D’Arpizio et al. (2019) show that the retail
market in luxury goods grew to 1.2 trillion euros in 2018 and, despite a drop
of 25–30% in 2020 due to the pandemic, expect it to recover in a few years.
 What is escapism? 21
This kind of capitalist triumphalism is not universal: a segment of the
ruling class sees trouble ahead, and their escapism is akin to the old uto-
pias of balance and moderation that infused 19th-century political econ-
omy. For instance, the Davos conference of global CEOs and government
ministers earnestly discusses “inclusive capitalism” at its annual gather-
ings. Naturally, there was no evidence for this goodwill during the 2020
pandemic. Rhodes (2020) shows that, despite Davos’ inclusive rhetoric,
global behemoths donated paltry sums to covid-19 relief while escaping the
obligation to pay taxes: for example, Amazon donated $3.9 million while
avoiding $100 billion worth of UK taxes over 10 years, while Neate (2020)
reports that global billionaire wealth grew during the pandemic from $8.9
trillion USD to $10.2 trillion. But some elites recognize this sort of inequal-
ity is unsustainable. The Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism, started by Lady
Lynn Forester de Rothschild, represents 30 business organizations that col-
lectively control $30 trillion USD in assets. Its goal is to repair capitalism’s
reputation for corruption, nepotism and monopolization by encouraging
firms to adopt long-term thinking and accountability. Their 2018 confer-
ence Investing in Tomorrow, featuring bankers, pension fund heads, major
CEOs and HRH The Prince of Wales, addressed weighty topics such as
the disruptive future of AI and “the challenges of deepening economic ine-
quality and large-scale structural transformation” in US politics. The fear,
of course, is that the constant upheavals wrought by capital’s instabilities
will spark a blowback: as the Coalition’s (n.d.) promo video states – using
bold text laid over images of anti-globalization protestors – in the wake of
the 2008 crisis, “capitalism became the scapegoat for all that seemed unfair
and unjust. Exposés on the fraudulent practices of multi-billion dollar busi-
nesses tarred business leaders with the same brush.” The dream of these
cautious planners is that CEOs will adopt more training and new account-
ing practices, even if these are more expensive, to make their companies
fairer and burnish their image. The Coalition’s (2018) Embankment Project
for Inclusive Capitalism report hopes to get better at communicating these
priorities, because “when businesses stop investing in the future, our entire
economy suffers.” They certainly have an audience: an interview with Lady
de Rothschild features prominently in Knight Frank’s 2016 Wealth Report.
Another, smaller and scattered segment of capitalists sees the same prob-
lems but has no desire to fix them, preferring instead to escape their worst
outcomes. They are closer to what Batalov (1985) calls technocratic uto-
pias, which have no room for people besides the chosen wealthy few. Their
escapism varies, from the Brexit anarchists who led the push for a “Britain-
first” economy freed from the competition and regulations of the European
Union, to those seeking apocalypse-proof boltholes in renovated missile
silos in the midwest US and destinations further afield. All show that the
wealthy are content to profit from capital so long as they can run away from
the people that are forced to sell their labour power. Even those moder-
ately wealthy professionals who escape to the safety of gated communities
22 What is escapism?
express, in a confused and individualist form, the pain of a broken social
contract, in which safety, health and security are on offer to the highest
bidder, at the expense of everyone else’s well-being. For example, private
islands are a prospective growth area, according to Everett-Allen (2015):
“Buyers’ motives will continue to vary from island to island…. The need for
escapism and privacy are the key common denominators and this motiva-
tion will only increase. By 2050, 64% of the world’s population is forecast to
be living in urban areas according to the United Nations.” The fact that the
paragraph ends there is telling: city life and, by inference, the working class
is something from which to escape.
In a more fundamental fashion, this self-seclusion is also the dream of
right-wing libertarians who, Carrico (2013) argues, dimly sense that the
world may not conform to a rarefied individualism and fantasize about leav-
ing it instead. Consider the trans-humanism of Paypal founder Peter Thiel,
who MacDougald (2016) shows bankrolled research into both immortal-
ity and far-right groups, making the ideological link between far-right and
wealthy Right-escapism all by himself. In this vision, the future of humanity
is one of escape from the limits of material production to provide a select
few with their wildest desires: consumption without end. Not coinciden-
tally, this dream is reserved for the white Übermensch. The link between
the angry desperation of fascism and the self-involved ruling elites comes
together in this form of escapism: those with capital, or those who desire it,
get to construct an ideology of freedom based entirely on protecting their
wealth from others.
More than mere physical escape, however, the escapism of the wealthy
confers a special, moral mission upon its lucky recipients. Lewis (2018)
describes a millennial capitalist who bought an entire mountain in Utah and
began hosting Summit, a tech and celebrity-heavy conference with $2,000-
$8,000 ticketed events. He justified it all by claiming meritocracy: “Elitism,
the way I would define it, is obtainable… All that stands between you and
being elite is your own investment in yourself.” This view is foundational
to the old-new ideology of wealthy Right-escapism, which eschews overt
displays of power in favour of yoga retreats, self-actualization and dubious
claims to charity. As another Summit founder puts it, “being like the pro-
totypical capitalist… [is] like, so lame.” What remains is the stability and
self-confidence that control over capital brings, along with the self- justifying
ideology that elites deserve everything they have. Consider the advice ladled
out to would-be entrepreneurs in Rampton’s (n.d.) aptly-named 20 Signs
You’re Destined to Become a Millionaire: be “action-oriented,” have “a sense
of urgency” and even be attractive and popular in high school. The man-
ifest destiny of capital starts early in life. Similarly, DePietro (2019) lists
passion, resilience, a strong sense of self and vision, or the ability to manage
stress, tolerate uncertainty and delegate as the traits of successful entrepre-
neurs. Or perhaps, going back to Adam Smith (1981b) in his famous Wealth
of Nations, Volume Two, personality is irrelevant: “The qualifications of the
 What is escapism? 23
mind can alone give very great authority. They are, however, invisible quali-
ties; always disputable, and generally disputed.” Far greater is the authority
granted by age and “the superiority of fortune,” which “is much greater
than that, either of age, or of personal qualities, [and] has been the constant
complaint of every period of society which admitted of any considerable
inequality of fortune.”
Engels (1972) long ago suggested that conflict came from communities
having a surplus to fight over. This is borne out by more recent anthropol-
ogy, in which Harman (2008) shows that property relations and coerced
labour date back to at least 3000 BC, when surplus production and the
administration needed to manage it gradually created a class of leaders and
rulers. Smith (1981a) concurred; despite his reputation as a proponent of
capital, Smith paid scant attention to the invisible hand – it is relegated to a
single mention in Volume One, Chapter 2, Footnote 9 – and saved his ire for
property relations. Without property, Smith (1981b) saw no need even for a
civil law system. But with property came the need to protect it, as anyone
who damaged someone else’s property invariably reaped the benefits:

avarice and ambition in the rich, in the poor the hatred of labour and
the love of present ease and enjoyment, are the passions which prompt
to invade property… Where there is great property, there is great ine-
quality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor,
and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.

For Smith, the many are “driven by want” to attack the property of the
few. This is the basis for “civil government”: protecting the rich so that
they “can sleep a single night in security.” Moreover, the rich must accept
this state of affairs: “civil government supposes a certain subordination.”
Otherwise, society exists in open warfare; the property owner “is at all times
surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can
never appease, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the
powerful arm of the civil magistrate continually held up to chastise it.”
This is intuitive: those with more are not gifted with special qualities, just
with the power to own property and protect it from others. Scholars who
study these qualities concluded long ago that they are irrelevant. Gartner’s
(1988) field-defining research, Who is an entrepreneur? Is the wrong question,
argued that organizational, not individual, cultures matter for business suc-
cess. Kerr et al. (2001) concurred that there is no such thing as an entrepre-
neurial personality. For example, the all-important trait of risk-tolerance
may simply come from family wealth, and thus “perhaps availability of
financial resources is the true factor that prompts entrepreneurship, inde-
pendent of risk tolerance.” After reviewing decades of literature on factors
such as optimism, a sense of control over one’s environment, and neuroti-
cism, researchers admit “[t]he literature is often unclear as to whether indi-
viduals with a given set of personality traits selected into entrepreneurship,
24 What is escapism?
or whether individuals developed the traits endogenously after becoming
entrepreneurs.” Groth (2015) reports that successful entrepreneurs simply
have access to money. Being white, male and highly educated helps as well.
In refuting the case for an entrepreneurial personality, Kerr, Kerr and Xu
warn that “[f]ew applied researchers when confronted with massive empir-
ical datasets would even contemplate such grandiose aims” as determining
individual motivation. Why then do capitalist ideologues persist in trying?
Narcissism, a common self-reporting trait among entrepreneurs, is part of
the explanation. Pepper (2019) collates a number of studies to show that the
wealthy and powerful are more likely to drive dangerously, cheat at games
and value greed over altruism. Dietze and Knowles (2020) show that the
wealthy also lack much capacity for empathy. Their narcissism is not an
aberration but a function of the control the bourgeoisie exercise in their
own lives.
A theorist such as Smith, living closer to capital’s genesis than today’s
ideologues, remained less clouded by the need to defend centuries of accu-
mulated power. In that sense, capital’s most-invoked theorist was not an
escapist in the sense considered here: Smith acknowledged and warned
against the raw operation of property and the power it granted. In contrast,
today’s Right-escapism works by subterfuge, pretending its privilege is a
product of its personal leadership qualities: witness the cult-like adoration
of Silicon Valley tech capitalists, who, Paris Marx (2017) reports, all started
with or still receive government subsidies. Having used public money or
financial connections to separate itself from the ungrateful masses, Right-
escapism can then berate those unlucky enough not to own property for
their failure to do so. These are aspirational positions; libertarians can be
poor. However, the substance of these positions can only be realized within
a certain class framework. To escape to a Randian paradise, the aspirant
needs money in order to actually become that atomized, rational individual
so beloved of rational choice capitalism. The possession of capital earns the
Right-escapist the freedom to pretend the division of labour and contradic-
tions of production can be overcome through the application of force and
ever-more capital. Since the latter is always the possession of a tiny minor-
ity, however, the mobilizing promise of personality remains doomed to be
the fantasies of enraged petty bourgeois and a few wealthy backers.
If denying social contradiction, while individualizing entrepreneur-
ial success, is the Right’s escapism, what of the Left? While obviously not
inhabiting the same ethical, economic or cultural universe as the former, the
Left manages to take escapism far less seriously than its enemy.

Left-wing escapism
The reality of capitalism is terrible, and therefore – according to much of
the Left – to avert one’s gaze is to suffer a moral lapse. Escapism is seen as
cowardly: it is not a label anyone has worn proudly, or at all. Consider the
 What is escapism? 25
Fourth International, the grouping of socialist parties meant to rebuild the
global Marxist movement after the betrayals of Stalinism. In its Transitional
Program, Trotsky (1938) wrote a famous passage that set the mood for
confrontation:

To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call
things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter
how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in
big ones; to base one’s program on the logic of the class struggle; to be
bold when the hour for action arrives – these are the rules of the Fourth
International.

This kind of challenge is built into Marxism. Its entire edifice rests on work-
ers being dispossessed from the means of production, and being forced to
sell their time and effort as a result. They have no property, and if they fail
to find a buyer for their labour power, they starve. They are chained to the
labour market yet compelled to fight for their very lives. Marx’s (1848/2010)
well-known flights of rhetoric in The Manifesto of the Communist Party,
which exhorted workers to cast off those chains, retreated as the 1848 revo-
lutions ebbed, and it was these defeats that plunged him into his richest intel-
lectual period, as he laid out the inner workings of capital in ever-greater
specificity. The question of ideology was never fully worked out, and it was
up to future generations of Marxists to understand how class consciousness
worked. But that confrontation with power had to be defended, as Marxism
found itself as a militant minority in most cases, fighting a frontal battle
against the capitalist class and its ideologues, and a rearguard struggle
against the reformists who desired compromise and slow, gradual change.
This spirit of confrontation was part of fealty to Marx’s original vision:
crucially, not a moral one – that workers should revolt – but a structural one,
in that workers were bound to revolt, due to their position at the coalface of
exploitation. Marx recognized that it was impossible for capitalism to exist
without making it impossible for workers to live: the constant, inbuilt crises
of the capitalist mode of production, along with the ruthless competition
that forced cost-cutting and “labour-saving” technologies, forced workers
to defend themselves or die. Thus, any retreat from confrontation with the
capitalist class, theoretical or practical, was a betrayal of the entire histor-
ical materialist method. As Marx (1865/2010) wrote in a parlour game of
question and answer:

Your idea of happiness To fight

Your idea of misery To submit

Faced with this choice, who would counsel escape? Among activists and
leaders of social movements, confrontation has assumed similar impor-
tance, and to avoid reality and rely on dogma or personal wishes rather
26 What is escapism?
than strategic assessments would mean political – or real – suicide. “Facing
reality” duly became a favourite phrase of many Leftists from varied tradi-
tions. On the Trotskyist side, Barrett (1944) scorned post-World War Two
social democratic peace plans that ignored capitalism’s crisis tendencies “as
a neurotic reluctance to face reality.” Likewise, Cannon (1939) demanded
that Socialist Worker Party (US) militants “face reality” by confronting
Stalinism in the trade unions. Cliff, founder of the International Socialist
Tendency (IST), defended Marxist theory to Shawki (1997) by counselling,
“If you are really convinced of your ideas you can face reality.” Fellow IST
theorist Hallas (1982) concurred, telling activists in the UK Labour Party
that party programmes were not enough: “the task of revolutionary social-
ists is to face reality, to recognise things as they are, to fight very hard in
support of all the struggles that do occur.” From the Maoists, Mao Tse-Tung
(1966) in his famous essay On Practice wrote: “Whoever wants to know a
thing has no way of doing so except by coming into contact with it, that is,
by living (practicing) in its environment … If you want knowledge, you must
take part in the practice of changing reality … All genuine knowledge orig-
inates in direct experience.” Chinese Communist Leader Liu Shaoqi (1951)
issued instructions on How to Be a Good Communist that counselled, “In
order to change the world we must not divorce ourselves from reality, disre-
gard it or escape from it.”
These examples are so common as to be truisms, but the antithesis to
facing reality, escapism, looms just behind as the antithesis to correct
revolutionary activity. Arvon (1973) quotes Soviet education commissar
Lunacharsky denouncing formalism, a movement that focused on literary
form rather than content, as “escapism… a way of avoiding real human
problems and a sterile product of the decadent ruling class.” Marxist-
Humanist Dunayevskaya (1973) called the Chinese Cultural Revolution
“cultural escapism” rather than “an actual, a proletarian, a social revolu-
tion.” Undeterred, the Maoist Bay Area Communist Union (1976) char-
acterized escapism as an individualist response to being poor: “As the
[Vietnam] war ended and recession began … many of the leaders of the stu-
dent movement turned to either escapism or their own careers.” A decade
later and still trying to create the Party, the San Diego Marxist-Leninist
Group (1985) likewise denounced non-revolutionary groups via the inac-
tivity of the “‘PARTY-PARTY-PARTY’ Type – Partying, playing sports &
video games, watching TV, ‘grooving to the music’, promiscuity & all other
forms of overt escapism.” Even “‘struggling’ for ‘personal happiness’ for self
& immediate family” is “‘covert escapism’,” since the former is impossible
in capitalist society anyway. No one can escape the need for a new Party:
“When you know what’s wrong and can see what needs doing and then don’t
do it…what are the masses to make of this? They, and we, cannot and do not
take a neutral stand on this – inaction must be condemned!”
Mandel (1976), a Trotskyist, provided a rationale for forms of retreat. He
rooted escapism in the disappointments of politics: “People feel there is no
 What is escapism? 27
alternative in political life – they do not see or cannot see small extreme
left-wing groups as an immediate credible alternative. So they lose hope,
feeling that you can’t change society… If you cannot make a collective and
revolutionary change, then you want at least to find an individual escape.”
Mandel’s organization, the Fourth International (1979), applied this under-
standing to the women’s liberation movement, which, while often dedicated
to overthrowing capitalism, sometimes adopted individual-focused tactics
such as consciousness-raising groups:

Our criticism is not directed against individuals who try to find a per-
sonal way out from under the intolerable pressures capitalist society
places on them. But … [u]ltimately there are no purely private solutions
for any of us. Individual escapism is a form of utopianism that can only
end in disillusionment and the dispersal of revolutionary forces.

In his book on feminism, Cliff (1984) was more scathing, dismissing the
entire experience of feminist consciousness-raising groups in a chapter enti-
tled “Escapism and Division.” He wrote: “You don’t build your confidence
by separating yourself off from the struggle going on in the world around
you. … As the experience showed, women tended to cling more and more
to their small groups, and when these broke up, to drop out completely.”
The irony of lecturing women on what builds their confidence, and then
criticizing them for dropping out of politics altogether, was apparently lost.
What today we would call gas-lighting was a prime reason that feminists
and others escaped from male-dominated Marxist groups that refused to
take feminism seriously or to countenance new pedagogies. 2

For our purposes, these critiques betray the deep distrust of escapism
by leftists. Arguing against pacifism in the anti-Vietnam War movement,
Deutscher (1966) suggests revolutionary violence has sometimes played a
positive historical role: to deny this is to posit “a very dangerous escapism.
Therefore, one tends to react, if one is a Marxist, with a certain venom.”
Cliff argues that since personal relations are ultimately social, “[e]ither one
fights to change those relations, or gives up and escapes.” For much of the
Left, escapism has thus become a catch-all for anything the author disa-
grees with: you avoid the reality that I am confronting – and defining.

Naggers of the working class

On very rare occasions, far-sighted theorists understood that, no matter how
important reality is to the Left, others defined it differently. Kracauer (1998),
Wiemar-era journalist and theorist, wrote of an anti-capitalist intelligentsia

usually roused only by extreme cases – war, crude miscarriages of jus-

tice … without appreciating the imperceptible dreadfulness of normal
existence. It is driven to the gesture of revolt not by the construction of
28 What is escapism?
this existence itself, but solely by its most visible emissions. Thus it does
not really impinge on the core of given conditions, but confines itself
to the symptoms; it castigates obvious deformations and forgets about
the sequence of small events of which our normal social life consists –
events as whose product those deformations can alone be understood.
… How is everyday life to change, if even those whose vocation is to stir
it up pay it no attention?

Kracauer’s question castigates the Left for highlighting the most egregious
examples of injustice to demonstrate the need for radical transformation.
The problem is that capitalist daily life is rarely about “extreme cases” and
crisis, and more about coping – and no less corrosive for that. Kracauer
points out that an intelligentsia blind to “the imperceptible dreadfulness
of normal existence” may too quickly denounce the escapism necessary to
cope with “everyday life” without understanding the conditions that make
it necessary.
CLR James (1962) concurred. He could hardly be accused of escapism –
he co-wrote a book and co-founded a Marxist group called Facing Reality.
However, he denounced any form of moralism towards the working class,
critiquing an article in his own group’s newspaper that

first lists all the Hell features of modern life in the United States, then
berates the very millions who suffer from this Hell: ‘Why do these inhu-
man conditions still exist in these United States, the one country in
the whole world which claims to be a classless society? These are the
questions which the American people must now face openly, squarely,
honestly. There is no longer any excuse for us to evade them.’
We are to become naggers of the working class. And they, being pro-
foundly sensitive to the condescension of the oppressors, will not renew
their subs, letting us shrivel and die the death we deserve.

For James, the injunction to face reality did not mean facing the “inhuman
conditions” of American capitalism, because there was no need to tell the
working class how terrible everything is: they already knew. The basic con-
cepts of the Left meant researching and explaining, not hectoring, because
the ability to face reality presumed a level of agency most people simply did
not have.
Thus it is odd, given the Left’s avowed commitment to base its activity on
the real, material life-practices of capitalism, that denouncing escapism has
become another form of critique. Nostalgia and the construction of imagi-
nary or past worlds is not automatically reactionary, as is often claimed by
the Left: for example, many Americans might yearn for the 1960s, before, as
Tekin (2020) shows, median gross rents increased 72%, housing costs overall
increased 121% but income only increased 29%. Capitalism is lived by those
whom it feeds upon, casts out or forces to bounce between education and
 What is escapism? 29
precarious work. As a power acting against us, capital must be coped with,
not openly opposed, if we are to simply survive day-to-day.
One of the features of contemporary capitalism is that feeling or affect
becomes the dominant way that everyday life under capitalism is both expe-
rienced and managed. When class as a group identity retreats under the
many-decade assault of neoliberalism, symptomatic responses are the pri-
mary result. Class is a relationship between people, and people have feel-
ings, experienced concretely and daily. If, as we have seen, those feelings
are often about trauma and its effects, then escapism is an inevitable result.
In fact, emotionality has been core to the experience of capitalism from
the beginning. Theorists have long considered caring work, and the ruth-
less positivity of the workplace, to be a crucial part of neoliberal affective
labour, as Gill and Kanai (2018) suggest. Under these conditions, escapism
adds a unique dimension: the emotional pressures of work and survival can-
not be separated from the need to maintain space away from the affective
assaults of the present. No Left politics would dispute the need for distance
from exploitation; in which case, are there theoretical reasons for the Left’s
anti-escapist stance, beyond a hidden voluntarism or simple “venom”?
A clue lies in the work of Adorno (1972), theorist of the Frankfurt School,
for whom an alienated, sick society must of necessity produce alienated,
sick art. He found plenty of it in the mass entertainment industry:

Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is

sought after as an escape from the mechanised work process, and to
recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same
time mechanisation has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness,
and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods,
that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process
itself … What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only
be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time.

The horrors of mechanized labour appear as “after-images” in entertain-

ment. The frenetic activity, repetition, and violence of work appear in slap-
stick humour, mystery films, novelty songs – all are evidence of “a contempt
for meaning”: cultural production that is not meant to subvert anything but
be consumed at face-value, while consumers must “rest content with the
simple horror of situations” ripped from their social context. Even cartoons
just “confirm the victory of technological reason over truth,” as characters
are brought back to life repeatedly, only to be tortured and killed once more.
The consumer has been so fully integrated into their alienation that, save for
“the slow-witted, who are the ones who suffer for everything anyhow,” the
culture industries could shut down entirely and still fulfil their function. We
are left with a brilliant presaging of A Clockwork Orange’s (1971) climactic
torture scene, in which Alex the droog has his eyelids pulled apart to receive
re-education. Adorno writes: “Nothing that the experts have devised as a
30 What is escapism?
stimulant must escape the weary eye; no stupidity is allowed in the face of
all the trickery; one has to follow everything and even display the smart
responses shown and recommended in the film.”
For Adorno, escapism itself is evidence of the impossibility of escape:
“In front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images
[of the culture industry] there is finally set no more than a commendation
of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape.” And that is escap-
ism’s purpose: it “confirms that the real point will never be reached, that
the diner must be satisfied with the menu.” To ask whether there are good
or bad escapisms misses the point entirely, because a society that needs
escapism does so as a safety valve, to siphon off the unbearable tension of
life under capitalism, thereby maintaining it. “The principle dictates that
he should be shown all his needs as capable of fulfilment, but that those
needs should be so predetermined that he feels himself to be the eternal
consumer, the object of the culture industry.” The fault here, then, is not
seeking escape, so much as believing that in doing so you are actually
escaping:

The escape from everyday drudgery which the whole culture industry
promises may be compared to the daughter’s abduction in the cartoon:
the father is holding the ladder in the dark. The paradise offered by the
culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement
are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes
the resignation which it ought to help to forget.

The gendered nature of Adorno’s analogy reveals something: what value is

escape for the daughter? According to the scenario, she is being offered up
as a bait for the angry young man. A sympathetic reading would see this
as evidence that the liberation of escapism is not true liberation for any-
one involved: the woman is a consumable object, the man secretly claiming
her is being duped by her father, the former thinks he is breaking with the
system, while the latter is, in reality, selling him his break, in the form of
her commodified body. Nobody escapes, and this is indeed Adorno’s point:
everything we consume has been constructed for us. “All are free to dance
and enjoy themselves… But freedom to choose an ideology – since ideology
always reflects economic coercion – everywhere proves to be freedom to
choose what is always the same.”
There is some truth to this account, as commercial semioticians can attest
to: deconstruct any ad and you will find it evoking dreams and insecurities,
often attached to proscriptive gender norms. Just at the moment of freedom
– handing over your money for a product that you chose – you are drawn
ever-deeper into the system of commodified individuality. But there may be
more going on than Adorno grants. To return to the elopement metaphor,
a male viewer “may be shown all his needs as capable of fulfillment,” but
how about a female one? The daughter’s fate, in which she is about to be the
 What is escapism? 31
object of patricidal rage by her father, hardly provokes calm resignation.
There is no escapism for a viewer who identifies with her. Indeed, a female
viewer may recognize being on the ladder just like she is in relationships “at
work, in the factory, or in the office.”
This sense that what is constructed to pacify us may not actually have
its intended effect can be illustrated with less melodrama by the concept
of “third spaces.” For example, echoing a common complaint about cor-
porate standardization, Fisher (2014) found a negative, life-denying exam-
ple in Starbucks’ creation of a third space, neither work nor home, which
provoke unease by being the same everywhere. This kind of commodified
escapism, into an empty null but with Christmas music, is a truism for
many who oppose the homogenization of leisure: Fisher’s opposition is
meant to remind us of a time before mass commodification, when local
shops had character, and chain stores had not erased all originality and
local ownership. Of course, a corporate coffee franchise is the opposite
of “the idea of a public that was not reducible to an aggregate of con-
sumer preferences,” but Starbucks is not popular because it promotes
unease – quite the opposite. “Spaces that could be anywhere” often pro-
vide a mental and physical escape, and it suggests that the cultural detri-
tus of late capitalism lands unevenly. In South Korea, for example, Seoul
has held the record for the most Starbucks per capita in the world, and a
tall latte costs $5.03 USD, twice the American price of $2.75, Yanofsky’s
(2014) and Reynolds’ (2019) research shows. Why would consumers, in a
country where, as Phelps and Crabtree (2013) report, the median wage is
below that of the US, pay twice as much to drink coffee in a third space?
The answer is that these drinks were largely consumed by young people,
and women in particular. The custom of living with one’s parents until
marriage, combined with the relatively low home ownership rate – ranked
42nd of 46 countries, according to Trading Economics (2020) – suggests
that many South Koreans cannot afford their own homes, despite citizens
working some of the longest hours in the OECD. Song (2014) shows that
young women wanting to enjoy coffee at Starbucks are stereotyped as vain
and materialistic, willing to work for minimum wage and spend an hour’s
worth on a coffee. Yet the third space represents a temporary escape from
meeting the expectations of a social hierarchy that has placed them near
the bottom.
This is not meant to valorize a commodified escapism but to situate it.
Starbucks’ popularity has little to do with its coffee, and clearly not its price;
it has more to do with Starbucks’ ability to create “free” spaces in most neigh-
bourhoods. Very few people have access to or awareness of non- corporate
third spaces, and those counter-cultural spaces can be deficient or exclu-
sive in any number of ways. To understand the escapism driving business
at Starbucks, we must understand the need to escape one’s circumstances,
and the inability to do so except by a temporary stop in a non- judgmental,
unstructured environment. For young women and others, going to Starbucks
32 What is escapism?
is not a slavish adherence to corporate power by the unthinking masses;
rather, Starbucks represents one of few spaces for escape in South Korea,
and doubtless elsewhere, too.
To return to the question that animated our discussion: escapism is flight
from the dehumanization inherent in a society governed by market rule,
one which infiltrates the deepest layers of our self-understanding and cir-
cumstances, with horrific effect. It is not laziness, distraction or cowardice
that motivate escapism but the deep material fissures in capitalist society.
Viewing escapism in this light shifts the debate: denouncing people for their
particular form of escapism is, to continue Adorno’s analogy, blaming the
woman for climbing out of the window rather than her father for forcing her
onto the ladder in the first place. Indeed, a focus on the horrors of escapism
precludes the idea that we can learn from it.
The Left uses the charge of escapism in all its political debates as both an
insult and a way to avoid dealing substantively with opponents. This charge
has no bearing on the validity of those debates; a critic might correctly point
out that all of the above examples were torn from their contexts, with much at
stake in each. Yet this only proves the point: if escapism can be used in all sit-
uations, for all opponents, it has no analytical clarity and is simply a term of
abuse. The phenomenon deserves better. Escapism in late capitalism remains
to be investigated, but once we accept that it is not a “thing in itself” but a
condensation of influences, ideas and ideologies, then it becomes immensely
valuable. It is no longer a way to avoid reality but an important feature of it.

Conclusion: the need for escapism

The capitalist lifeworld is an often-scary, exploitative place, which privi-
leges the growth of wealth over the well-being of humans and sinks many
into poverty, ill-health and addiction. Escapism is the desire to level these
circumstances, asserting individuals’ presence and validity against the
anti-human forces of accumulation. This quite natural response is either
stigmatized by theorists, who treat it pejoratively or, in Tuan’s case, use it to
further an ahistorical and frightening model of human nature. In response,
Right-escapism promotes terrifying myths of a hierarchical, privileged
strata, but it also tries to provide comfort and answers – to a few – in a world
where those are lacking. For the most part, in contrast, the Left refuses to
take escapism seriously. The latter is more curious, given the long-standing
Left commitment to empathizing with the human victims of the system.
There are alternatives to telling others to face reality. In The Road to Wigan
Pier, Orwell (1958) touches on the kind of uneasiness that has always ani-
mated capitalism, even outside times of overt crisis:

The very best the English-working class can hope for is an occasional
temporary decrease in unemployment when this or that industry is
 What is escapism? 33
artificially stimulated by, for instance, rearmament. Even the middle
classes… find themselves floundering in a sort of deadly net of frustra-
tion in which it is harder and harder to persuade yourself that you are
either happy, active, or useful. Even the lucky ones at the top, the real
bourgeoisie, are haunted periodically by a consciousness of the miseries
below, and still more by fears of the menacing future.

No one escapes the need for escapism, and for that reason, escapism as an
object of study is not a refusal to face reality. Escapism is constitutive. As a
product of alienation, it shapes our coping methods and attitudes towards
the dislocations and contradictions of capitalism. Addiction, its most visible
outlet, is, as Maté suggests, a rational response to one’s own “deadly net of
frustration.”
To rescue escapism from the racial and capitalist fantasies of the Right,
the Left must stop dismissing it. Escapism does not stand in for ethics or
politics; any term that could justify fascism, capitalism, violence, anti-
violence or communism deserves to be retired. But an analysis of escapism
remains useful, both as way of understanding the capitalist lifeworld and
forming liberatory alternatives to it. To give escapism the intellectual focus
it deserves, we must look deeper into the experiences of human development
and the everyday in late capitalism.

Notes
1. By Right we mean more properly far, or alt-right, the most vocal and virulent
of recent ideological strains. The escapism of the conservative right is far more
complex, dealing with attempts to establish freedom as an abstract ideal and
then identifying threats to that ideal from new groups and tendencies. The alt-
right is an easier study, as it rejects the nuances of political history in favour of
myth. The alt-right has come to mobilize specifically gendered mythologies,
and its world is populated by Pick Up Artists (PUAs), who value women solely
as objects of conquest and employ cod-psychology to obtain the prize of sex-
ual congress; Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), who consider relation-
ships of any duration entirely beyond them and reject all women as greedy and
manipulative; and the involuntary celibates, or incels, who remain balanced
between these two poles by simultaneously deeply desiring intimacy and
blaming women as a gender for not providing it. This brief note does not do
justice to the varieties of alt-right thinking, but they share a common theme:
hatred and fear of women, and a deep belief that they have been marginalized
by liberals, so-called cultural Marxists and foreigners. Cf. Mirrlees’s (2018)
analysis of the alt-right’s political and cultural roots.
2. In fairness to Cliff, the book was an attempt to highlight class differences in
the women’s movement. However, Renton (2013) argues this was a systematic
misreading of feminist politics, as the book says little about the particular
oppressions that women face, leaving issues of violence and domestic labour
outside of the socialist orbit. Feminists were not, apparently, facing the urgent
questions of the working class. Again, this is hard to see as anything besides
gas-lighting.
34 What is escapism?
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2 Escapism and negative humanism

In the encounter between Marxism and psychology, escapism fares badly.

Osborn (1937) examined the case for the prosecution: “If human beings can
escape, by psychological devices, from discomfort caused often by exter-
nal circumstances, how necessary is a study of those devices on the part
of those who wish to encourage the removal of external difficulties?” Not
only was psychology a distraction from the class struggle (“the removal
of external difficulties”), but it could actually interfere with building class
consciousness. In psychology’s defence, he suggested it was an essential
shield against escapism: “If the Marxist desires to get the worker to grips
with reality, to teach him that he can change it by his own efforts, he must
combat those mental tendencies by which the worker seeks to escape from
the world of reality.” Marxist-humanist psychoanalyst Fromm (1962) also
sought to contextualize escapism but as a necessary evil: “man lives with
illusions because these illusions make the misery of real life bearable. If
he can… wake up from the half-dream state, then he can… become aware
of his proper forces and powers, and change reality in such a way that illu-
sions are no longer necessary.” Setting aside whether escapism is, in fact, the
enemy, both Osborn and Fromm at least acknowledged that it is important
to know how it works.
This chapter suggests that, far from being a distraction, escapism exists
at a point of intersection between Marxism and psychoanalysis, in which
the founding traumas of capitalist society create ideas about how that soci-
ety works. Marx had a theory of the individual as a creative human being,
and this remained remarkably consistent throughout his writings. However,
humans are alienated because of the domination of the value-form: work-
ers’ creativity is harnessed to the production of commodities, and this
process of “wresting away” their capacities eventually colonizes their
minds. This is why, as Lukács explained, the realities of capitalism must
appear in their alienated, mediated forms. It does not mean a Matrix-like
awakening, in which people wake up from the soothing goo of capitalist
society to discover they are batteries for the machines. No one chooses ide-
ology; rather, it chooses them, and everything they comprehend appears
through its lens. However, this chapter suggests that a close reading of the
42 Escapism and negative humanism
Marxian tradition preserves a subject who, due to that very alienation, is
never totally consumed by ideology. Escapism, Althusser suggests to us, is
counter- ideological, a sign that integration into ideological structures has
failed. Next, this chapter examines Freud’s concepts of the id as a repository
of pre-social drives, which Marcuse sees as a font of resistance to aliena-
tion. However, Fromm’s ego psychology provides a more workable model
of the Self’s capacity for relationality and creativity, conceptualizing the
psyche as a continuum on which creative capacities meet introjected social
norms. This chapter then applies ego psychology to trauma by examining
the mind-object, an internally-alienated Self that provides mastery over
an uncertain external world. This, along with the manic defence, forms
escapisms that lets subjects both cope with their own development, and
paradoxically, adapt better to the demands of neoliberal selfhood. Finally,
this chapter examines a concrete example of the mind-object in the work
of Bourdieu, whose own escapism left him with a trauma of undeveloped
selfhood. In the degraded conditions of 21st-century capitalism, the prom-
ise of mastery appears impossible. This urge to escape, combined with the
inability to actually accomplish it, gestures towards a negative humanism,
in which frustrated desires reveal human potentialities.

Did Marx have a theory of the individual?

Marx and Engels did not address the science of psychology – still in its
infancy in the mid-19th century – directly, but they did create elements of
a theory of personality. As Marx (1859/2010) famously wrote in the Preface
to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “The mode of pro-
duction of material life conditions the general process of social, political
and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines
their existence, but their social existence that determines their conscious-
ness.” In other words, the study of how society produces and reproduces
itself will explain the origin and content of its self-concepts as well. While
a vital materialist statement, in that ideas come from what people do and
not the other way round, it does not provide any detail on how existence
determines consciousness. Worse, it could suggest a pristine, fixed human
nature, outside of the complexity of social activity that comprises history,
which gets sullied upon encounters with exploitation. This would be a fatal
flaw in Marx’s method – literally, historical materialism – in which people,
not kings, nature or the cosmos, create their own self-understanding and
development. This idea had some purchase on the Left. Some fin de siècle
socialists reversed Marx’s edict, suggesting that humans were naturally giv-
ing, loyal and brave, because they could build socialism, a society which
rewarded generosity, loyalty and bravery. Humans simply embodied higher
emotions because they automatically know and value them. This tautology
did not hold up in the killing fields of World War One. The fact that humans
remained greedy and selfish, and that the propaganda attempts to embody
 Escapism and negative humanism 43
their better side – so-called socialist realism – failed to inspire genuine feel-
ings in anyone, discredited socialism and spurred Freud in his search for
the death drive, as we shall see. But more immediately, this kind of human
nature also turned class consciousness into a mechanical, cause-and-effect
model: workers learn they are exploited, and rise up out of the goodness
of their hearts. If it does not happen, their hearts must be the problem.
Unmoored from the question of how people actually live, the question
quickly slips into broad, inevitably negative generalizations about why the
masses are brainwashed. More than one ex-radical has cited the failure of
the masses to rise up as the reason they gave up on Marxism and became
hard-headed “realists.”1
A model of the psyche in capitalism is necessary to begin untangling this
question. Realizing and acting on exploitation is anything but straightfor-
ward, because social relations and one’s ideas about them exist reciprocally,
meshed together. Sève (1978) attempted a grand synthesis, yet his syllogisms
– a “juxtastructure” of individual and society, forming an “oriented circu-
larity” of determination, each subordinate to the other – seem laboured.
The model that Thomas (2009) attributes to Gramsci does better: there,
non-economic phenomena like laws and beliefs are “the essential form of
appearance of a content that is itself contradictory.” Ideas about how cap-
italism works have to appear the way they do because workers’ existence
itself is alienated. Those ideas are thus rational, an “adequate comprehen-
sion” by those at the sharp end of exploitation.
But we can go even further. Ollman’s (1976) elegant internally-related
social model does away with the chicken-and-egg of mind-society alto-
gether, by reading Marx as a thinker who made no distinction between
things or material relations, economics or people, except at varying levels of
abstraction. When Marx “declares that man ‘in nature’ or that his objects
‘reside in the nature of his being’, the ties to which our attention is drawn are
clearly not external ones. Rather, the individual is held to be in some kind of
union with his object; they are in fact relationally contained in one another,
which requires that each be conceived of as a Relation.” This concept of
“Relation” allows the individual and their ideas about the world back into
materialism, one as a product of the other. Much controversy has centred on
Althusser’s famous epistemological break, in which Marx apparently aban-
doned his youthful abstract humanism and concept of the integral, individ-
ual Self for a structuralist political economy. However, a few examples can
show how Marx emphasized certain parts of the whole relation and back-
grounded others, to form his concept of the concrete, historical individual.
In its denunciation of mainstream (bourgeois) political economy, Marx’s
(1844/2010) early pamphlet Estranged Labour sounds awfully concrete. He
writes of a “sensuous external world” separated from the worker that seems
abstract but arrives via capital, in its property and money forms: “Political
economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to
us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through
44 Escapism and negative humanism
which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes
for laws. It does not… demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of
private property.” The so-called laws of political economy neutralize terms
like investment, wages and returns, which are in fact products of a political
economy that refuses to historicize itself. To do so would be to admit the
violence and inequality that created private property. Instead, bourgeois
economics invents “fictitious primordial condition[s]” for the birth of cap-
italism. In short, Marx critiques political economy for being too abstract,
assuming the conditions shaping individual consciousness that it needs to
explain.
Marx settled his accounts with both idealism and mechanical materi-
alism a few years later in the Theses on Feuerbach (1845/2010). The Sixth
Thesis stated that “the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each
single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.” The
alternative was to “abstract from the historical process … and to presup-
pose an abstract – isolated – human individual.” This is a neat denunci-
ation of abstract humanism, in which Marx historicized human essence
within social relations. A few years later, in The German Ideology, Marx
(1932/2010) made the same point: “This sum of productive forces, capital
funds and social forms of intercourse … is the real basis of what the phi-
losophers have conceived as ‘substance’ and ‘essence of man’.” The “social
forms of intercourse” are easy to map onto psychology, and they are just as
important as the productive forces: “These conditions of life… determine
also whether or not the revolutionary convulsion periodically recurring in
history will be strong enough to overthrow the basis of everything that
exists.” This achieved programmatic status in Chapter 32 of Capital Volume
I (1887/2010), where Marx showed how socialism becomes “the negation of
negation” of capital and “the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degrada-
tion, exploitation” it makes people suffer. The flowering of revolution was
not about creating a grey collective mass but giving workers “individual
property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era” and its vast wealth.
His revolutionary agents were both classes and individuals. Finally, in
Capital Volume III Marx (1894/2010) denounced any analysis of capitalism
“arising from human nature and thus independent of all historical devel-
opment.” Rather, human development arises from “relations which human
beings enter into… in the creation of their social life [that] possess a spe-
cific, historical and transitory character.” Concrete humanism, in which
structure and agency remained internally related to one another, wove a
red thread that Marx spun for decades on his journey from philosophy to
economics and beyond.
We can see the danger of an abstract, ahistorical human condition for a
nuanced understanding of history. For orthodox economists, that condi-
tion would be rapacious human nature or the eternal forces of competition;
for some psychologists, it would be the unconscious. But not for all; just as
Marx historicized capitalism, the Left could do the same for the personality
 Escapism and negative humanism 45
structure. For Fromm (1970), the concept of the individual arises from “the
prevailing practice of life which in turn is determined by his mode of pro-
duction.” Eagleton (2011) suggested we all share “certain powers and capaci-
ties,” which makes us “most human when we are free to realize these powers
as an end in itself, rather than for any purely utilitarian purpose.” Our bod-
ily needs often run across cultures, but the full gamut of their expression, in
“grief and ecstasy, labour and sexuality” and so on arises socially to shape
our nature.
Why does this concrete humanism matter for a theory of escapism?
Without it, Marx’s entire system falls apart, and with it, any hope of peri-
odizing escapism within our society and our minds. A serious analysis of
the personality must grapple with the concept of a concrete individual:
someone who can only be understood through capitalist social relations,
without being reduced to them. Marx’s (1858/2010) Grundrisse defined capi-
talism as a system that removes the very possibility of escape by destroying
or reshaping prior social formations. It is not just that the logic of capital
is dominant but that it excludes all alternatives, not just in the market for
labour-power but in our minds, eroding what Marx called our “spiritual
powers.” Capitalism sweeps away society’s “long-established and compla-
cently accepted limits” with the sheer, staggering scope of its reach. Yet
workers are hardly passive receptacles for this; if they were, they could not
be producers of the commodity labour-power, selling time for a wage. It is
only in the context of individuals conducting directed, purposeful activity,
in a system that must constantly destroy and remake whatever it touches –
including those individuals themselves – that a theory of alienation and thus
escapism makes sense.

The worst architect and the best of bees

According to the stereotype, Marx wrote about the working class because
he was a theorist of industrial capitalism. Communism was about the
workers in the giant factories of the 19th century overthrowing their
top-hatted capitalists, and then working even harder to make more fac-
tories. This immediately suggests an escapist vision: who would not want
to run from such a hellish reality? However, this was the kind of social-
ism that Marx hated. He spent much of Capital Volume I denouncing
those factories for degrading the humanity of their occupants, and con-
temporary Marxists like William Morris were very clear that socialism
meant destroying the factory system, not elevating it to a higher order.
A factory-style socialism is what Draper (1966) called plannism, a vari-
ant of “socialism from above” that eliminates democracy and freedom in
favour of strictly-regimented work regimes. Marx’s vision of labour was
not prison but art.
In The German Ideology, Marx defined a society through how it organ-
izes itself to survive. But this “mode of production must not be considered
46 Escapism and negative humanism
simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individu-
als. Rather… As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are,
therefore, coincides with… what they produce and with how they produce.”
It would be very hard to shoehorn “expressing their life” into working in a
factory. Rather, it suggests an overall character that shapes our lives, which
Marx refined into the capacity to create and imagine future activity. Writing
22 years later in Capital Volume I, he suggested: “A spider conducts oper-
ations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an
architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst
architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure
in imagination before he erects it in reality.”
The labour process is inherently creative, yet capital reduces it to what
is commonly known as work. The capitalist owns the means of production
and pays workers a portion of the labour they have produced previously as
a wage, leaving a remainder of the time purchased to produce surplus…
which goes back to the capitalist. Within this vicious cycle, Marx (1847/2010)
argued, workers sell their willingness to spend time working: “we would
not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that
one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an
hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcase.
Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything.” That quan-
tity has nothing to do with the worker. Marx describes how the commodities
that workers create have two qualities: their use-value or usefulness, which
is tangible, and exchange-value, which is abstract. The latter allows those
items to be bought and sold. Both qualities, use and exchange, create a mag-
ical third quality called value, which governs the production and sale of all
commodities, including work itself. The unstoppable spread of these com-
modities with value – what Marx called the value-form – is why in Capital
Volume I he sardonically described the worker “continually transform[ing]
his own product into a means by which another man can purchase him.
In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the
capitalist.”
As abstract as value may sound, its power acts concretely in workers’
lives. Capitalists constantly try to beat the system and each other, intro-
ducing new technology to replace workers. That competition forces wages
down to the minimum or hours to the maximum, dynamics that today we
call speed-up, unemployment and precarity. But, as Kracauer warned us,
misery does not just accrue to the worst off. Indeed, the idea that capitalism
is defined by its excesses is at its heart social-democratic, because it suggests
that by curbing them, the system is fundamentally okay. Marx’s analysis
went deeper: for him, the law of value manifested as the crushing sense of
calculability that rules all aspects of life. This was not just about a lack
of money but control. Decisions over all aspects of production are in the
hands of others: how it works, what gets made, who it gets made with and
what happens to the final product is decided by managers, CEOs and the
 Escapism and negative humanism 47
impersonal laws of the market – everyone but workers. As he suggested in
Estranged Labour, the effect on the worker is devastating:

in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does
not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and men-
tal energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore
only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself
… His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour.

Workers’ capacity to create is reduced to the capacity to create anything

that the capitalist wants, and they only want it because it can sell. This
abstraction wrests away concrete desires, which are considered unimpor-
tant or obstructive. Torn from workers’ ability to plan and control the out-
come, work looms like a monster: “it exists outside him, independently, as
something alien to him, and ... it becomes a power on its own confronting
him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts
him as something hostile and alien.” The partial pleasures of production,
such as the expression of pride in the making of a good or providing a ser-
vice, are short-lived and compromised. This is why Marx is so unflinching
in denouncing alienation, describing in Capital Volume I how increases in
productivity “mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to
the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in
his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual
potentialities of the labor process.” It is not simply that work denies “intel-
lectual potentialities” – purposeful, creative activity – but that workers have
no choice in the matter. The worse work gets, the more capital accumu-
lates, and the less chance workers have of maintaining themselves outside
the labour market: “[a]ccumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the
same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutal-
ity, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”
The effects of this alienation will be explored in greater depth in Chapter 3.
For now, the point is that the creation of value is relentless and totalizing.
From the far-flung commodity chains bringing all our goods to the kitchen
table, to the design of our neighbourhoods, built and natural environ-
ments are reshaped around the accumulation and circulation of capital.
Everything from the location of homes to the fast food, coffee and enter-
tainment industries would change drastically or disappear if selling labour-
power was not mandatory. This relationship structures our entire lives and
the whole planet, a reality from which none can escape.

The value-form and consciousness

Psychology is traditionally concerned with everything but labour: child-
hood, dreams, the family and so on. Yet alienated labour structures all
those things. Sève argues that the conflict between use and exchange – the
48 Escapism and negative humanism
things we need to live, and the abstractions that run our lives – gets inter-
nalized inside our own heads: “The concept of abstract labour as such also
corresponds to a concrete psychological reality… which does not correspond
to the reality of individual life.” The conflict sets up a chain of actions and
reactions that play out through our lifetimes. The lived experience of alien-
ated labour, and the social laws that structure it, stretch the law of value into
the deepest recesses of our minds. When value sets the terms for how we live
and sell ourselves, the effect is dizzying; as the discussion group Endnotes
(2010) points out, while it may seem “true and politically effective … to say
that we produce capital by our labour, it is actually more accurate to say
(in a world that really is topsy turvy) that we, as subjects of labour, are
produced by capital.” We sell ourselves because we are alienated, and we
are alienated because we sell ourselves. The closed system loops in on itself:
any problems appear external, incidental or the fault of those raising them.
For the worker, there is no escape: there is only creating the conditions for
the sale of one’s labour power. It is powerful because it is both unavoidable
and presented as a form of equality. In non-capitalist modes of production,
there were non-market forms of reproduction. The slave had to have their
meagre needs provided for by the slave-owner or given time and land to
provide for them. The peasant could live off the surplus product the land
produced, once the lord had taken their share. Inequality was formal; in
Marx’s (1887/2010) example, Greek slave-owning society had “for its natural
basis, the inequality of men and of their labour powers.” Not so for capital-
ism: workers and owners of capital supposedly enter the labour market from
a position of equality, to buy and sell labour power and a wage, respectively.
Yet the worker depends on this relationship for their very survival, and this
gives them all the incentive they need to believe it is fair. Nothing in workers’
experience suggests it is a good idea to acknowledge a power imbalance;
after all, “if you don’t like it, you can leave,” and the capitalist can simply
find another worker. The world produced by capital is a very small one.
In a world governed by commodities, most people see relationships
between things rather than relationships between people. Marx called this
commodity fetishism, in which prices for labour appear natural, a commod-
ity’s price erases its use-value and the laws based on these distortions also
appear normal (“a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages”). From this con-
dition, Rubin (1973) suggests that “[v]alue, money, and so on, are not con-
sidered as expressions of human relations ‘tied’ to things, but as the direct
characteristics of the things themselves, characteristics which are ‘directly
intertwined’ with the natural-technical characteristics of the things.” Things
and their possession or absence dominate human relationships. Workers
come to believe isolation and mutual competition is the natural state of
things, without seeing the collective social labour that determines the con-
ditions for human relations, including the isolated person themselves.
It stands to reason that the social laws – competition, theft and exploita-
tion – appear natural, and this appears most of all in the domination of
 Escapism and negative humanism 49
money. From its acceptance as a prime mover, all sorts of fantastical things
happen: stock markets rise and fall on their own, offices need people and
house values mysteriously grow. Invisible and behind it all, Ollman sug-
gests, are the particular decisions of capitalists to expand or shrink pro-
duction and the forced decisions of workers to sell their labour-power. The
close relationships forged with objects distorts those with other people and,
as Marx pointed out, with time itself. Money acts, while workers act to do
its bidding. Lutz (2009) suggests that capitalists themselves remain isolated
from the objects they command, trapped by the system they control. As
Lukács (1971) put it, “the principle of rational mechanisation and calcula-
bility must embrace every aspect of life.”
Of course, the impact upon workers is far worse than for their trapped
masters. The commodity represents the prospects of freedom and auton-
omy, presented as a lifestyle of complete hedonism, if only it was attaina-
ble. However, the fact that capitalism makes it so difficult for most people
to obtain their basic needs, let alone their desires, turns commodities into
goals forever out of reach. Wu-Tang Clan’s (1993) song “C.R.E.A.M.,” an
acronym for Cash Rules Everything Around Me, is where the Staten Island
crew vividly expresses the rule of calculability. Inspectah Deck, who wrote
the lyrics, attests to growing up in a poor, single-parent family, being evicted
as a child, entering jail at age 15, and finally choosing hip hop as a way
out of poverty. In an interview with Tardio (2013), he remembers dreading
moments of lucidity:

with the things adding up you’re like, ‘Damn.’ You smoking, and you
get high. For that temporary moment, you might think about some
other shit, like, ‘Yo, remember when this was going down?’ But then
when that high is gone, you get right back into shit. If you’re depressed,
you roll a blunt, and when your high is gone, you’re still depressed. I’m
like, ‘What the fuck? What’s it worth? Why even smoke?’

This neatly captures the dual-sided nature of commodity fetishism and its
relationship to escapism. People are not brainwashed into believing money
has an independent existence: it actually does work independently upon
those who lack it, and their means of coping and often their very lives depend
on recognizing and mastering it. This also requires establishing distance
from the degradations that being subject to the value-form imposes, and the
resulting forms of commodity fetishism may look ludicrous to those who do
not need to escape. However, these forms serve an entirely serious purpose,
in representing an escapism that not only rejects austerity but revels in that
rejection. In short, commodity fetishism is not simply a desire for mate-
rial goods but for recapturing a lost portion of humanity: the desire for
self-expression unburdened by the hard work of survival. As Inspectah
Deck (1993) puts it, “But as the world turns I learned life is Hell/Living in
the world/no different from a cell.” Those whose lives are run by commodity
50 Escapism and negative humanism
fetishism have the keenest understanding of how it works and what it feels
like, and accepting C.R.E.A.M. does not equal consent. Ollman laments that
“The laws of capitalism… become necessary in virtue of everyone thinking
and acting as if they are.” But this transference is not total. Precisely because
the material reality of alienation has such a direct, life-threatening effect,
those who either sell their labour-power – or are never even given the chance
to do so – understand that they can control very few of the forces acting
upon them. The desire to run away is an inevitable result.

Ideology
The problem is why those obviously oppressed by such a system still identify
with it. As we have seen, Marx and Engels answered in the Manifesto that
ideas come from the material organization of society, which means those
that control that society also dictate its concepts. This can be interpreted as
“false consciousness”: Eyerman (1981) explains that people could be duped
into adopting their rulers’ perspective, a position that has often been imputed
to Marxism. 2 Yet Marx never mentioned the phrase false consciousness, and
Engels did only once,3 to suggest that people hold contradictory ideas about
society in our heads. Engels (1893/2010) explains that false consciousness
happens when someone cannot discern their own motives, and

Hence the motives he supposes himself to have are either spurious or

illusory. Because it is a mental process, he sees both its substance and its
form as deriving solely from thought… He works solely with conceptual
material which he automatically assumes to have been engendered by
thought without inquiring whether it might not have some more remote
origin unconnected therewith; indeed, he takes this for granted since, to
him, all action is induced by thought, and therefore appears in the final
analysis, to be motivated, by thought.

Note Engels’ repeated emphasis on thought: the “spurious or illusory”

motives do not come from having the wrong ideas, contrasted to the suppos-
edly correct ones of the revolutionary theorist. Rather, false consciousness
derives from all idealism, left- or right-wing: treating ideas as independent
of the material social relations that produce them. Seen this way, ideology is
not a pass-fail test but a methodology for understanding where ideas come
from and, for our purposes, why escapism retains such a powerful hold on
capitalist subjectivity.
Social existence determines social consciousness: the complex sum of
activities that we conduct in society determines how we understand our
place in it. But Marx (1859/2010) cautions us “to distinguish between the
material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which
can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, polit-
ical, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which
 Escapism and negative humanism 51
men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.” Capital and labour
battle over the extraction of surplus value, but when one side is made up of
real people with creative capacities, that battle naturally extends into atti-
tudes, mores and desires.
Capital is totalizing, always seeking to consume, expand and infiltrate
into all aspects of social life. Yet the process of production it creates is split
between classes with fundamentally different relationships to capital, pro-
ducing their own, alienated understandings of that relationship. In this way,
Jakubowski (1976) says, the ruling class creates ideology, a set of ideas that
describes a particular class’s outlook. It is not as simple as decoding hidden
commands in ads, as Rowdy Roddy Piper did in They Live (1988), when he
put on sunglasses and revealed alien capitalist slogans on billboards. Those
messages – obey, consume, submit, etc. – are not capitalism’s core messaging.
Rather, the ruling classes lead by example, demonstrating in their success,
autonomy and above all competitive spirit that the dream of becoming an
UNHWI is still viable, and that therefore workers can become rich and free
if they are industrious, lucky and sell their own labour (and buy that of oth-
ers). Ideology is thus better understood as the stories the ruling class tells
about itself, in which social transformation is unnecessary because everyone
can pursue entrepreneurial success and autonomy. And that message is true
– for the ruling classes. The entrepreneurs who built Powder Mountain resort
really can benefit from networking with their friends. Someone who follows
Dale Carnegie’s advice about remembering names really can climb the cor-
porate ladder, with the correct last name, degree, manner of speech and a
thousand other classed qualifications. There are objective limits to conquer-
ing these limits: individuals may succeed, but Jakubowski argues that the
mass of people cannot, “since the very existence of that mass expresses the…
necessary subordination, of the individuals to it.” Without a mass, there
would be no surplus from which to extract the capital that the ruling class
uses to assert its individuality. The more these falsely-specialized knowl-
edges pretend to be universal, the more they just express their roots.

Class consciousness and escapism

In the TV series A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1989), in a sketch entitled Beggar,
comedians Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie play an aristocrat and a panhan-
dler meeting in the street. After being berated by the evening-coated Fry for
being poor, a dishevelled Laurie asks, “We share the same planet, why can’t
you let me be?” Fry brays:

Share the same planet? What are you saying, ‘share the same planet’?
The planet I inhabit is full of restaurants, fast cars, high level finance,
holidays in Barbados and fine wine. Your planet is full of bottles of
meths, howling harmonicas, smelliness and grimy doss-houses. It’s not
the same planet at all.
52 Escapism and negative humanism
Fry’s character is partially right. In the sense of their lived experience, and
membership of classes opposed to one another, they do not occupy the same
social, economic or geographic worlds. He lives, like all members of his
class, in what Lukács (1971) called “a definite formal nexus which appears
to govern the whole of life.” The ideas of the ruling class – the sense of secu-
rity and entitlement that comes naturally with power – must reflect how its
members see their own position, and in that sense their consciousness “is
simply the intellectual reflex of the objective economic structure.” But it is
more than that: the result of “man’s nature [being] subjugated, deformed
and crippled” is “the subjective marks of an internal alienation.” This
twisted “intellectual reflex” explains why myths of the free market appear
as common sense for those who rule capitalism. For example, when Schools
(2017) details how CEOs of major firms sleep only four hours a night, the
implication is that the rest of us have only ourselves to blame for being too
lazy to accumulate wealth.
But this does not mean that “man’s nature” is a product of pure con-
sciousness, which only gets dirty when it comes into contact with history
or social forces. Lukács differentiates sharply between ideological reality
and what he calls immanent, or social reality. The latter is mediated, under-
stood “as the aspects of a total social situation caught up in the process of
historical change”: capitalist alienation, in other words. The fact of media-
tion between objective and subjective worlds is not an attempt to impose an
abstract truth on anything:

It is rather the manifestation of their authentic objective structure…

Mediation would not be possible were it not for the fact that the empir-
ical existence of objects is itself mediated and only appears to be unme-
diated in so far as the awareness of mediation is lacking so that the
objects are torn from the complex of their true determinants and placed
in artificial isolation.”

Any time an adage appears obvious – for example, the rich must get richer,
while the poor must suffer – it is a mystification of socially constructed rela-
tionships of power. It is also mandatory: what Lukács calls mediation is
the appearance which social forms in capitalism must take, because alien-
ation exists in capitalism’s social organization first, before it exists in our
heads. This means that escapism itself is a form of mediation, the necessary
appearance of our conflictual, ideological relationship to the commodity
labour and its appearance as a wage. Selling labour power appears as a free
exchange; deep down we know it is not, not as an act of individual deduction
but as a consequence of the slow destruction of our creative capacities.
Perhaps unexpectedly, it is Althusser (2005) who takes us a step closer to
placing escapism at the centre of the relationship between exploitation and
its effects, through his theory of ideology. For him, ideology did not dis-
play the world produced by social structures; rather, ideological forms “are
 Escapism and negative humanism 53
perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects and they act functionally on
men via a process that escapes them.” These cultural objects are what give
ideology such reach and power. In an elegant passage, Althusser uses this to
touch on the basis of escapism: “[i]n ideology the real relation is inevitably
invested in the imaginary relation, a relation that expresses a wish (con-
servative, conformist, reformist or revolutionary), a hope or a nostalgia,
rather than describing a reality.” The wish-fulfilment we have is not reality;
it is instead the “overdetermination of the real by the imaginary and of the
imaginary by the real.” That intertwined relation “reinforces or modifies
the relation between men and their conditions of existence, in the imaginary
relation itself.” Althusser is talking about humanism, the attempt to estab-
lish a human essence or nature separate from and preceding society, which
he considers a fantasy next to the political, economic and legal structures
that organize the material world. The implications for escapism are clear:
hope, nostalgia and wish-fulfilment, put together, form an “overdetermina-
tion of the real by the imaginary,” which has a real impact on how we live.
However, escapism is not an ideology. Its fantastic elements do not com-
plete the overdetermination, because however toxic the particular form of
escapism, it expresses the failure to master a situation; after all, if a situation
was tolerable, there would be no reason to dream of escape. In this way,
escapism is counter-ideological. Individuals experience the conflict between
abstract labour and concrete reality inside their bodies and minds and, una-
ble to solve it, resolve it with the fantasy of running away.
Its near-infinite shapes do not make escapism coincidental. Sève suggests
that all our traits are subordinate to the “abstract personality” imposed by
the theft of labour-time; this personality “more or less severely besets [the
concrete personality], assails it, overwhelms it and crushes it, not only from
without but from within.” Aspirations are lost within that abstraction, and
individuals are split between authentic and labouring selves, one for use and
one for exchange: “the two men who dwell in every individual are each the
alienation of the other; and to live in these conditions always therefore pre-
supposes relinquishing some reason for living.” Escapism begins to appear
as a defensive movement, not simply an inability to fully integrate ruling
class ideology but an active refusal to participate in any further disintegra-
tion. Escapism must result when individuals are not allowed to know – and
thus not to understand – the conditions of alienation, expressed personally
as trauma in their fullest, social sense. Freud helps make sense of this.

Freud and drives

While the thrust of psychoanalysis is the inner life of the individual, given
the latter’s relationship to environmental and biological stimuli, it is not
that radical to extend that focus to the historical, cultural and economic
circumstances that shape the individual. Freud illustrates a key feature of
escapism as social pathology: having identified the developmental stages of
54 Escapism and negative humanism
how an adult achieves independence, he details all the ways it can go wrong.
The conditions identified share a refusal to confront what he called the real-
ity principle: the ability to properly understand the potential of the external
world to meet individual needs.
Although Freud’s model of the psyche evolved, the one he settled on begins
with the id, acting as the repository of inherited biological and instinctual
drives that it seeks to release and express. The ego keeps the organism safe,
mediating all encounters with the external world by negotiating how the id
can gratify its desires. Finally, the super-ego is that part of the ego which, in
contact with parents and society, adapts the individual to external standards
for behaviour, the “ego-ideal.” Fairholm and Lench (2014) suggest that the
energy driving these phenomena comes from the libido, developed by Freud
variously as a pure expression of sexual instincts, as those instincts’ attach-
ment to the ego or various objects, or as a tension that co-exists uneasily with
aggression. These parts are developmental and are most easy to observe when
certain stages are blocked. For example, he (1923/2001) described “hysteri-
cal symptoms” that appear when a “mental process with a heavy charge of
affect … [is] ‘strangulated’ … diverted along wrong paths,” causing “‘patho-
genic ideas’” and “‘psychical traumas’.” The concept of blocked and rerouted
energy presumes both a clear progression of stages of personal development
and an energy driving that development that must be channelled correctly, to
the mastery of one’s drives and a mature attachment to another person. But
of course, Freud was interested in why this did not happen, and later iden-
tified the most fundamental, internal conflict of the psyche as between the
drive for Eros, libidinal expression, and Thanatos, the death drive. Unable
to understand why World War One veterans demonstrated a compulsion to
repeat past traumas, Freud concluded that aggressive behaviour attempted
to rid the body of the trauma of relating to all external objects. Having failed
to satisfy its needs to curb the id or mould external reality in the external
world, the ego simply tried to destroy itself. It ran from pain towards an
archaic, pre-living, even pre-organic state, in which it could achieve com-
plete psychic non-disturbance: death.
While death may appear to be the ultimate escapism, clinical Freud has
a tenuous link to theoretical Freud – a caution he admitted, recognizing
that his lack of biological evidence forced him to turn to psychology to sup-
port his theories. However his method, psychoanalysis, yielded fruit as the
art of interpretation of the patient’s symptoms, and his model of the brain
(1923/2001) sounds remarkably dialectical: “everything that occurred to a
patient setting out from a particular starting-point must also stand in an
internal connection with that starting-point.” Moreover, even a brief sur-
vey reveals clinical evidence for Freud’s observations. Solms and Turnbull
(2011) find his concept of drives in the profound impact that emotions have
on neurological states, while Tauber (2013) suggests the unconscious func-
tions as a guide to the external world for the ego. Akhtar (2011) argues that
the death instinct can be observed in clinical practice, as an attempt to
 Escapism and negative humanism 55
quash overwhelming thoughts and feelings and bring emotions to an equi-
librium, which Mills (2006) and Holowchak and Lavin (2015) show mani-
festing in self-destructive behaviours and the compulsion to repeat. These
insights suggest Freud is less a theorist of escapism as a consolation prize for
the near-impossible task of normal development, and more a theorist of the
impossibility of this task in a sick society.
Adorno (2014) takes up this political role for Freud, eulogizing him for
shining a light into humanity’s darkest recesses: “As [Freud] takes the utopia
and its realization bitterly seriously, he is no utopian but faces the reality as
it is in order not to let himself be stupefied by it. He wants to free the ele-
ments of the better that are determined in the reality from their bondage.
He makes himself so austere in order to break the petrified conditions.”
Who would not want to be the catalyst to break received wisdom? Jay (1973)
pointed out that Frankfurt School scholars fled Nazi Germany, and Freud’s
darkness fit the prevailing mood. Adorno’s Freud is the hero whose super-
power is forcing society to confront its contradictions: “Psychoanalysis
becomes the indictment of civilization,” not because it creates mental health
for its patients but because it unveils their deep irrationality. Confrontation,
not adaptation, is required.
Fellow Frankfurt School psychoanalyst Marcuse (1998) revealed this rev-
olutionary potential. Marcuse agreed with Freud that people internalized
their own repression, sacrificing what he called the pleasure principle, or
instinctual needs, to the reality principle, compromises made for the sake of
group survival. In capitalism, this was further refined into the performance
principle, the precise form of surplus-repression required for alienated
labour.4 Internalized in the unconscious, repression disappeared and the
remaining shell of a person could call itself happy. However, this potential
danger created a vital role for our libidinal drives: they fuelled the innate
creativity that Marx identified as our most human quality. Drives signalled
utopia, not death, and Marcuse called for their revolt: play could be the goal
of a transformative movement, unleashed by “phantasy,” the mental capac-
ity to play, imagine and enact utopian worlds. The implications for escapism
are that, rooted in the biological functions of the psyche, it could act as a
defence mechanism against the trauma of psychological development. The
latter leaves what Adorno (2014) called “a system of scars, which are inte-
grated only under suffering, and never completely” (emphasis added). As
a reaction to surplus repression, rather than a form of it, escapism could
become a way for the subject to channel the death drive into Marcuse’s
“revolt of the instincts.”

Id and ego psychology

Freud and his successors practiced an id psychology, in which the social ego
floated at the top of a far deeper well of the id, bubbling up from our primor-
dial biology. For Freud this was a natural outgrowth of the 19th-century
56 Escapism and negative humanism
mechanical materialism he inherited, in which biological drives func-
tioned analogously to pistons driving an engine. Fromm (1970) shifted this
focus from the id to the ego, which he claimed had structure and logic.
Rather than simply constraining the id, the ego met it on a continuum,
on which social relations blended into instinct. His critiques of id psy-
chology were both pragmatic and historical. Practically, even if we retain
a precious, pre-social core that is outside to capitalism and inside our
own heads, this does not mean we can act on it, or even access it, except
through the tortured language of dreams and symptoms. The biological
id resembles other dynamics said to be outside of history: technological
change, greed, scarcity and so on, all of which lack explanatory power.
If the ego is only the product of a thin veneer of civilization channelling
the death drive, then the more society develops, the more it dominates the
instinctual drives. It is hard to imagine how any subjectivity could survive
the onslaught of advanced, spectacle-driven capitalism. Whereas if the
ego has a biological imperative to be social, then drives are also social.
Conflict is not the non-history of instincts versus society, but a history of
the kinds of social organization, hierarchical or democratic, introjected
into the personality. Unlike libidinal drives that seek the release of insa-
tiable needs, ego psychological drives seek relational objects. They express
creative capacities, which can only be realized when united with an activ-
ity. The external world is not the repository of people’s drives but an active
component that shapes them. Fromm called this the social character: an
ego built from socially introjected parts.
This means that, in an alienated society, drives become alienated too, as
individuals are unable to fulfil their creative capacities. Just like Marcuse
thought happiness comes from submission to the performance principle
(at the cost of the Self), for Fromm the social character under capitalism
allows the working classes to adapt to their own oppression, “wanting to
act as they have to act.” The need to work turns into a drive, along with its
attendant habits like punctuality and organization. Fromm (1970) criticized
the black box model of the unconscious, in which repressed desires hide;
rather, he arrived at a model of a “social unconscious,” which both holds
and represses experiences and knowledge that threaten social order. The
fear of breaking social order arose from an evolutionarily-encoded require-
ment of group survival, and even authoritarian societies could ward off the
deep-seated fear of isolation.

Is ego psychology idealist?

Fromm’s ego psychology faced many objections, two of which concern
escapism. The first is that his humanism resembled an abstract moral
system, outside of history; the second was that his ego psychology sim-
ply helped integrate unhappy subjects into the system that caused their
unhappiness.
 Escapism and negative humanism 57
The first criticism is relatively straightforward. Although an atheist,
Fromm was trained in Judaic religious scholarship and explored those
themes throughout his work, often using poetic language: for example,
invoking the abstraction of “universal man, the whole man, rooted in the
cosmos” in 1962’s Beyond the Chains of Illusion. Yet psychoanalysis itself
was the study of symbols, poetry and myth, which Fromm used as a basis
for understanding Marx’s relational humanism. Fromm’s desire to wrest the
definition of humanism from religion, and his use of poetic language to do
so, does not make him an idealist, any more than Marx wanting efficient
resource allocation made him a classical economist.
The second and more challenging critique is that Fromm’s concept of
the social ego annulled the function of libidinal drives. If the organizing
principle for capitalist subjectivity is, as Berardi (2015) invokes, utter hope-
lessness and disconnection, then ego psychology becomes a form of integra-
tion: substituting sociology for a pre-social model of the unconscious. And
without a focus on the deep conflicts that precede ego integration, Adorno
(2014) insisted, “[t]he cured would be nothing more than a nucleus of condi-
tional reflexes.” If our libidinal drives were shaped by society, there would
be no resistance to re-socialization under an authoritarian regime, and fas-
cists could build their supermen. The job of psychoanalysis, Pavón-Cuéllar
(2017) observes, would be to reconcile unhappy subjects with their social
order, creating “frank resignation to the reality of the system,” and with
that, “sentimental compliance and complicity” on the part of the proletar-
iat. The scientists of the mind would turn into human resource managers.
However, critiques of Fromm’s humanism may be missing the point:
he is describing how an aspiration to collectivity becomes blocked. In an
alienated society, where the social unconscious binds group acceptance to
developmental trauma and the labour process, even the most personally-felt
feelings of escapism cannot be understood biologically or individually. The
infinite varieties of escapism make sense only by examining the historical
and structural forces that reinforce them. Otherwise, escapism becomes a
universal part of the human personality, and an ahistorical response to con-
flict and aggression, like Freud’s death drive or Tuan’s escape into cruelty.
Moreover, we cannot discount the possibility that, when the libido appears
to be beyond history, this may just demonstrate its ideological status. An
ahistorical escapism may suggest that escapism is simply biology, the id psy-
chology-equivalent of “essence” – after all, “it’s in our genes” is the siren-call
of conservative sociobiology. In contrast, Fromm’s (1970) humanism links
the micro expression of alienation to the macro structures that create it. In
particular, his concept of the social unconscious explains Right-escapism:
“Decaying societies and classes… hold most fiercely to their fictions since
they have nothing to gain by the truth.” But escapism is also negating, not
just negative: it becomes a way to maintain a coherent, psychic whole in the
face of fragmenting social forces. We dream of escape precisely because we
can never achieve the complete integration promised by capitalist ideology.
58 Escapism and negative humanism
For our purposes, id and ego psychology are not so far apart. Whether the
primary mediation between Self and society takes place deep in our uncon-
scious or in our waking thoughts, its impact is lived socially and histori-
cally. In fact, despite their differences, both id and ego psychology share a
thwarted drive – for libidinal release, death or relationality – that threatens
individual and society coherence unless sublimated or safely vented. The
libido remains outside of (alienated) social control, until its drives appear
along the continuum of consciousness, at which point it enters into pre-
existing social relations. These are rooted in the value-form and its atten-
dant effects in alienation and commodity fetishism. The manipulation of
the subject – by the culture industries, the performance principle, or the
social unconscious – models the roots of escapism, culminating in a nega-
tive humanism that demonstrates the social conditions warping our capac-
ities and our impulses to flee those conditions. We arrive at a historicized
subject-who-escapes.

Towards a negative humanism

If the performance principle channels the expression of our creative capac-
ities into narrow, commodified channels, then escapism provides an alter-
nate direction, in which human ingenuity moves towards a utopian place
where those capacities are fulfilled. That place is at odds with our pres-
ent reality, which is why Fromm (1970) considers Marx’s chief insight into
psychology not about mental illness but what he calls “the pathology of
normalcy… of the—statistically—normal man… the loss of his human sub-
stance.” Alienation takes away the capacity to relate to nature and others,
leaving individuals in pieces. In The German Ideology (1932/2010), Marx
describes this hypothetical individual as someone who has a passion for
writing books, which nonetheless does not bring any satisfaction. Whether
that person enjoys writing or not is irrelevant: their willingness to develop
their capacity is sold to the buyer of labour-power, which leaves that capac-
ity one-sided. The “activity offers the individual [only] the possibility of a
momentary escape from his ‘bad world’, of a momentary pleasure.” The
stunted individual has “few remaining desires, which… express themselves
only through repercussion, i.e., they assume in their narrow development
the same one-sided and crude character as does his thought.” Even when
individuals think they are running from the cold world of wage labour to
the warm embraces of bodily pleasures or philosophy, they continue to
express the very alienation that made them want to escape in the first place.
This explains why so many escapist fantasies are reduced to simple wish-
fulfilment, marked by the absence of all the pieces of the personality that
capitalism has destroyed. “No moral preaching avails here,” Marx warns us;
in its place, we get the anguished cry of the “sick, fragmented” human being.
Physical and mental escapisms must be considered as manifestations of a
deeper alienation of which they are the surface appearance: a mode of social
 Escapism and negative humanism 59
existence in which people and objects appear disconnected, unchanging
and destructive. This demonstrates how humanism is fundamentally neg-
ative, because it provides an immanent critique of how capitalism distorts
the personality. Marcuse (1998) accepted Fromm’s label of “human nihil-
ism,” in which a refusal to accept terrible conditions is the only consistent
humanist position. As Blunden (2005) points out, humans remain conscious
of themselves and each other, marking capitalism as a particularly brutal –
because internalized – form of social organization. After all, if humans were
automatons, there would be no creative capacity from which to be alien-
ated. This is why humanism must be negative. It is a far darker, bleaker and
nihilistic condemnation of capitalism: not on moral grounds, but because
those moral grounds are denied. Individuals are subjects, humanism says,
whose subjectivity is brutally suppressed from the moment they enter the
social world.

Class and the mind-object

Subjectivity still exists, but in the capitalist lifeworld, it is a refracted, fair-
ground mirror of the undeveloped Self. The distorted reflections appear as
escapism, in which the capacity for action, to free oneself from one’s cir-
cumstances and live authentically is no longer severely curtailed. The rea-
son that escapism is so common is because it arrives as a natural outgrowth
of early experience. For example, in McGarvey’s (2017) experience, growing
up poor causes trauma and hyper-vigilance: a state of being on permanent
alert to ward off further trauma. That hyper-vigilance is more than the
stress induced by exclusion and deprivation: he experienced his community
policing norms of behaviour, dress and speech for any deviance that could
indicate difference and signal competition for the few resources available.
These kinds of physical and emotional pressures are routes to many coping
mechanisms, including addiction, but another less well-known consequence
is the development of the mind-object: a premature formation of the ego,
in which those with insecure attachments seek absolute command of their
environment. In that quest they learn to objectify their own needs, substi-
tuting fantasy and intellect for a missing stable object.
The mind-object acts as a shield, which, as Corrigan and Gordon (1995)
observe, appears all-powerful, “always available for mastery and control of
internal objects so that dependence and the feelings it generates – anxiety,
frustration, anger, and envy – can be obliterated.” Fantasies of omnipotence
appear as a means of warding off vulnerability. In replacing a relationship
with a real object by an imaginary one, the mind-object bears an uncanny
resemblance to commodity fetishism, in which an object made for sale hides
the real relationships between the people that made it. It also suggests one
of the reasons why commodity fetishism is accepted so readily by denizens
of late capitalism: we are already accustomed to fetishization via our early
formation of mind-objects. The real Self remains hidden and undeveloped,
60 Escapism and negative humanism
while the false Self takes on relating to the outside world, ingratiating itself
with the demands of those around it.
The isolation and powerlessness that prompts this state creates what
Fromm (1965) calls “mechanisms of escape.” Holders of mind-objects
wish for control and mindlessness at the same time. Escapism is a flight
from this contradiction, in which the demands of the Self are simultane-
ously articulated and repressed. The defences of the mind-object allow
the Self a sense of mastery and distance from lack, protecting its integ-
rity. But the bearer must wage an unending, exhausting war against all
perceived attacks, even – particularly – from their own drives. The secret
wish of all sufferers is to ease that struggle by means of dulling the senses,
or escaping: geographically, spiritually, relationally. This is not so much
the desire to abandon the mind-object and achieve the real Self – for how
can it form under these conditions? – but instead the desire to escape the
conflict altogether.
A “magic” or manic solution to trauma and insecure attachment involves
turning away from that reality, towards a place where objects are restored to
their rightful, integrated place. Conflicts disappear under the force of imag-
ination, such that even hobbies and daydreams become manic defences.
Peltz (2006) suggests that a manic defence allows a sense of mastery – and a
denial of abandonment – over what would otherwise be an intolerable social
environment. Minnick’s (2019) Kleinian approach names “any hobby that
involves collecting or making things, becoming passionate about reading
books where one individual conquers or saves the world, constantly day-
dreaming about being someone talented or famous, starting to use sub-
stances as a teenager to alter one’s mind and experience, etc.” as signs of
manic defences. To call a hobby a form of individualized escapism is hardly
a criticism: everyone needs a potential space that mediates between inner
and outer environments, allowing a navigation of the rocky shoals of Self
and other. But it becomes pathological when it helps reconcile a subject with
an environment that denies flourishing. Both the mind-object and the manic
defence can thus be considered forms of adaptive escapism. The mind-ob-
ject results when drives are forced into suppression too early, left uninte-
grated, and then overtaken by what turns out to be a false ego. The flight
from reality – a feature of Fromm’s “escape from freedom” – helps to quash
a Self that could be a threat to external objects and so risk destruction. But
while Fromm saw the energy of flight deriving from a search for stability and
thus towards authoritarian movements, it need not go anywhere tangible.
Instead, those with unexpressed pain can also wish to escape, as Corrigan
and Gordon observe: “We have heard dream images of being ‘above it all,’
images that convey both their solution and their dilemma… Clearly, our
patients do not feel connected to or alive in their bodies. In a sense they
are heads without bodies.” This is an escapist fantasy, leaving behind the
painful realities of lack and the isolation that entails. It also points to the
somatic benefits of addiction: it is a way to reconnect with bodily sensation,
 Escapism and negative humanism 61
and simultaneously to avoid the painful traumas enacted upon the body.
Either function is an escape from real integration.
Despite the very real symptoms described in Chapter 1, escapism need
not be as extreme as an addiction. The mind-object was constructed with-
out the help of substances, after all, through the bearer’s own will to sur-
vive. The mind-object allows its bearers acute sensitivity in comprehending
reality as well as creating fantasy, and thus Corrigan and Gordon observe
“there are times when there is real pleasure in the use of the mind, indeed
there may even be a sense of triumph. Consciously, they have succeeded,
produced, achieved, dazzled; unconsciously, they celebrate their capacity
for survival in the face of the annihilating object.” This is socially adaptive;
of course those with a mind-object find their route planned by capitalism,
but it is nonetheless a route, not a barrier.
Class forms the structuring boundary of the developmental environment
that shapes the mind-object and manic defence. The symbolic order of the
unconscious meets unequal power relations in society, and the mind-object
helps internalize these contradictory relationships. Layton (2006) suggests
class is as much about denial as about open displays of status, lived “via a
defensive splitting off of parts of self too closely associated with anything
felt to characterize other, especially lower—but also upper-class fractions
… that very splitting creates a haunting anxiety about necessity that is
ever-present and must be vigilantly guarded against.” The mind-object finds
fertile ground within the broader social world: subjects with developmental
trauma ward off narcissistic wounds, while subjects of alienation – which
is everyone – must ward off the threat of not having enough or losing what
they have. In both cases, escapist splitting allows subjects to break off and
isolate their unacceptable parts, which articulate, in individual fashion, the
contradictions of class society.

Escapism via the mind-object: the example of Bourdieu

The mind-object is “hidden in plain sight,” its very commonality unac-
knowledged because it is so adaptive to capitalism: it expresses both how
to evade and survive the emotional truths of alienation. Its very plasticity
makes it visible in the life of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose
studies on the cultural markers of class trajectory demonstrated its power.
Chapter 3 will examine his theoretical work; here, it is his life-trajectory that
demonstrates both a concrete humanism and a distancing from develop-
mental trauma. The preface of Bourdieu’s (2007) Sketch for a Self-Analysis
simply reads, “This is not an autobiography.” Yet this need not be read as
an injunction against analysis, because his oeuvre followed Marx’s famous
invocation to study human life-processes, not what people say about them-
selves. Bourdieu’s story about himself demonstrates how the experience of
individuals coalesces into a class. In doing so, he demonstrates his own con-
cept of habitus: the psycho-social and cultural practices that accrue to a
62 Escapism and negative humanism
social layer, which defines itself by aspiring to the practices of those above
and distinguishing itself from those below. Bourdieu’s habitus is of a profes-
sional class, in which a precocious ego discovers, through escapism, that it
is uniquely adaptable to the needs of capital.
Bourdieu had a mind-object, like most researchers, because the ability to
objectify one’s environment and study discrete aspects of it is very clearly
an act of splitting. But what makes him worth examining in depth is his self-
reflexivity. In a lengthy interview, Bourdieu (1992) asks himself, “Sometimes
I wonder where I acquired this ability to understand or even to anticipate
the experience of situations that I have not known firsthand, such as work
on an assembly line or the dull routine of unskilled office work.” He roots his
sensitivity in his close observational powers (“mental photographs”) of the
upwardly mobile, which allow him “to experience all human experiences.”
For our purposes, this is a clear statement of the omnipotent mind-object.
Sketch opens with a defensive history of Bourdieu’s place in French intel-
lectual history, detailing who was “in” and “out” of higher education in
the 1950s and its impact on philosophy. His intellectual guard only drops
half-way through the book, when he returns to his childhood in the south
of France, where his left-wing father was a postmaster, a low-waged and
onerous but nonetheless white-collar occupation which earned him the ire
of local farmers, and his mother was the youngest daughter of a wealthy
family. Bourdieu was duly shunned by local children, a rejection acceler-
ated by the horrors of boarding school, which sparked his interest in class
distinction. In words McGarvey would echo decades later, Bourdieu calls
the school’s pecking order “a terrible education in social realism, in which
everything is already present, through the necessities of the struggle for sur-
vival: opportunism, servility, sneaking, treachery, etc.” The sense of regi-
mented social distinction, always apparent in his work on classes, appears
total in his account of those early school days:

It enveloped all our existences in its monotonous regularities… and in

the routine of everyday anxieties and struggles, all the calculations and
ruses that had to be deployed, at every instant, to secure one’s due, keep
one’s place, defend one’s share (especially at mealtimes, when we ate at
tables of eight), arrive on time, win respect, always ready to exchange
blows, in a word, to survive.

The emotional cost of such a life is clear and terrifying. The fear of mak-
ing a mistake and losing status “lock[s] one into the lonely, shameful fear
of accidents, and which haunt the minds of children, unarmed fake tough
guys, stubborn and always scrapping, yet often desperate to the point of
tears, without anyone to complain to or even talk to.” Suffering from intense
loneliness, Bourdieu still chafed under harsh boarding school discipline. He
identified his early wounds, which were too deep to overcome: “the adult
man who writes this does not know how, has never known how, to do justice
 Escapism and negative humanism 63
to the child who lived through these experiences, his times of despair and
rage, his longing for vengeance.”
Yet Bourdieu had a key resource: the omnipotence of achievement. His
mind-object was channelled to useful and even developmental ends, because
he tried to politicize his early trauma. The escapism-through-mastery that
marks his intellectual precocity was joined with a deep empathy for oth-
ers’ struggles. His fieldwork during the Algerian war of independence was
driven not just by political commitment but “also in the dull but constant
sensation of guilt and revolt in the face of so much suffering and injustice.”
He risked his life in dangerous situations, strolling past armed combatants
whose allegiance was unclear, not from heroism but from “the extreme
sadness and anxiety in which I lived.” This “frenzied work… would enable
me to measure up to experiences of which I was the unworthy, disarmed
witness.” Describing similar dangers, Bourdieu explains how this empa-
thy allowed him to survive by “exercis[ing] a permanent practical reflex-
ivity which is indispensable, in conditions of extreme urgency and risk, to
interpret and assess the situation instantaneously and to mobilize… the
knowledge… acquired in one’s earliest social experience.” He channelled his
developmental trauma into a commitment to fight injustice, yet the language
sounds eerily similar to how Stewart (1995) describes the formation of the
mind- object in children shaping themselves to their caregivers’ emotional
needs, or Corrigan and Gordon’s (1995) “psychic structure that replaces the
relationship to a real object.” There is a strong parallel between the mind-
object’s desire for mastery, and the application of that desire to scholarship,
activism and political commitment. His inaugural speech after being hired
at the Collège de France should have been a triumph, but instead it sparked
deep feelings of inadequacy towards the academic world; he wanted to cri-
tique the institution and yet also wanted the approval of the luminaries in
the lecture hall. Bourdieu describes his guilt at his success shortly after his
father’s death and his desire to ease the worries of junior scholars, out of

a deeper reason or cause: a very cruel unhappiness which brought the

irremediable into the childhood paradise of my life and which, since the
1950s, has weighed on every moment of my existence… frenetic work
was also a way of filling an immense void and pulling myself out of
despair by interesting myself in others; abandoning the heights of phi-
losophy for the wretchedness of the bidonville [slum] was also a kind
of sacrificial expiation of my adolescent avoidances of reality (emphasis
added).

Escapism remained a sin for Bourdieu, despite his entire intellectual path
being one of escape from early ostracization. This was an adaptation:
determined to escape his trajectory and his own, unintegrated past, he
threw himself into work that confronted his social reality. How much to
believe Bourdieu, when, as Lescourret (2008) suggests, he may simply be
64 Escapism and negative humanism
constructing a deeply sensitive character to create distance from read-
ers? Reed-Danahay’s (2005) charitable interpretation suggests it is real,
part of Bourdieu’s reconsideration of his sociology later in life, when he
began studying intimate relationships and community. Neither explana-
tion seems wholly consistent with Bourdieu’s trajectory. He admitted that
one of his early ethnographies of a village dance in Béarn was motivated
by a sense of pathos, because in it he omitted the fact that he grew up in
the region, instead feeling “compelled to ‘disappear’.” His shame at his
background provided continuity: the pain of a poor childhood, separated
from peers by his father’s status, compounded by a brutal boarding school
experience and the shock of academic elitism (he writes of undergradu-
ate songs mocking the accents of professors from Béarn), and an escape
through intellectualization that nonetheless tied him to the oppressed
and exploited. His “cruel unhappiness,” “immense void” and “sacrifi-
cial expiation” were not natural. They were the contributing conditions
to a mind-object that hides real pain – unsuccessfully, for someone of
Bourdieus’ keen intellect – and fuelled his escapism. It is a tribute to his
abilities, the adaptive and plastic qualities of human development, and the
structuring determinants of class that Bourdieu could turn his escapism
into escape, from his region and class, and into the intellectual pursuits of
the class to which he was admitted.
A frustrated reader might wonder why, if even as prolific a thinker as
Bourdieu, whose professional status was far beyond that of most people, is
simply demonstrating his own propensity for escapism, what hope is there
for the rest of us? If the goal is to “escape the escapism,” then the answer is
none: we can no more refuse to practice escapism than avoid the ideologies
that constitute our class. But if it is possible to reframe escapism as a form
of adaptation and avenue for creative sublimation, there is nothing to avoid.
Exploitation and alienation are real and, for that reason, their mediations
must be real as well.

Conclusion: the escapist stage of capitalism

Capitalism’s psychic damage is created structurally but felt personally. To
establish an escapist subject, it is necessary to start with that experience, to
insist that the relief of pain is not simply an adaptation to power. In con-
ditions of abject suffering, the ego is consumed with threats to its existence
and has no ability to understand and change its circumstances, let alone
society. However enthusiastically the individual embraces the capitalist ide-
ology of individual advancement, the gap between expectations and reality
lies outside their heads, and it is this gap that escapism fills. Its articulation
of unmet desires, personal or collective, reveals escapism’s explanatory and
freeing potential. It sates desire in a temporary, fantastical manner, much
like any political ideology, but with one key difference: escapism is within
the immediate grasp of the escapee.
 Escapism and negative humanism 65
Marxian alienation, Freudian drives and their combination in ego psy-
chology help create an escapist model of the personality. Marx’s concept of
the creative individual, established throughout his writings, forms the basis
for the introjection of alienated social relations into the psyche. People are
defined by purposeful, creative activity, historically grounded in a mode
of production. For the past few centuries, that mode has been capitalist, in
which the law of value – the private appropriation of social wealth, turned
against those who made it – appears inside our heads. The value-form
operates through the extraction of alienated labour, which wrests creative
capacities away from the individual. Yet the sheer brutality of that process
gives rise to the mediated response of escapism. As the social and historical
expression of drives for relationality and creativity, escapism is a flight from
explanations of trauma that repress the truth of alienation. Escapism forms
a counter-ideology, through the ability of the dominant ideology to account
for anything but its own myths of freedom and dominance. It is best under-
stood through ego psychology, in which the drives that Freud identified, and
Marcuse refined, are recast as alienated social relations introjected into our
psyches. In that way, escapism is a response to the trauma inflicted by the
commodity labour-power. The truncated life-paths it assigns to those who
must sell their time and deny their creative capacities lead to further devel-
opmental trauma, expressed through the mind-object and manic defence,
as Bourdieu’s own story suggests. This dynamic suggests that escapism
can be understood as a negative humanism, one which signals a repressed
subjectivity.
Escapism shows that the social contract at the heart of the reality prin-
ciple, in which the expression of drives is traded for collective security, has
broken down. Yet, by positing a subject brutally suppressed upon entering
the social world, escapism begins the negation of a social existence ruled
by objects. In expressing the failure to achieve purposeful creativity in the
workplace, home and community, it redirects the need for creative fulfil-
ment into fantasy rather than self-destruction or stasis. Whether those fan-
tasies are pro- or anti-social depends on the bearer and the kind of society
to which they belong.
Fromm (1970) described capitalist social character after World War Two
as bureaucratic, in which members of large organizations valued loyalty,
security and process. These characteristics were stable products of a mature
monopoly capitalism, and very different from the values of quick wealth
and disruptive change that marked earlier stages. Fromm made a genu-
ine attempt to grapple with vast post-war social and economic changes,
in which capital concentration and automation changed personalities as
well as production lines. Fromm was not alone in this diagnosis, as critics
like Marcuse and Mumford also targeted the erasure of individualism by
machine-culture. But as a Frankfurt School renegade, he drew the ire of
Adorno for shifting the locus of conflict from the violence of the death drive
to competitive structures. Unfortunately Adorno’s (2014) counter-assertion,
66 Escapism and negative humanism
that “society is held together by frequent indirect threat of material force,
which is the origin of the ‘potential hostility’ that has an effect on neuroses
and character disturbances” did not offer much precision either. Adorno’s
explanation worked well to describe the rise of Nazi Germany, but the
impact of “material force” varies greatly, and tying everything from the
threat of an eviction, to a police officer kneeling on a black person’s neck,
to the desire for inorganic stasis does not explain very much. An ortho-
dox Freudian model’s focus is elsewhere than the structuring effect of an
alienating environment. While it is true that violence and bureaucracy were
integral features of 20th-century capitalism, we must add escapism to the
features of the 21st.
There are escapisms of the powerful and the subjugated. In the retreat
from collective social provision of welfare, and the emphasis instead on
punitive market discipline, a manic defence firstly protects the few who
benefit from the yawning gap between rich and poor from the knowledge
that they are not all-powerful. The entrepreneurial ideologists can ridicule
helplessness and dependence and idealize their own abilities. For everyone
else, the acute stress brought on by the instability of producing and repro-
ducing in a market society mimics the instability of upbringing, and neither
a developmental gap nor neoliberalism allow being needful. Thus the pro-
pensity for destruction need not be rooted in a death drive but in social-
environmental failure. The cult of work, productivity and achievement is
also a form of manic defence for the subjugated, to ward off the feeling of
never measuring up. To be frenetically occupied with tasks is, Peltz (2006)
shows, to take “manic flight from the space she cannot put up with.” For
someone suffering from the unprocessed lack of introjection of a healthy
self-object, “[s]lowing down reminds her of her failings, her limitations.”
This assumes extra importance in an age where neoliberalism promises
complete mastery with the correct amount of self-promotion. This propen-
sity to fantasy and mental mastery is, of course, an important skill for the
entrepreneurial subject who has to continually sell herself. In her study of
millennial overwork, Peterson (2020) laments that today’s workers live in
a perpetual blurred state between work and leisure, updating their status
on social media and internal workflow apps to demonstrate that they are
productive, happy and interesting. The fantasy is repeatedly bolstered by its
participants: put simply, neoliberal subjectivity loves the mind-object.
However, it does not love the bearer of that mind-object. If people are
judged as workers, only valuable according to what they produce, and not
allowed to produce services, objects or concepts that reflect real needs or
exercise capacities, feelings of inadequacy – and thus escapism – are inevita-
ble. Those subject to the degradations explored in Chapter 1 “check out” of
reality by daydreaming, listening to music, taking smoke breaks, indulging
in lottery fantasies, procrastination and sabotage. Complaining, shirking
and malingering are all forms of passive resistance that blur the boundaries
between labour and one’s perception of it. But the turn back to the Self
 Escapism and negative humanism 67
as the seat of both resistance and acceptance, all the more violent for the
threat that non-compliance represents, solidifies those ideological bounda-
ries. The fluid evaporates, there is no more room to imagine alternatives or
resistances. In that case, escapism is the only option, as non-presence and
non-work.
Since individuation depends on a direct, active relationship to the exter-
nal world, it assumes, as Fromm (1965) suggests, “active solidarity with
all… [and] spontaneous activity, love and work.” Without the necessary
secure “economic, social and political” basis, potential freedom becomes
unbearable because it cannot be realized, instead veering towards self-
doubt. The authoritarianism of Right-escapism, an external substitute for
missing internal self-governance, is certainly part of the response. But con-
temporary social life is lacking in security and reassurance in others ways,
too. It is not infantilizing, in the sense of recreating an unmediated whole;
if anything, the centrifugal forces of late capitalism, embodied in increas-
ing precarity, forced migration and diminished life chances, exacerbate the
fracturing of the Self. The attempt to make oneself saleable through self-
branding is a form of manic flight from the foundational pain at the heart of
developing and functioning in alienated capitalist society. The mind-object
and a manic overachieving are forms of escapism that enmesh the subject
deeper in developmental and social trauma. They represent self-destructive
attempts at agency over the terrifying null of capitalist social life.
Marcuse (1998) described the overpowering of the reality principle, in
which we “give up momentary, uncertain, and destructive pleasure for
delayed, restrained, but ‘assured’ pleasure” by the performance princi-
ple. Late escapism is the result of the absolute end of that assurance. The
performance principle remains in full effect, but we escape into imagined
pleasures because the social contract at its dark heart has broken down.
Escapism represents the impossibility of our drives’ realization, even when
it is sublimated into more creative directions. In a precarious economy,
there are no productive directions that ensure survival, and unlike in earlier
crises, there are also fewer non-capitalist ties of community or non-market
reproduction on which to rely. What becomes removed from possibility is
not only flourishing but the hope for it. The destruction of unproductive
capital and ecology is mirrored by the destructive nature of social char-
acter, when it conflicts with its older, outmoded forms. Escapism destroys
the careful, process-oriented integration Fromm observed because it is a
sign that the system is unable to fully enfold its subjects into the ideological
world it has constructed. But capitalism is nothing if not flexible: active con-
sent is not necessary except at key moments, like voting, signing contracts,
paying taxes and so on. Escapism signals the emergence of a new social
character, in which capitalism is happy to let its outsides, or less-subsumed
edges, absorb the excess libidinal energies blocked by alienation.
Having established the basis for a psychology of escapism, we can
return to the need for a psychologically grounded Marxism in general,
68 Escapism and negative humanism
and a negative humanism in particular. Osborn counsels: “The curric-
ulum of a Marxist should include, as of first importance, a study of the
unconscious mind, if he wishes to bring his actions into line with reality,
to recognise unconscious mechanisms at work in others, to prevent com-
plexes of his own rather than the facts of the objective situation deter-
mining his behaviour.” The unconscious, feeding into a social character,
is crucial for understanding how individuals understand themselves in
capitalism. The mind-object represents the internalization of trauma,
one which is remarkably adaptive to the entrepreneurial self required for
late capitalist selfhood. Yet the escapist stage of capitalism represents a
possible resistance even to the mind-object. Lukács’ (1971) “facts of the
objective situation” are complexes themselves, and he gives us a prescient
warning:

The bare fact of separation itself indicates that the consciousness of the
proletariat is still fettered by reification. And if the proletariat finds the
economic inhumanity to which it is subjected easier to understand than
the political, and the political easier than the cultural, then all these
separations point to the extent of the still unconquered power of capi-
talist forms of life in the proletariat itself.

What kind of cultural forms, in the broad sense of technology and social
organization that form “capitalist forms of life,” might appear as reified?
These appear, as they must, in distinct psychological symptoms in the lives
of working class people as they engage, willingly or otherwise, in the world
of work.

Notes
1. In fairness to the intellectual ambitions of the ex-leftists, many were deeply
disillusioned by the crimes of Stalinism, but the background to this was, as
Wald (2017) explains, the general and unexpected rebound of capitalism and
consumerism after World War Two.
2. Or, in popular culture, false consciousness can be imputed to any radical
social change. In the Game of Thrones TV episode The Dance of Dragons
(2015), rebel Queen Daenerys Targaryen frees the slaves of the city of Mereen,
and then re-introduces annual “contracts” for slaves to pacify the outraged
slave-owners. Emboldened, the latter press for the reopening of gladiatorial
combat for slaves, which she bitterly opposes. Her adviser Hizdahr zo Loraq,
himself son of a former slave master, argues that Daenerys’ anti-fighting edict
is elitist, and that the gladiators are in fact willing participants to the brutal-
ity: “So your reasons are true and theirs are false? They don’t know their own
minds, and you do?” The idea that there might be rational reasons to chance
self-destruction – if the goal is escape from a brutal system – is buried under
the endlessly refracting mirrors of individual preference.
3. This is translated in the Marx Engels Collected Works edition as “a conscious-
ness that is spurious,” in an apparent attempt to further distance Engels from
the claim.
 Escapism and negative humanism 69
4. This is not to discount Marcuse’s (1998) insight that “The sex instincts bear
the brunt of the reality principle,” creating objectification of others, the distor-
tions of taboos, sublimations or procreation, or even Freud’s later insight that
Eros is inseparably linked to the death instinct, which unleashes its destruc-
tive impulses upon all of civilization. For our purposes, we are concerned
with how capital forces the value-form into the deepest corner of our minds.
Libidinal expression is, of course, a threat to labour discipline, but it is not
the source of value in capitalism. Thanatos is also good for business, but it
does not represent the logic of capital: that is reserved for the self-expanding
value-form.

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3 Work and protective escapism

In the 1980s, as the British Left raged against the onslaught of Thatcherism,
punks Subhumans (1983) wrote Reality is Waiting for a Bus, in which they
told their audience – or themselves – that the misery of their lives threw
into relief any overarching political goals: “So your reality is getting pissed/
Avoiding a world that shouldn’t exist/A world within your own sour mind/
Where everything can be re-defined.” Establishing anarchy remained the
only worthwhile aim, but the pressing nature of life tasks – the bus to work
might be late – put its establishment into the far future. This gap between
aspiration and practice, forced open by the realities of working class lives,
animated 1960s Situationist Vaneigem (2001) before them. He described the
routine of work in terms akin to death:

What spark of humanity, which is to say possible creativity, can remain

alive in being dragged from sleep at six every morning, jolted about in
commuter trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and
steamed by speed-up and meaningless gestures and production quotas,
and tossed out at the end of the day into great railway-station halls—
temples of arrival and departure for the hell of weekdays and the nuga-
tory paradise of the weekend, where the masses commune in brutish
weariness? From adolescence to retirement age, relentlessly, every twen-
ty-four-hour cycle helps lengthen all the cracks—like those in a broken
window pane—that work inflicts in the shape of mechanical repetition,
time-that-is-money, submission to bosses, boredom, exhaustion, and so
on. From the shattering of youthful vitality to the yawning chasm of old
age, life splinters in every direction under the blows of forced labour.

It is remarkable that, despite the text’s original publication in 1967,

Vaneigem’s description of the work-life world resonates today, as anyone
who has commuted to a monotonous job will know. Consider Cederström
and Fleming’s (2012) Dead Man Working, which goes into excruciating
detail about the ways menial wage labour tries to substitute itself for real
life, channelling workers’ genuine emotions into service labour, with inev-
itable results: “When the economy of work infects one’s early morning
 Work and protective escapism 73
dreams, spills over into booze-soaked weekends and reduces almost every
social relation to a cold cash exchange, workers are the first to realize that
life becomes evacuated, a perpetual living absence no matter how many
smiley-faces dot the cubicle.”
Both accounts speak of the entire realm of social reproduction: what work-
ers have to do to survive their jobs. Except for a privileged few, work and
its attendant life tasks are burdens to be carried. This critique was the basis
for the creeping dread of industrial society shared by post-war humanist
critics, who saw how easily capitalism could incorporate the new escapisms:
the leisure and aesthetic industries brought about by rising living standards
became part of creating a contented, pacified workforce. Right-wing critics
seized on the same malaise to blame the welfare state for destroying indi-
vidualism. Frankel (1987) points out that most of these critiques grappled
with the technical changes going on in capitalist production, not the social
relations driving them. No real escape from the dehumanization of mass
industrial society was possible, because the system worked to actively neu-
tralize the freedoms of any libidinal rebellions.
However, exploitation and alienation do not appear ready-made on the
surface of people’s minds, easy to consume; they cannot, because, as we
have seen, capitalist society depends on mystification of its real relations to
function. How reasonable is it, then, to accept Marx’s edict that the ruling
ideas of the age are those of the ruling class, and nonetheless expect workers
to overcome that contradiction through force of will alone? In fact, being
a worker and surviving psychically depends on not recognizing alienation;
a daily self-sacrifice, lived in full awareness of what one is doing, would be
too much for anyone to bear. Instead, that awareness seeps into and around
consciousness in a myriad of ways.
This chapter is thus about work and its injuries, and how escapism helps
workers cope with them. Work can best be understood as a form of chronic
trauma, pain that must be endured and rarely spoken of aloud. The capacity
for creativity, which Chapter 2 shows is innate to the concrete, historical
individual, only exists as a potential. It depends on having the time and
resources to explore and experiment, and it becomes distorted or repressed
when harnessed to a schedule set by the market. Work forms the basis of
self-respect but also erodes it, by wresting control and initiative from the
individual. In turn, workers blame themselves for being unable to prevent
this loss of autonomy. The experiences of looking for work and being unem-
ployed heighten the internalization of capitalist social norms and their ero-
sion of self-worth. The dream of being one’s own boss and joining the petty
bourgeois class occupies an outsized place in the consciousness of many
workers, both because it represents autonomy and freedom, and because
the petty bourgeois themselves take up so much ideological space in late
capitalism. Those whom Bourdieu describes occupying a middle space
between capital and labour demonstrate escape from the capital-labour
nexus through their independence and distinguishing habits; however, this
74 Work and protective escapism
path remains impossible for most workers and exacts a heavy personal cost
on those who attempt it.
What ties these experiences together is not just the labour market and its
entrances and exits, but the fact that they cannot be spoken about openly.
The pain of work, looking for work or being unemployed must be hidden in
order to appear employable and as a well-regulated citizen, despite the loss
of identity and dignity that the disjunctions of the labour market create.
The response to this is, of course, escapism, which protects the real Self and
shields workers from alienation.
The cry of “not all jobs” is, like “not all police” in the context of the Black
Lives Matter movement, a distraction. Of course, many jobs allow for cre-
ativity and control, or are sufficiently recompensed that those features are
seen as a worthwhile trade-off. But when Marx denounced capital’s “blind
unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus labour,” he was not
counselling that workers upgrade their CVs to move from industrial spin-
ning to UX design. The critique of work is structural: the capitalist division
of labour breaks down production processes into component parts, improv-
ing efficiency and oversight, and it also mechanizes and automates to bring
those tasks back together. But all this happens according to the rhythm of
a machine, not the worker herself. This is because labour under capitalism
takes place to augment capital, and whatever benefit the worker gets from
it is incidental or secondary. The exact processes of work vary greatly, but
the power imbalance between the owners of capital and the sellers of labour-
power has remained the same since capitalism became a global system in
the 19th century. Production is run by others, leading to apathy or outright
hostility on the part of those who must produce; thus, as Braverman (1998)
observes, “in this situation it is not at all surprising that work is seen as a
curse-what is surprising is only that it is tolerated at all.”
The obvious answer – work pays a wage, which allows survival – speaks
to the material reality of capitalism, but not its mental or emotional cost. To
be clear, a blanket denunciation of work, in the absence of a sustained polit-
ical movement to change it, is a middle-class conceit, corresponding closely
to the habitus of those who labour in conditions of relative autonomy and
control. Likewise, to denounce workers’ escapism – and their refusal to out-
right escape – fails to recognize the conditions under which work must take
place. The dignity that comes from self-respect may not be available from
other sources, so workers create it themselves by exercising creative powers
through escapism. This is not a distraction but an assertion of humanity,
identity and self-respect.
To focus on escapism in the context of work does not mean the experi-
ences of billions can be reduced to pain. One could equally theorize happi-
ness and social solidarity as the glue that holds working class communities
together, and find infinite examples of everyday caring in, and effective cop-
ing with social reality. However, positing escapism as a central feature of
working class lives suggests that something universal is embedded in the
 Work and protective escapism 75
experience of selling one’s labour power. Not all the time for all people,
but as a mode of coping with life’s vicissitudes – which are themselves part
of the structuring, multifaceted whole of capitalist social life – escapism
appears as the mediated response to pain. And equally important, escap-
ism asserts self-worth when no other source is available: it is a refusal to
participate in the mental labour of identifying with one’s role as a labourer,
an act that is available regardless of the circumstance. Class conscious-
ness, according to Giddens (1972), is not “just reflecting the overall system
of class relations… [but] a struggle to avoid (emphasis added) such absorp-
tion, to maintain a sense of freedom and dignity in contexts where these
threaten to be engulfed”. Freedom and dignity are not commodities bought
and sold on the market, marking escapism as a non-commodified response
to exploitation and oppression. This is illustrated, in absurdist fashion, in
Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. Bartleby attempts the impossible: to define
himself as a worker while not doing any work himself. Although the effort
eventually destroys him, it demonstrates escapism’s function: to achieve a
balance between being physically present and emotionally absent. It creates
a space in which resistance to capitalist social relations is articulated and
shaped. Of course, escapism is also crucial to maintaining labour discipline,
because the dream of escape allows actual work to be endured. But capital
logic is imposing; it is never entirely imposed, and the existence of escap-
ism alone is proof that capitalism never destroys agency outright, it merely
channels it along new paths. Thus escapism can be a positive coping mech-
anism to restore dignity, gathering strength to the degree that workers’ lives
are forced into material constraints.

The alienation of work

It is a truism that the neoliberal age is an individual, not a collective one.
No one considers themselves members of a working class anymore: the grey
misery of blue-collar conformity was shocked by the day-glow rebellions of
the 1960s, beaten into submission by the bright polyester of the following
“me decade,” and finally drowned in the lustrous marble and lavish pastels
of the Memphis Group and 1980s postmodernism. The media that suffuse
our lives assert our individuality at every opportunity: rather than being
manipulated by forces unseen, we are beseeched to help companies target
their products more effectively and, if work is a source of pain, then shop-
ping, as we have seen, is its antithesis, the place where individuals encode
themselves according to their most joyous desires. In consumption, workers
become subjects, not producers; if escapism is a safety valve for the unbear-
able, then the only thing we could possibly escape from is ourselves.
This story holds some truth. But even the most deeply-held individual
trauma and mind-object comes to life in a society governed by external
coercion. As Chapter 2 suggested, the unconscious mind is social, not
just instinctive. Hollander and Gutwill (2006) argue that the mind-object
76 Work and protective escapism
holder’s identification with, and submission to authority co-exists in an
uneasy relationship with a deep antipathy towards that authority, which
extends outwards from the family to society as a whole. It is important not
to collapse capitalist alienation into individual trauma, with its roots in
family and schooling: the former is a function of the law of value and need
not be consciously recognized to be experienced. However, the latter does
not float freely above the life conditions of its subjects either. The authority
of capitalism is most often felt as the unstated but universal coercion of the
need to work, which shapes most people’s lives.
Yet it is not enough to denounce something so fundamental to most
people’s identities as work. If the essence of a Marxist-humanist critique is
alienation and its opposite, self-realization, we advance very little by simply
holding a mirror to the labour process and declaring “Look!” This is true
not because work can be reframed as a fulfilment of one’s inner-most dreams
but because workers already know, on a level felt with the same intensity as a
drive, that work is alienating. To discuss escapism, we must first understand
why, despite work’s very real depredations, it remains a source of dignity: as
the ability to meet one’s emotional needs for creative fulfilment within the
workplace, even indirectly.
External respect is easy to mark; internal self-respect is more complex.
For those whose identities are based around both production and the social
reproduction of themselves and their family, self-respect comes from the
ability to persevere in the struggle to survive, forming what Lamont (2000),
in her study of male workers, calls the disciplined Self: a combination of
individualism with responsibility for one’s family and, for racialized work-
ers, collective solidarity. Showing up on time, working hard on the job and
even working multiple jobs are all signs of having mastered the important
tasks of life. Conversely, it is common for workers to dislike dishonesty, irre-
sponsibility, and laziness on the job. The knowledge of exploitation is not
a sign of being used but of further proof of strength; this is understandable
since, more than anyone else, workers know how physically and emotionally
demanding it is to labour. There are emotional resonances specific to differ-
ent classes: manual workers value straightforward behaviour, while office
workers value the conflict-avoidance required for group projects. But the
need for value and dignity at work remains for all those who must sell their
labour-power.
As Chapter 2 showed, humans are defined by creativity, and it is our ability
to plan long into the future that marks us out as a unique species. Consider
Kahn’s (1990) description of a happy architect, who “hooked into the joy of
creating designs both aesthetic and functional” and “exhort[ed] team mem-
bers to think about how the clients would actually use the work, question-
ing the chief architect’s assumptions about the design.” This allowed her to
“behave in ways that were both expressive of what she wanted to see acted
out in the world and harnessed to the engine of task-oriented realities.” It
may be a coincidence that Kahn, one of the major theorists of workplace
 Work and protective escapism 77
disengagement, used the same profession as Marx did to illustrate cre-
ative work, but the analogy stands: an architect with sufficient autonomy
can express her aesthetic, organizational and rhetorical skills and make an
immediate impact on her project and physical environment. According to
Kahn, “When people were able to wield influence, occupy valuable posi-
tions in their systems, and gain desirable status, they experienced a sense of
meaningfulness. The underlying dimension was power and what it bought:
influence, and a sense of being valued, valuable, and needed.”
However, the affirming nature of some labour does not remove the need
for escapism, first because not many jobs afford the same kind of joyful
autonomy as a senior architect on a good project, and second because even
people with full-time, secure employment often lack control over their
workplace’s organization and, Sennett and Cobb (1972) show, wrestle with
a fear of being judged incapable. Since dignity comes from the capacity to
make life decisions, when workers are unable to do so with any autonomy,
two glaring lacks appear, internal and external. Internally, the alienated
labour process breaks down the Self as an autonomous, creative being,
while externally, the status-reward of capitalist social hierarchy, and the
ability to define oneself in opposition to the mass, is no longer possible in a
life defined by routine work. The worker becomes merely average, forced to
sell herself like everyone else, and being average is shameful. Lamont (2019)
describes this as a “recognition gap,” in which gaps between groups creates
stigma and a low self-worth: from poverty, racism and isolation come fur-
ther marginalization.
Work is two-sided: the social respect, dignity and means to survive that
it provides are real because the circumstances forcing participation in the
labour market are also real. Work’s duality benefits both labour and capi-
tal. As Vee (2019) says, “it may make survival easier, but loving your job is
a compensation that benefits your boss much more than you, making you
more hardworking, less likely to quit or move on, better at making money
for them, and therefore easier to exploit.” This suggests that the critics
of work may not grasp work’s entire significance. For example, consider
LaFargue’s (2006) 1898 pamphlet The Right To Be Lazy, which not only
castigates the labour process but rhetorically blames workers for refusing to
see how their heedless overwork causes the overproduction that sparks cap-
italist crises. It demonstrates a common trope among anti-work literature,
which frames the horrors of wage labour within the political will to over-
come it. This criticism arises in various forms throughout the history of the
workers’ movement. For example, see Shuurman’s (1924) impassioned cry
against all capitalist labour, Seidman’s (1988) invoking of work refusal as a
part of revolutionary struggle in the Spanish Revolution, Negri’s (2005) The
Workers’ Party Against Work, which frames anti-work sentiment as both
product of and demand for increasing workers’ control, and, from anarchist
tech workers, the entire oeuvre of Processed World. In a representative sam-
ple of the latter, Cabins et al. (1982) give a sympathetic account of how to
78 Work and protective escapism
avoid the pressures of office work, which remains unsatisfying and dreary at
lower levels, and a hunting ground for sociopaths higher up:

Public space is colonized by the entertainment industry, which profits

from our need to forget, to escape. In the cinemas and concert-halls
where we consume its products, we are ‘alone together,’ isolated from
each other even as we occupy the same space. The few scenes where
some genuine community exists can’t really compensate for the dreari-
ness of the working week.
It’s no wonder so many people feel their lives are being wasted by
countless hours of boring, uncreative toil.

In short, for either personal or programmatic reasons, the Left recognizes

how work dehumanizes the worker. However, the studies of anti-work sen-
timent in revolutionary struggles have little to say for acquiescent times,
which form the majority of workers’ lives. Those passionately against
work have a heartfelt, but not necessarily strategic interest in foreground-
ing its voluntary aspects, rather than its forced nature. Yet if work is so
unbearable, why do workers not leave en masse to find other means of sur-
vival, forming co-operatives or living off the land? Likewise, work could
not simply be performative for the respect from other workers, because
after a while the collective deceit would be too much to bear. If the fear
of dispossession was its only motivation, that would preclude pride in an
unbearable daily experience. Rather, work is imbued with significance for
its content, for how better or worse it is than others’ work and the oppor-
tunities it affords for escapism.

The old-new economy

In 2017, a Gallup survey of 160 countries found that 85% of the world’s 1.2
billion full-time workers were disengaged from or actively hated their jobs.
Only a minority of workers, from 13% worldwide to 32% in the US, went to
work actively looking forward to the opportunity to express themselves and
shape the direction of their work. Jim Clifton (2017), Gallup’s Chair and
CEO, saw the end of capitalism in these figures: “World productivity has
been in general decline for far too long. If this trend isn’t reversed immedi-
ately, it means the end of civilization.”
It would take a capitalist to equate the decline of productivity with the
end of civilization. Rather, the mediated reaction to alienated labour that
disengagement from work represents is a form of escapism, a defence against
the denial of our capacities. Much like Lady de Rothschild, Clifton suggests
that consultation and better leadership, in which “organizations should
change from having command-and-control managers to high- performance
coaches” would placate workers, if there were real opportunities for which
to be coached. However, the rise of just-in-time production and new
 Work and protective escapism 79
technologies of work distribution and workplace control have lessened the
number of physical managers through the internalization of management
within the worker.
For example, Golumbia (2015) reports that Amazon, the giant commodity-
distribution service, sells cloud computing software that manages real-
time product location during commodities’ journey from manufacturer, to
warehouse, to customer. The software updates every 11 seconds, a rhythm
that workers must follow precisely. Its distribution warehouse workers are
infamously micro-managed, texted if they are behind schedule and fired
remotely if they fail to meet productivity targets. Amazon has exported
this micro-control model to its data entry work distribution platform,
Mechanical Turk, which gathers over 500,000 data entry workers to com-
pete for offered jobs. This online work is not done for the sake of spare
cash – indeed, how could a survey allocated 45 minutes and paying 80 cents
leave much to spare? – but because for a quarter of these workers, Semuels
(2018) explains, there is no other work available in their area. In theory it is
possible to complete many low-paid jobs from the comfort of a home office,
saving commuting time that might otherwise go unpaid. However, in prac-
tice workers must spend hours simply searching and competing for work,
and sending poorly-explained orders back for clarification, even if they have
spent hours on the project before realizing it is impossible to complete. This
causes stress and exhaustion: “To compete, Valerie keeps the [job] site open
all day, sometimes waking up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, in order to
grab tasks and earn enough money to keep her bills paid. Even with all
those hours… she’s struggling to make $30 a day.” Even if the wage offered
by employers is above the minimum, they do not have to pay for the hours
of preparation, clarification and delay for which full-time employees would
be compensated. The competition and payment for services pushes median
wages below two dollars per hour. This system replicates the zero-hours
contracts of the UK, in which employers hire workers to be on-call but only
pay them for the hours they actually work.
There are three disturbing historical parallels with this new econ-
omy. First, in a historical reference that would be cruel if deliberate, the
Mechanical Turk really existed. Hooper and Whyld (1992) detail its history
as a 19th-century chess-playing automaton, whose chess pieces appeared
to slide mechanically but were in fact moved by an operator concealed in a
compartment inside. There is no better metaphor for the smooth, uninter-
rupted flow of disbursed labour: what appears to move like clockwork is in
fact the hidden act of human beings.
Second, through its casual and flexibilized labour force, the new econ-
omy sounds a lot like an old one. In the early 1900s, the anarcho-syndical-
ist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) campaigned vigorously against
what they called labour sharks, the employment exchanges where agents
would sell jobs to itinerant workers. As contractors to the big employers,
the sharks guaranteed low wages, blacklisted union organizers and helped
80 Work and protective escapism
maintain the system of labour camps. Workers flocked to the northwest-
ern US to work in the mines, forests and farms. Conditions were harsh, as
Jensen (2004) recounts an IWW organizer explaining:

Over three thousand men were hired through employment sharks for
one camp of the Somers Lumber Co. (Great Northern) last winter to
maintain a force of fifty men. As soon as a man had worked long enough
to pay the shark’s fee, the hospital dollar, poll tax, and a few other grafts,
he was discharged to make room for more other slaves, so that the fleec-
ing process could continue … The victim of the shark in the most cases
gets his check cashed at the first saloon, and takes a little stimulation.
Why not? What is life to these men? … The strong, barbed-wire whiskey
makes things look bright for a while. Then the weary tramp goes to
town with his bed on his back.

There was no future for the migrant labourers the IWW organized, only
survival, a reality reflected in the kind of escapism they practiced. But pro-
ductivity matters less when there is a steady supply of raw human mate-
rial to use up. Many contemporary workers are not in such terrible straits
– but many of the world’s 272 million migrant labourers often face slave-
like working conditions, according to the International Organization for
Migration (2019). Walshe (2014) reports that labour sharks continue to the
present day, with domestic and manual workers – mostly migrants – being
charged hundreds of dollars by employment agencies for short-term, low-
wage positions. The difference now is that, rather than being corralled in
unsanitary labour camps, the workers work in others’ homes, or get to stay
home in front of a screen. And rather than being underpaid by a miserly
employer, they internalize the latter’s directives by setting their own low
wage rates.
The IWW made labour sharks the focus of their highly successful free-
speech campaign in Spokane Washington in 1908, at the cost of hundreds
of members jailed, abused and sometimes killed. Today, the “weary tramp”
chooses her own unlivable rate of exploitation. This is partly why Moody
(2016) argues that, contrary to the hype of AI and the gig economy replacing
traditional jobs, there is a future for jobs, just not a very good one. 70% of
new jobs are expected to be low-skilled and low-paid: “we are not head-
ing for some big, high-tech economy. Instead we are heading for a low-paid
workforce with crappy jobs.”
The third parallel is with Stakhanovism, a Soviet propaganda model that
pushed workers to vastly exceed normal quotas for industrial output. Reich
(1973) described the immense pressure put on workers to meet the goals of
Stalin’s Five Year Plans in the 1930s. Having committed itself to socialism in
one country – in other words, to the survival of the Bolshevik Party-class –
the USSR had no friendly socialist trading partners and, surrounded by hos-
tile capitalist powers, it had to industrialize through intensive exploitation
 Work and protective escapism 81
of its own workers. The kind of moral exhortation typified by Stakhanovism
fed an ideology of a productive worker at war with Soviet underdevelopment
and committed to defeating it through the physical powers of his or her own
body. Stripped of ideological significance, the result was a system of work-
place competition with

disastrous effects on the formation of man’s character structure. Only

those who are inordinately ambitious and brutal are capable of excel-
ling at competitive piecework. The great majority of the workers either
fall far behind or leave off altogether. A gap arises between the majority
of average workers and a small minority of work-athletes, who readily
develop into a new ruling class.

This was self-justifying, as those who had been gifted with the physi-
cal prowess or incapacity to sense their own limits would see their efforts
rewarded, while the rest felt disconnected from tasks they were doomed to
fail at completing anyway. The “vast majority of workers have no enthusi-
asm for their work and no consciousness of personal responsibility about it”
and could be duly blamed by administrators for laziness and poor-quality
work. The political impact of competitive work was particularly galling:
“This new gap produces envy and ambition among the weaker workers and
presumption and racial arrogance among the stronger workers.” Instead
of solidarity, “Denunciations and reactions characteristic of the emotional
plague will prevail.” The mass absenteeism that Stakhanovism was meant
to combat, and ended up compounding, can be seen as a form of escapism
possible under Stalinism. It appears a historical irony that neoliberalism,
which Harvey (2005) reminds us was invented in 1947 by the Mount Pèlerin
Society to combat communism, eventually arrived at Stakhanovism’s
ideological order: internalized division, based on all-out competition for
unreachable goals. But the irony disappears when considering the fact that
both Stalinism and capitalism are systems of labour control from above,
whose goals are the accumulation of surplus, not human flourishing.
Put together, these parallels establish a continuity between the birth and
spread of capitalist social relations and the brave new logistics economy.
Both rely on workers who are pushed into the labour market to meet their
physical and socially mediated needs, the difference being that no one ever
asked the “weary tramps” whether they felt engaged with their work. For
an advanced economy, affective labour and active identification with the
firm’s goals are required for the complex coordination of tasks. And indeed,
the promise of structured time, new coworkers and the chance to learn new
tasks – not to mention earning a wage – that a new workplace brings can be
exciting. Yet when the initial elation wears off, Willis (2004) suggests in his
study of male shop-floor workers, the reaction of many is “a numbing sense
of boredom and meaningless … A job is undertaken not out of interest, but
merely because one’s bought labour is directed there”. The first victim is time
82 Work and protective escapism
itself: “Without an intrinsic interest in the job … then, the full focus of the
detached consciousness is thrown on to the passing of time,” which “slows
… down to a painful existential drag.” Graeber (2019) suggests this reac-
tion is because so many positions are “bullshit jobs.” Capitalism could cre-
ate enough labour-saving technology and work processes to make 15-hour
work-weeks. Instead, employers spin off useless occupations to keep people
employed in administration, security and service industries, while the truly
important jobs of caring for people are shunted to lower-paid, often ardu-
ous occupations staffed by women, racialized minorities or done for free in
the home. Graeber explains, “The ruling class figured out that a happy and
productive population with free time on its hands is a mortal danger.” The
disengaged are not happy and productive, but neither are they willing to
stop work.
This balancing act requires some mental gymnastics. The Self copes by
forming an active identification with the goals of the employer and a clear
recognition of the structural necessity to work, to make mental space for
what it must do to survive. The worker ignores any discomfort, pain or dan-
ger and thus seeks approval from authority for doing what they find odious
or tedious. Sennett and Cobb suggest that a passive, second part of the Self
acts as a shield for the genuine feelings and vulnerabilities of the worker: a
“protective alienation.” Whatever terrible experiences this other Self may
go through, the real, hidden one can dissociate. To complete the analogy,
the pride in completing a job, or even getting through a difficult working
day, is a genuine expression of the use-value of labour-power for the Self;
the identification with the company and the passive acceptance of abuse is
an exchange-value that allows one’s labour-power to be sold on the market.
The problem for capital is that the use-value of the genuine Self persists,
causing conflict and uncertainty, and unhappy employees affect produc-
tivity. Human resource theorists are, of course, intimately aware of this
problem, for their organizations depend on the active Self’s work. Wollard
(2011) describes disengagement as a process, in which “The person begins
to feel fatigue, anger, irritability, and frustration which begin to drain the
energy and motivation for performance … adopt[ing] behaviors that are self
protective (emphasis added), in response to perceived threats to their physi-
cal or emotional safety, either from stress, unrewarding interpersonal rela-
tionships in the workplace, or a continual failure to have their basic needs
met.” The genuine Self cannot stay hidden forever, no matter how much it
wants to, when faced with such external pressures. The sincerity of those
trying to fix this problem is not at issue; quite apart from the needs of the
bottom line, no manager wants someone actively attempting to sabotage
their workplace. But the rationality at the heart of disengagement is that
workers must protect themselves from self-denying environments, and even
those lucky enough to have access to counselling, lunchtime yoga, nap
rooms and juice bars will not escape the theft of their labour-time and the
slow erosion of their creative capacities.
 Work and protective escapism 83
We can see escapism, therefore, in the emotional intensity of stories about
work: either the attempt to maintain psychic coherence through distancing,
or the breakdown of escapist mechanisms, when employees are forced to
confront their lack of alternatives. Consider the following anecdotes, pulled
from the Reddit community r/hatemyjob. Though self-selecting, they artic-
ulate what Kahn (1990) called “uncoupling self from role,” removing per-
sonal engagement from one’s tasks or expressing pain at being unable to do
so. In short posts with headlines like “Anybody ever just give up?,” “I don’t
know what to do” and “Trapped,” anonymous workers tell repeated stories
of being caught in circumstances beyond their control. In “Corporate slave”
(2020), someone is at the beginning of their long arc of employment:

I hate the fact that I’ll have to work for years to be able to afford my
freedom. That’s honestly what retirement is.
Seeing people celebrating 40 years at a company literally makes me
feel sick and I just don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to be planing
to finally begin my life own in 2060 [sic]. Let me out.

The worker of “My job kinda sorta makes me wanna die” (2020) is further
along their trajectory:

My job requires me to work 16-18 hours/day. I literally get to my desk

at 8AM and work until anywhere from 1AM – 3AM. Doing a job that I
don’t enjoy. 5 days/week, 80-90 hours/week. I barely have time to eat. I
barely have time to sleep. I barely have time to take a shower, or to get
up and go to the bathroom and just take a shit. I barely have time to
see my spouse. I barely have time to see my kids. I barely have time to
experience any joy at all. My job just sucks me dry and is barely letting
me live.

Another writing about “My job” (2020) explains how the covid-19 pandemic
exacerbated their already-difficult working conditions:

Front line staff, some of who are good honest hard working people with
families to feed put themselves at risk day in and day out in an environ-
ment I could only describe as an abyss a soul destroying black hole of
a place that supports people in certain scenarios… where every ill of
society plays out before your eyes… things we as a society would rather
not see, things we don’t want to see or need to see and things that will
stay with you for the rest of your life. You will carry the invisible scars
and trauma for the rest of your days and you just work there.

At first glance, what is striking in these and many other stories is the com-
mon physical and emotional fatigue that workers feel: despite being in dif-
ferent occupations and countries, they share the experience of feeling lost,
84 Work and protective escapism
trapped and worn down. On reflection, a more surprising undercurrent is
how isolated each worker feels from the rest. One might reasonably assume
something that is felt by 85% of the world’s workers might be expressed
directly and openly. But the threat of being cut off from the labour market
and its norms is simply too great to acknowledge.

Escapism as defence
The separation between the Self’s creative capacities, and the realities of
the labour process creates escapism. Admitting that split openly in a work-
place would endanger one’s employment, so Sennett and Cobb suggest the
most common way to cope is for workers to believe they chose their circum-
stances, rather than being forced into them. Escapism becomes a way to
evade self-blame and move towards internal freedom and autonomy, in an
environment that guarantees neither. This double move creates a paradox: it
grants agency, but only to for the worker to believe that they chose this path
and deserve their alienation. Lerner (1986) identified how many workers are
unable to articulate their dissatisfaction, even to themselves, because “they
blame themselves for having these jobs in the first place. They think they will
be merely exposing their failure in life if they turn to others to talk about the
stress they are experiencing. Stress is experienced as humiliation.” This in
turn reinforces the sense of being unable to change circumstances beyond
one’s control.
The power of this self-blame resides in how it co-exists with the prom-
ise of free will and the ability to rise through one’s merit, which are the
foundations of capitalist ideology. If we do not rise, then we are wholly
responsible for our present circumstances. As the reproductive labour of
one’s Self and social world is converted into exchange-value and stripped of
meaning, Sennett and Cobb argue, its use-value becomes more remote and
“estrangements from meaningful action… mark the tone of the culture ever
more strongly.” Escapism is nothing if not an “estrangement from meaning-
ful action,” a product of capitalism’s commodification of mental life. When
all free time, and the internal and performative aspects of the personal-
ity honed in it, are fodder for the marketplace, there is very little intrinsic
satisfaction available through active engagement with reality, unless one is
already well-placed within networks of cultural and social capital – and of
capitalist property above all.
As Chapter 2 showed, capital forces workers into abstraction, not just
for the products of their labour but for their very personalities. However,
other spaces remain where, Sève (1978) suggests, “the logic of the exchange
does not by itself transform psychological activity into abstract activity.”
That conflict mirrors workers’ desire to express their genuine capacities
despite the forces that would abstract them, and it suggests a specifically
working class kind of escapism. To understand this, it is necessary to
re-visit Bourdieu’s famous schema for how symbolic orders map onto our
 Work and protective escapism 85
awareness of society and our place in it. For obvious reasons, a system
based on the private appropriation of socially-produced wealth cannot
advertise its injustices. Yet it cannot hide them entirely either: it is a truism
that most people have to work or struggle to find work, while the explosion
of social media has made it much easier to see how a select few get to play
for a living. Rather than being seen as a sign of deepening inequality, the
“few who play” turn their commodification into a fetish, provoking a fas-
cination with individualized competition among their onlookers. However,
while this status-seeking may be amplified by social media, it is not new: in
Distinction, Bourdieu (1984) sought to map those fetishizations, grounding
our everyday presentations and perceptions of our status – in other words,
taste – in class.
Bourdieu explores the affective dimensions of exploitation and privilege:
how those things feel and look. For some, this kind of analysis is the begin-
ning of a slippery slope, down from the summit of capitalist social relations
to the meandering foothills of a sociology where those relations are natural-
ized. After all, exploitation is secular: it happens regardless of how we feel
about it, and whether a capitalist wears a top-hat or an Audemars Piguet
watch. Riley (2017) calls Bourdieu’s arguments tautological: some classes
have particular habits, so all habits are evidence of that class. His observa-
tions are “compatible with all conceivable evidence” and thus offer nothing
at all. It is true that Bourdieu’s work highlights a conflict between Marxian
analyses, which illustrate the effects of the unbridgeable gulf between capital
and labour, and those drawing on Max Weber’s work, which determine class
according to factors like income, socio-economic status and job prestige.
At stake is whether class is accepted as given and thus outside of history,
like greed or the propensity to trade, or whether it is the visible expression
of the value form, the final unfolding of the capital-labour conflict between
property-owners and labour-sellers. Bourdieu’s highly complex schema,
which defines fields of class membership according to axes of absolute and
relative possession of capital, has a clear Weberian inspiration. However,
Bourdieu never suggests his observations should bolster the natural order
of capitalism: his own life history, not to mention his denunciations of neo-
liberalism later in life, shows how opposed he was to inequality. As we have
seen, he pursued the life of a scholar-activist by immersing himself in the
struggles of the Algerian anti-colonial fighters. The fact that his concepts
were so easily adopted by functionalists as forms of career guidance – “build
your cultural capital!” is this century’s “think and grow rich!” – is more a reflec-
tion of how effectively capitalism re-incorporates radical ideas, than any fault
of Bourdieu’s.
Bourdieu is well aware of how sociology and its use of occupational and
demographic statistics can dehistoricize a moment in time: the office work-
ers of late 1970s France have vastly different tastes from any contemporary
group. But he offers a plea for “what is objectively inscribed in every dis-
tribution”: an estimation of the balance of class forces between labour and
86 Work and protective escapism
capital, the losses and victories of each side. Thus Bourdieu is not justifying
a static vision of class, with all the inaccuracies that implies; in fact, he
argues the complete opposite, seeing class struggle as a battle on constantly
shifting terrain far beyond the workplace and home. He can be faulted for
trying to create a micro vision of this struggle, which of necessity relies
on personal and psychological factors rather than structural ones, and a
failure to fully differentiate between personal and social struggle. But even
this is not an easy distinction to make: the social struggle for collective class
power happens in a myriad of different ways, and its goals of bettering one’s
circumstances, security and freedom overlap with that of individual striv-
ing. The difference between open class warfare, and the small, competitive
struggles that most of us are familiar with in our daily lives, is that the latter
focus on individual goals. They are only collective in the sense that everyone
does them at the same time: millions of parallel lines, attempting to proceed
in the same direction, often criss-crossing as the struggle for resources in
capitalist society sets us against each other.
But if Bourdieu makes “different types” of capital equal, and in the pro-
cess loses the sense of social power behind the Marxian definition of capital
and class, the course of battle remains. What constitutes the struggle is itself
contested: “The definition of the legitimate means and stakes of struggle is
in fact one of the stakes of the struggle.” A war takes place for differentia-
tion and status, collective identity and empowerment or a multitude of other
stakes. Victory depends on not just how much social or cultural capital the
players have, but whether they have the power to shift the rules of the game:
“the conversion rate between one sort of capital and another is fought over
at all times and is therefore subject to endless fluctuations.” The owners of
capital always control the terms under which labour is sold, but that sale is a
struggle, and the social fields of capital remain a terrain of battle.
Bourdieu’s work remains useful to understanding escapism because
for him, class is intimately perceptual. Class membership appears in our
heads, allowing a belief “in fictions and the realities they simulate, with
more or less distance and detachment.” These arise from different social
spaces: “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.” Since the concept
of habitus outlines a class’s taste in everything from aesthetics to food
and hobbies, with accompanying values, Bourdieu appears to suggest
that escapism is a pastime of the wealthy. For example, he describes how
privileging form over content is the mark of class privilege, the “active
distance from necessity” by those who do not struggle to survive, which
allows detachment. The rich celebrate “the ability to apply the principles
of a ‘pure’ aesthetic to the most everyday choices of everyday life, e.g.,
in cooking, clothing or decoration.” While popular feeling suggests that
what is good is useful, the wealthy’s appreciation for pure aesthetics marks
an escape from the realities of exploitation, and those who wish to sig-
nal their upward mobility express their distance from necessity at every
opportunity. This can mean appreciating the form of representation in
 Work and protective escapism 87
fine art rather than the accuracy of a depiction, reading complex books or
listening to avant-garde music. Bourdieu is critiquing form, not content,
suggesting these habits are not individually chosen and grow naturally out
of a life protected by class privilege, in which struggle is for demarcation
rather than survival.
Since, for Bourdieu, privilege means creating space between you and
something that you are forced to do, then being forced to sell one’s labour
power is the sine qua non of capitalist subjectivity. It is precisely that sub-
jugation and its cultural effects that mark a person as lower down the class
hierarchy. But even here, escapism appears. For example, Bloch (1986)
understood that behind workers’ eagerness to consume lay the cultural
compulsion of the labour market: “Those who offer themselves for sale have
to please. The girl the way she should be, the young man the way he should
carry himself, they are therefore also put on show outside.” Prefiguring
Bourdieu, Bloch saw that dress helps conceal the wear and tear of exploita-
tion, but that this in itself is a form of escapism, in which a forced choice
of presentation becomes a way to show off one’s best, most-groomed Self.
Like the factory workers Linhart observed changing into formal dress after
a shift, or the intensive effort put into subcultural uniforms the world over,
working class escapism acts as a shield, both concealing reality and declar-
ing it invalid through the assertion of its concealment.
However, we must be careful not to typify escapism’s particular forms as
belonging to one class, forever and always. Just like class cannot be solely
defined by occupational categories because it is a relationship to power
and ownership, escapism cannot be solely defined by habits, because it is
a response to alienation. Bourdieu observes class habits, but he does not
create a mechanical system for determining escapist preferences. Our pres-
ent conditions form “merely the starting point of a trajectory, the reference
whereby the slope of the social career is defined.” Escapism cannot be solely
defined by the job, house or neighbourhood of the person expressing it;
rather, the arc of an individual’s trajectory must be aggregated with oth-
ers bounded by similar social conditions. If a strictly linear relationship
between class and escapist consciousness does not exist, escapism does not
elide material determination altogether. Its determinations are multiple,
complex and always bounded by available resources, because class rela-
tionships themselves are complex and shifting. For those on the move, up
or down, the ideologies adopted as a result of previous modes of existence
grate against current ones. The lottery winner who insists they will keep
their job despite their millions, or the homeowners who bankrupt them-
selves to keep up appearances are the most obvious examples, but it also
works more subtly.1 Kracauer (1998) describes workers who carry the rank
of professional or civil servant but whose circumstances are no different
from any other salaried worker: “Large sections of the population today do
indeed base their bourgeois existence, which is no longer bourgeois at all,
on monthly salaries, so-called intellectual labour and a few other similarly
88 Work and protective escapism
trivial characteristics.” The pressure to maintain either a previous life-world
or aspire to rise – in other words, to appear to escape the shame of one’s
circumstances – can become all-encompassing.

Petty bourgeois escapism

Bourdieu spends quite a bit of time on people between capital and labour,
whom he calls the petty bourgeois. This is a contested category, and for
good reason: traditionally made up of small farmers or shop-owners, even
Marx expected them to be trampled underfoot by the looming giants of big
capital and labour. And indeed, as Hipple and Hammond (2016) show, the
number of self-employed in the US dropped from 80% in the 19th century
to nine percent by the 1960s. This number has remained more or less con-
stant ever since, rising to 12.1% in 1994 and falling to 10.1% in 2015. “Being
your own boss” is a workforce anomaly due to the structural dominance
of big capital. Marx understood that the petty bourgeois compete with the
large bourgeois, workers and among themselves because they have to: big
capitals grow by carving out markets and lowering their production costs.
Small capitalists grow by their own labour, and by selling in high-risk mar-
kets, assuming the liabilities that large capital would rather not take on. The
smallest of the small are often forced to the margins of the labour market as
independent contractors freed from a steady wage or benefits. But consid-
ered as those whose capital comes from self-exploitation, or exploiting the
labour of a few others, then the term retains social weight and, most impor-
tantly for a study of escapism, an ideological weight as well.
Bourdieu emphasizes the petty bourgeois’ isolation. They have the “ambi-
tion of escaping from the common present,” and pursue private home life
rather than social conviviality, defined (in Bourdieu’s day) by going to the
café. Just like the wealthy demonstrate their escape from class relations by
a love for pure aesthetics, the petty bourgeois longing to escape community
suggests a hope for upward mobility, fulfilling the promise of individual,
atomistic bourgeois self-hood. Their ideas reflect the in-between status of
a class whose members rely on themselves, individually, for uplift. Lacking
sufficient economic capital to control markets, the petty bourgeois must
demonstrate the values of saving and prudence to the employer institutions,
investors and customers who can make or deny their fortune, “since they
represent his only hope of deriving profits from fundamentally negative
assets.” Bourdieu means that the petty bourgeois individual has no capital
to speak of, and therefore nothing substantive to offer the system’s gate-
keepers. A profligate small capitalist just shows that she does not take her
capital investment seriously; thus the “petty bourgeois is a proletarian who
makes himself small to become bourgeois.”
This position remains contradictory, just like the petty bourgeois them-
selves. Consider, for example, the habitus of progressive businesses, so
beloved as a bulwark of community and solidarity against faceless corporate
 Work and protective escapism 89
monotony. The healthy co-operative grocery will have ethical food and
healthcare products, which Rao et al. (2013) demonstrate cost significantly
more than their unhealthy, corporate equivalents. Infante (2018) tells of aver-
age wages for craft brewery employees falling between 2006 and 2016, right
when the craft beer boom exploded. Yet petty bourgeois habitus insists on
framing itself as choosing quality over quantity, and health (for consumers)
over speed. In the guise of market rationality for the sliver of middle-class
consumers who can afford higher prices, it also delivers validation that the
distance from necessity is real. The petty bourgeois mobilizes their fetish of
isolation and independence as a marketing tool, enabling themselves and
their emulators to consume refined taste or, in extreme examples, ortho-
rexia. This establishes distance and exclusivity from the workers who lack
the petty bourgeois’ resources. True, organic food can keep one healthier,
and mass-produced beer often tastes bad; but a stable job, a house, health-
care and green space guarantee well-being and the chance to explore taste.
These tangibles accrue to the petty bourgeois and their middle class admir-
ers long before they can get their hands on a limited edition IPA.
As Bourdieu makes clear, naming the qualities of the petty bourgeois is
not the same as shaming them; indeed, he explicitly denounces this as “class
racism.” Those who use the category as a slur “speak as if the ‘vices’ and ‘vir-
tues’ of the petty bourgeois … were, in this case, to be imputed to the indi-
viduals and not to the structures, on the grounds that the structures have left
them free to ‘choose’ their alienation.” No one is free to choose alienation,
and likewise no one can be free from its resulting psychological pressures.
The pressure of being in between is what leads to the desire to escape, as it
is a heavy burden to live constantly in the future and internalize the weight
of social expectation. Indeed, Marx’s whole criticism of the petty bourgeois
political project is one based on its attempted escape from the titanic social
forces animating capital and labour. 2 The mental toll that this herculean
act of self-denial requires is enormous. In a study of mental health among
workers, supervisors and managers, and owners, Prins et al. (2015) found
anxiety and depression to be highest among the middle group, who lack the
clearly-defined job roles of the workers and the autonomy and control of
the capitalists: “low-level supervisors attribute their occupational conditions
as resulting from internal, personal failings, whereas workers attribute their
exploitation, alienation, and lower levels of occupational control to factors
external to themselves.” Class consciousness has a shielding effect, because
knowing the system is rigged allows one to evade responsibility for it.
Unlike the petty bourgeois, this suggests that workers can mitigate the
effects of alienated labour through cooperation, both against ideologies
from another class and for better wages and working conditions. But despite
his reputation as a theorist of workers’ revolution, Marx (1887/2010) allowed
that workers were set against each other, particularly by the introduction of
new machines and technology designed to reduce the size of the workforce
and enlarge the number of unemployed (the “reserve”):
90 Work and protective escapism
in proportion as the productiveness of labour increases, capital increases
its supply of labour more quickly than its demand for labourers. The
overwork of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of
the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its
competition exerts on the former, forces these to submit to overwork
and to subjugation under the dictates of capital.

Marx scorned those economists who saw this pressure to overwork as a

natural reallocation of capital and labour – “beautiful mode of motion this
for developed capitalist production!” – rather than capital’s weapon in the
class struggle to maintain its sources of accumulation. Despite the middle
layers’ suffering, workers’ own competition among each other can be just
as fierce, making capitalist self-emancipation a dream for millions of wan-
nabe Horatio Algers, who seek escape from the subjugation of wage labour. 3

Fantasies of professional life or craft hold the promise of control, in which

the mind-object can finally relent and hidden capacities can develop natu-
rally. These fantasies are, as Sennett and Cobb put it, “an attempt to flee
from being judged… to flee the anxieties of the market in which a man is put
up on the block and assayed.” The cost is an often-dramatic change of one’s
core sense of Self, to better adapt to new capitalist realities. But this cost
is rarely paid; as most workers cannot become professionals, the weight of
class is not sloughed off but borne through dreams of flight and autonomy.
The petty bourgeois dream is as false today as it was in Marx’s time; the
classes who yearn to adopt it must seek other imagined avenues of escape.
The introduction to Terkel’s Working picks the following accounts as
representative:

The waitress, who moves by the tables with the grace of a ballerina,
pretends she’s forever on stage … It helps her fight humiliation as well
as arthritis. The interstate truckdriver … battling pollution, noise, an
ulcer, and kidneys that act up, ‘fantasizes something tremendous.’ They
all, in some manner, perform astonishingly to survive the day. These are
not yet automata.

It is impossible to miss Terkel’s bittersweet “not yet,” as human beings resist

their objectification. The fantasy and degradation are impossible to separate:

I was constantly astonished by the extraordinary dreams of ordinary

people. No matter how bewildering the times, no matter how dissem-
bling the official language, those we call ordinary are aware of a sense of
personal worth—or more often a lack of it—in the work they do.

Escapism exists because work is dehumanizing. Rubin (1976) described quite

clearly how “creativity, innovation, initiative [and] flexibility,” the cherished
values of those with the resources to nurture their children’s gifts, are not
 Work and protective escapism 91
values of working class families. Rather, parents of the latter instil “respect,
orderliness, cleanliness—in a word, discipline” in their place. Aside from
artists, Marcuse (1998) noted, “[t]he work that created and enlarged the
material basis of civilization was chiefly… alienated labor, painful and mis-
erable-and still is. The performance of such work hardly gratifies individual
needs and inclinations.” Substitute “capitalism” for “civilization,” and the
restriction of cultural production to a tiny elite follows logically, not because
the masses are being held back from lecturing on abstract art and music but
because a life revolving around the routine performance of tasks, and its
accompanying fatigue, provides little time for abstraction. Ozzy Osbourne
(2009) wrote of his upbringing in the UK’s Birmingham, his home town:
“they gave you a shit job, and then you took pride in it, even though it was a
shit job.” He briefly worked in an auto factory – back when such things were
widespread in the UK’s industrial heartlands – as a horn tuner; deafened
and enraged by the din of the factory floor, he asked his coworker how he
withstood it, who replied:

‘You know what the best thing is? … In five months’ time, I’ll get my
gold watch. I’ll have been here thirty years!’
The thought of thirty years in that room made me want the Russians
to drop the bomb and get it over with.

Osbourne’s resistance to his coworkers’ evident pride is entirely understand-

able, but it is a reality to which most succumb. Work itself demands concen-
tration: life depends on the tangible existence of a place to eat, sleep and
rest, private or public transport, and the expectation of a wage, all concrete
necessities that take up tremendous mental space. Thinking too hard about
motivation may dissipate a sense of purpose and grind work and thus sur-
vival to a halt. One need not inhabit a Freudian world to agree with Marcuse
that civilization requires repressing one’s drives in order to get anything
done. However, those who believe that workers are actively complicit in an
unadorned way of life mistake appearances for reality. People who wear the
straitjacket of work understand it best. Hamper’s (1992) account of labour-
ing in Flint, Michigan’s auto-plants describes its absurdity:

Most of these guys were not unlike myself—urped [sic] forth from
the birthrights of their kin, drowsy with destiny, uninspired, keen for
drink… desperate, goofy, bored and trapped … There were really no
other options—just tricky lies and self-soothing bullshit about “how
my real talent lies in carpentry” or “within five years I’m opening a bait
shop in Tawas.” We weren’t going anywhere. That pay stub was like a
concrete pair of loafers.

Practical jokes, doubling up on jobs, and shirking were subtle forms of

resistance that coexisted with the need to survive. Those who sell their
92 Work and protective escapism
labour power to survive experience the contradiction between the labour
process and their creative capacities directly; Hamper writes of his 90-day
probation, “The one thing that was impossible to escape was the monotony
of our new jobs. Every minute, every hour, every truck and every movement
was a plodding replica of the one that had gone before.” The monotony does
not extinguish dreams, for example of becoming a musician, which provide
some comfort during the daily grind. But Osbourne is the exception that
proves the rule; as he realized of his menial job, “I needed to get the fuck
out before I got stuck in the same trap.” Most do not make it out, because
the alternative is even worse.

The trauma of being out of work

In her critique of socialist economies shut out from global capitalism,
Robinson (2009) offered an ironic defence of capitalist productivity: “As
we see nowadays in South-East Asia or the Caribbean, the misery of being
exploited by capitalists in nothing compared to the misery of not being
exploited at all.” The analogy could equally apply to those without work:
however alienating work may be, it is better to have the means of survival
than not. An employer’s priority remains the firm’s survival and expansion,
to which the workforce’s well-being must sometimes sadly be sacrificed. The
capitalist firm is, after all, under no obligation to buy labour power, and
there may be structural barriers like a lack of opportunities for profitable
investments that even the best-qualified candidate cannot overcome. This is
made clearest in one of the most glaring inefficiencies of the contemporary
labour market: the market-anarchy of job searches. Those seeking to sell
their labour power must approach the task from the perspective of meeting
employers’ needs, not their own. For example, consider some of the very
common advice given to job-seekers about self-adjustment. Sanford (2012),
a recruitment firm VP, sets the tone firmly in Your Attitude is Key to Your
Job Search: “If you want to impress your potential employer, think carefully
about the possible things going on in his or her work life that cause stress
and anxiety. Talk about how you can go into that job and make things easier
and better for the manager.” Job-seekers are encouraged to actively empa-
thize with the struggles of the manager – themselves beholden to hiring and
firing targets set well beyond their control – because this person controls
their well-being. Stockholm Syndrome appears in the guise of a job-finding
strategy, when the employer holds hostage workers’ ability to reproduce
themselves.
The advice given to job-seekers, framed in terms of self-care and moti-
vation during the job search, reinforces the unconscious message that
the labour-seller is to blame for her misfortune. She has failed to write
the correct keywords on her CV, to find the proper contact online with
whom to network – or found her and then failed to phrase the intro-
duction email properly. The jobseeker has failed to obtain the correct
 Work and protective escapism 93
micro-credentials in software that her chosen company desires, or to
make enough eye contact during the interview. Capital hovers in the
background, ready to extract more money from the desperate – overtly
criminal in the form of pyramid schemes, or simply unethical in the case
of freemium online networking. 4 Capitalists create jobs according to
the dictates of profitability, not the needs of the job-seeker. If there are
not enough positions created – or not enough paying above the mini-
mum level needed for reproduction – then no amount of self-marketing
will bridge the gap. The complexities of matching worker to task are
subsumed beneath the mountain of CVs sent for each position, necessi-
tating ever-bigger human resource departments to handle them, while
the intricacies of personal networking spawn experts and consultancies
dedicated to interpersonal skills. The mismatch between jobs and candi-
dates is present, for instance, in tips on how to get past the software that
filters applications for keywords, due to the overwhelming numbers of
applicants for most positions. Why so many people are applying to the
same positions that employers need software to filter their documents is
blamed on technology, not the labour market. Capital-owners have no
obligation to allocate jobs equitably – indeed, that would guarantee their
demise. These technical hurdles to job-finding are real, and the aptitudes
of self-promotion are no doubt helpful in many circumstances. But when
there are more workers than jobs, or the only jobs available are onerous
and low-paid, it remains up to workers to compete among themselves for
the remaining good positions. Ever-higher qualifications are needed to
qualify for jobs that once did not require them, to assist the sifting-out
process. The capitalists’ hands are tied.
Emotionally, the onus is on the job-seeker to remain strong in the face
of this rejection. On the job search, Foss (2015) counsels, “I smack myself
across the head with the simple message, ‘I will not cave. Caving is not an
option’.” In addition to pep talks and asking for help from others, a positive
attitude is key: “When survivors of major catastrophes are interviewed…
They didn’t panic, nor give up. Rather, they navigated through the situa-
tion as if they were playing a game of strategy, one that they intended to
win.” These are not remarkable pieces of advice; Nienhueser (2011) suggests
that the field of human resource management is geared towards measuring
profit and productivity, not job satisfaction. Workers are supposed to fit the
needs of the labour market, rather than vice versa. It is considered common
sense that “no one owes you a living.” However, this process comes with
costs: the need to reproduce oneself for however long it takes to find work,
while pitting fixed savings and the classed, raced and gendered assumptions
about “employee fit” against an anarchic labour market, with no guarantee
of success.
In this light, the attempt to deny one’s feelings of loss over the lack of
employment cuts off both self- and systemic knowledge. As unacknowl-
edged emotional truths, those feelings function as signifiers for the actual
94 Work and protective escapism
lived relations of exploitation and alienation. The problem is no longer
circumstances, it is the individual and her lack of networks. Fear of hard
work, the wrong work, or no work at all is not a sign that the work is actu-
ally too hard, unsatisfying or non-existent but that the worker’s attitude
must change until whatever is available becomes the right work. The inter-
nalization of performance metrics and capital-oriented self- presentation
is packaged as job skills for those workers who need a wage but also
possibly a makeover. This, of course, predates neoliberalism, belonging
more properly to the ideological sinews of capitalism itself, because the
mental structure it creates obscures the competitive labour market into
which workers are born. If, in Stakhanovism, workers were ideologically
moulded to improve their output, in neoliberalism, workers are ideolog-
ically moulded to demonstrate the correct bearing towards employment.
When that chance is not available, neither is the opportunity for improve-
ment and the self-definition work afforded, and the fabric of everyday life
begins to tear. Marx’s description of the worker as “time’s carcase” is not
just a rhetorical flourish but an inevitable emotional response to the struc-
turing effects of work: time is shaped by work’s absence as much as by its
presence, and this is a consistent pattern throughout capitalism. This is
the construction of time and life by the value form itself. Consider these
chronological descriptions of unemployment. In Capital Volume I, Marx
(1887/2010) retold journalistic accounts from the 1866 recession, in this case
of unemployed shipbuilders and their families:

We found her ill from want of food, lying on a mattress in her clothes,
and just covered with a strip of carpet, for all the bedding had been
pawned. Two wretched children were tending her, themselves looking
as much in need of nursing as their mother. Nineteen weeks of enforced
idleness had brought them to this pass, and while the mother told the
history of that bitter past, she moaned as if all her faith in a future that
should atone for it were dead.

The “enforced idleness” of unemployment may have caused starvation, but

it was the loss of hope that truly destroyed the woman. Decades later, in
1930, Kracauer (1998) shared survey results of how the unemployed see their
prospects:

2. Thirty-nine, married, three children (fourteen, eleven, nine). Three

years earned nothing. Future? Work, madhouse, or turn on the gas…
4. I am spiritually broken and sometimes entertain thoughts suicide.
Moreover, I have lost confidence in all men. Thirty eight years old,
divorced, four children.

Outside of the labour process, workers know better than most that their
chances for survival are limited. In his workers’ narratives, Terkel (1990)
 Work and protective escapism 95
includes an early bit of roleplaying by a 51-year-old college president, who
worked at a menial job and was fired:

I’d never been unemployed. For three days I walked the streets. Though
I had a bank account, though my children’s tuition was paid, though I
had a salary and a job waiting for me back in Haverford, I was demor-
alized. I had an inkling of how professionals my age feel when they lose
their job and their confidence begins to sink.

The following are among dozens of Nolan’s (2012) Unemployment Stories, a

40-episode series about the aftermath of the 2008 recession. A legal recruiter
described the emotional impact of long-term unemployment:

When a month or two went by without so much as one interview, that’s

when the real feeling of being unemployed set in. I still applied to jobs,
but I was burned-out and hopeless. All semblance of daily routine was
gone. When I slept, ate, showered—they happened sporadically, if at all
… I began what would be a long cycle of hobby-fixation, as I’d take up
new things like cake decorating, biking, knitting, genealogy, learning
French, etc., in intense bursts that would last for a few weeks, absorbing
every moment that I wasn’t applying to jobs, and then, seemingly out of
nowhere, just stop. Cold. Done.

Nolan (2013) tells of another job-seeker who speaks of dislocated time:

The experience is one of extremes. There are moments of incredi-

ble shame and despair. Being 40 and unemployed. Having my wife
support me. Having nothing to do much of the time. The sense that
your neighbors know your shameful truth. The feeling that the world
is moving on outside everyday and you are doing nothing. As in the
workaday world, Mondays are the worst. On Mondays, there are no
new job ads. You are looking at the same ones that were posted up
on Friday. You already applied. But everyone else is off to work and
there you are.

The covid-19 pandemic sparked the same fundamental insecurities

among the unemployed and precarious. Cohen (2020) described the vice-
grip that work has on consciousness just three weeks into the first global
lockdown, which is all the time it took for poverty to begin eroding work-
ers’ identity:

Under very different conditions, we could imagine a period of life with-

out work as the most precious of gifts – the chance to live at our own
pace and rediscover the pleasures and possibilities of free, aimless time.
But this can only be the case when [work’s]… loss doesn’t plague us
96 Work and protective escapism
with anxiety, depression and sleeplessness. The virus, in other words,
is throwing into stark relief an obvious yet suddenly treacherous fact of
life today: we depend on work…
beyond survival, work shapes our sense of self. The thought of being
without it induces existential terror. ‘I’m scared of the loss of income,
for sure,’ a woman with a suddenly precarious job in the arts said to
me recently, ‘and obviously my health. But I’m more scared of losing
myself.’

However terrible work can be, not working casts one out of a shared identity.
The non-workers must keep a close watch on their limited expenses, and the
longer they do not work, the more miserable that experience becomes, until
the issue becomes physical as well as psychic survival.
The impact of unemployment is concentrated by all the social condi-
tions surrounding it. Shrinking the social safety net, by making welfare
and housing harder to access, is part of austerity politics, a hallmark
of neoliberal government. McGrath et al. (2016) describe the emotional
effects of austerity as: “Humiliation and shame … Fear and distrust …
Instability and insecurity … Isolation and loneliness… Being trapped and
powerless.” Being poor leads to a decline in social status, creating humil-
iation and shame. The public discourse surrounding poverty encourages
this self-blame: poor people believe that they deserve their fate because
they made bad choices. The humiliation of “severe loss” of a job or bene-
fits increases the chances of depression. In these circumstances, inequality
and the resulting distrust – for example, from myths about benefit fraud,
held to be widespread in the UK despite fraudulent claims only amounting
to 3% of the total – increase the chances of psychosis and suicide among
the unemployed.
Precarious and poorly-paid employment is no guarantee of preventing
these symptoms. The dichotomy of the well-fed but miserable worker and
the hungry non-worker no longer strictly applies in a world where most
of those living below the poverty line have jobs. As of 2018, Inman (2020)
reports, 56% of the UK’s poor lived in a household where someone works.
Poor workers in the UK, McGrath et al. (2016) show, outnumber the unem-
ployed, 1.8 million workers have no guaranteed work hours, and 22% of
all workers earn below a living wage. These factors mean that insecurity
is likely to rise with the spread of contract jobs that Moody describes. The
removal of income, housing assistance and shelters for victims of spousal
abuse adds to the sense of permanent impermanence and creates feelings of
shame and powerlessness.
Everything from access to green space, to a shared community, to
the ability to change one’s circumstances can create a sense of per-
sonal agency, based on security, connection and trust. A job with some
autonomy, and positive relationships outside of work, are crucial to
constructing this underlying sense of agency. Combined, these create
 Work and protective escapism 97
meaning in one’s life. However, lacking these many social determinants,
McGrath et al. explain,

Long-term entrapping life experiences nearly treble the chances of anx-

iety and depression … Central to feeling trapped is a loss of hope in the
possibility of being able to change life for the better. Feeling powerless
is also a key component of many psychotic experiences, such as para-
noia … trapping people into situations of trauma, abuse and neglect
can create lifelong problems.

The emotional impact of being trapped can perplex observers unable to

understand why those suffering in terrible circumstances fail to just “get
out.” When the life chances of those shut out from mobility do not change,
mental geographies do not change either. As Roberts and Evans (2013) sug-
gest, the “hopes and dreams” of the working class “are influenced by the
realities lived by family members and friends with reference to what they
understand about the wider social and political context.” For those who are
in the class they were born in, and have no expectations of rising or falling,
Rubin (1976) suggests their social attitudes are reinforced by the life-paths
of those nearby:

Imagine … an environment in which the same paucity of choices is the

reality of most lives—no friends or relatives around who see a future
with plenty of possibilities stretching before them; no one who expects
very much because experience has taught them that such expectations
end painfully. Such is the fertile field in which the fatalism, passivity,
and resignation of the working class grow … these are not personal fail-
ings … [but] realistic responses to the social context.

In Yorkshire, 30 years later, Charlesworth (2003) found the same sense of

lives in slow-motion, without rhythm or meaning, but now intensified due to
de-industrialization. Workers could not “adapt to the new reality,” because
there was nothing to adapt to: without jobs, it was not just tangibles like
housing, education and community institutions that receded but the sense
of time itself. Lacking a stable narrative to one’s life – and, crucially, being
without the means to create one – ratcheted up the sense of ennui already
induced by “the same paucity of choices” to inhuman levels of intensity:
“Their lives are absorbed in the effort involved in coping and getting by and
in the stress of dealing with an unfulfilling world and they are possessed of
a sense of the absurdity of this endless present which seems to be the ines-
capable context of life.” Through no fault of their own, “the only thing they
can do with their time is waste it.” It is here where escapism took hold as a
crucial coping mechanism: “In this context, dreaming becomes pathologi-
cal because it means feeling the weight of necessity more cruelly. It is a life
of the absurd where hard work and self-development lead directly to a more
98 Work and protective escapism
painful experience of this condition. It makes most sense to deaden the self,
one way or another.” Becoming aspirational, and adopting an active posi-
tion towards employment, education and the social world – in essence, to
think ‘middle class’ – assumes the resources to enact those attitudes. In con-
trast, if one’s entire mode of existence, and that of most people one knows,
revolves around “fatalism, passivity, and resignation,” then coping with the
real indignities of poverty requires separating from those feelings.
Those coping mechanisms are not always available. There is an infamous
scene in Ken Loach’s (2016) drama I, Daniel Blake, when single mom Katie
visits a food bank. Her hunger drives her to open a can of tinned tomatoes
and eat the dripping contents with her fingers. It was filmed with foodbank
volunteers and users in order to convey the true-to-life qualities of the expe-
rience. Hayley Squires, who played Katie, went without food to make it
more real for her, Jolin (2017) recounts: “It was about what quick starvation
like that does to your body. It brings all of your emotions to the surface.
There’s a level of exhaustion and stress that goes with it. So then when some-
thing happens, when adrenaline kicks through your body, it just takes you
into a whole other place. And me and Ken knew we couldn’t do that if I was
full-up.” The intense hunger was inseparable from the intensity of its affect,
in particular shame. This level of desperation is corroborated by surveys of
food bank users: McGrath et al. (2016) report 84% of users felt humiliated
having to rely on foodbanks, and 43% did not tell their children about it.
The lack of any outlet drove Squires to tears. Yet I, Daniel Blake not
only demonstrated the circumstances that create escapism but also por-
trayed how it works as a coping mechanism. Its stoic portrayal of Daniel, an
unemployed carpenter who suffers in silence and extends generosity to all,
at first seems incomprehensible, since his status as a marginalized person
with a heart of gold erases the real complexities of alienation. However, in a
context where the gap between the expectations and reality of physical and
emotional nourishment are too great, he tries escapism, attempting to over-
come institutional barriers through human relationality alone. He fails, and
at the end can only assert his humanity by writing his name on the wall of
the benefits centre. In this sense, it is Daniel’s inability to practice escapism
– into a world that he has every right to inhabit, and which if he had more
resources, he could – that demonstrates the depths to which he has sunk.
This became the film’s strongest thematic point of condemnation of the sys-
temic creation and regulation of poverty.
No matter the infinite permutations of family and work dynamics that
produce the unique psychodramas of individuals, the options for expres-
sion are structured by the unevenly scarred landscape of capitalism. The
“injured dignity” that drives workers to internalize the demands of pro-
duction and reproduction confronts the system’s inability to actually
provide the mobility it promises. As a result, Sennett and Cobb (1972) sug-
gest, a worker may “feel… he has inadequately used his opportunities to
make something of himself, and at the same time he has ceased to believe
 Work and protective escapism 99
he could.” This feeling makes manifest the lack of ability to change one’s
circumstances which, combined with a lack of external possibility, creates
powerlessness. The knowledge that inequality and deprivation are systemic,
and that class mobility is largely a myth, does not assuage the feeling that
one’s own conditions are “terrible, true, but you see that at least some peo-
ple escape them, and the reason they do is because they are smart, have
pluck and nerve; if you don’t like poverty, you too can leave it if you are good
enough.” Unemployment makes this a nearly-impossible balance, because
the first message learned from being unable to sell your labour power is that
you are not good enough; otherwise why would you be unemployed?
Acknowledging that the system is rigged, and the feeling that you should
have done better despite this reality, share an uneasy coexistence. Self-
blame remains everywhere and nowhere. It is a constant refrain in the self-
hating memes of millennials, albeit banished from the burnished profiles
of LinkedIn. It also long predates neoliberalism, stemming not from the
special emphasis our current governance regime places on entrepreneurship
but from the pressure of alienation.
Consider pop song lyrics, of which a few well-known standards are repre-
sentative of the need for escape from alienation. Black Sabbath’s Paranoid
features bassist Geezer Butler’s (1970) ode to being young, working class
and needing to escape: “All day long, I think of things but nothing seems
to satisfy/Think I’ll lose my mind if I don’t find something to pacify.” On a
more resigned note, John, one of the characters in Billy Joel’s (1973) Piano
Man, has “someplace that he’d rather be” and is “sure that I could be a
movie star/If I could get out of this place.” But of course, he cannot leave.
Almost two decades later, Tracy Chapman’s (1988) heartbreaking ballad to
failed escape, Fast Car, tells the story of a woman trapped by her circum-
stances, first having to care for her alcoholic father and then being trapped
in a loveless relationship. At first, the titular vehicle is an escape: “You got
a fast car/Is it fast enough so we can fly away?” But by the end, the protago-
nist’s best hope is that her deadbeat partner will leave: “I’d always hoped for
better/ Thought maybe together you and me would find it/I got no plans I
ain’t going nowhere/So take your fast car and keep on driving.” Not only has
she given up hope of escape but of escapism itself. The protagonist of Pearl
Jam’s (1993) Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town laments the
circumstances that entrapped her in her life: “It’s hard when you’re stuck
up on the shelf/I changed by not changing at all.” Nine Inch Nails’ (2005)
Everyday is Exactly the Same, offers a neat summary of life without escape,
in which all meaning breaks down: “I believe I can see the future/’Cause I
repeat the same routine/I think I used to have a purpose/But then again, that
might have been a dream.” The final word goes to Tupac Shakur’s (1991) song
Trapped: “Trapped in a corner/Dark and I couldn’t see the light/Thoughts in
my mind was the nine and a better life/What do I do? Live my life in a prison
cell?/I’d rather die than be trapped in a living hell.” Without escape – and,
crucially, without escapism – death is preferable to life. Implicit or explicit in
100 Work and protective escapism
all of these songs is self-blame: the belief that, had the songwriter managed
their circumstances better, they might not be trapped. These songs are not
simply about a lack of means to escape, but how the inability to imagine
alternatives compounds the misery of being trapped.
These odes to escapism transcend the post-war boom and neoliberalism;
clearly, things were not so golden in the golden post-war era. However, it is
a matter of statistical record that, since the 1960s, markers of generational
progress have largely ceased. Dobbs et al. (2016) found that real incomes
stagnated for 65–70% of people in high-income countries between 2005 and
2014, with the result that younger people risk being worse-off than their par-
ents. Meanwhile, as we have seen, the rapid growth of billionaire wealth –
who are too few in number to be called a class, but who represent the extreme
edge of inequality – only increased during the covid-19 pandemic.
Thus it is important to see the continuity between neoliberalism, as a
system of governance encouraging internalization of capitalist norms, and
vanilla capitalism, which has always removed the means of survival for
those without property. Work continues to structure most people’s lives,
and to understand it, we must grasp the contradiction between the fear of
penury on the one hand and the alienation of drudgery, powerlessness and
the social and physical violence of poverty on the other. This paradox drives
the psychic defences needed to maintain participation in the labour market.

What happens if you cannot leave? Bartleby the Scrivener

If escapism itself is celebrated in popular culture, the reasons for escapism
remain largely hidden, just like the relations between worker and employer
and their emotional effects. That makes escapism more easily observed in
pop cultural artefacts and in fiction. After the decades of literary and theo-
retical work heaped on Bartleby the Scrivener’s shoulders, it may be a greater
injustice to saddle him with another interpretation: after all, he just wanted
to be left alone. 5 But the dead labour of Bartleby, the clerk who gets hired
by a lawyer in 19th-century New York, refuses to work and then refuses to
leave the workplace, remains more profitable to literary accumulation than
his living labour ever was. 160 years after Melville (2009) gave him life and
death, the text that Bartleby illuminates is an important attempt to tackle
escapism and its limits, and it is all the more significant because Melville
wrote it in a period of burgeoning industrial capitalism. He was describing
the worker coming into existence, and in satirizing its effects on workers’
attitudes and psyches, he was prophesying escapism.
The story is situated at the nerve-centre of capitalism’s paroxysms of
growth and constant reorganization: Wall Street. Kuebrich (1996) points
out that Bartleby is not a fantasy but a distillation of Melville’s own expe-
riences: his decline in family fortune, unemployment, servitude aboard
whaling ships and witnessing of the era’s intense class conflict, denied in
its turn by the class collaborationist rhetoric of newspaper magnates and
 Work and protective escapism 101
industrialists. The lawyer’s incomprehension of Bartleby, and the peccadil-
los of his other employees, can be easily put down to his position as boss
and Melville’s desire to ridicule the myths the ruling class tells itself about
its natural right to govern. But for our purposes, what is most fascinating
is Bartleby’s own response: the passive resistance that results in his death.
When Bartleby, the new assistant, arrives at the office, the other clerks
know how to keep up appearances. Turkey, the lawyer’s oldest assistant,
is a clumsy alcoholic getting clumsier as he approaches 60, yet he refuses
to retire. Nippers, the second assistant, associates with seedy clients and
indicates through his outbursts that he is made for better things. However,
“when he chose, [he] was not deficient in a gentlemanly sort of deportment.”
Even Ginger Nut, the 12-year-old office assistant, is eager to run errands for
the other two. But Bartleby appears as a different beast altogether: “pallidly
neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!” He gets hired as ballast for
Turkey and Nippers’ volatility and, for the first few days of employment,
proves himself indefatigable. The lawyer treats him and his colleagues the
same way he treats his office: as property. The work is fast and monotonous,
and the office is designed to be as uncomfortable as possible. All the clerks
demonstrate resistance through sabotage, of work habits and of themselves.
However, on the third day, Bartleby’s resistance begins: he refuses a task
three times with the words “I would prefer not to.” His boss is incensed,
yet perplexed: “Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or
impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been anything ordi-
narily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him
from the premises. But as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning
my pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors.” At this early stage,
the lawyer is confused because Bartleby refuses to act like a worker. But
his rebellion goes deeper than that: even without being paid, he continues
to arrive at work. The lawyer, who idolizes the drug-running Astor family,
schemes about how to get rid of Bartleby after he ceases to be profitable:
“If I turn him away, the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent
employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth mis-
erably to starve. Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self- approval.”
But Bartleby’s calmness and lack of overt resistance disarms his boss, and
even when he begins using his office for his own purposes, barring his
employers’ entry, the lawyer cannot act.
It soon emerges that his relationship with his boss is a dialectic that nei-
ther willingly participates in: his boss would prefer him not to be there, and
Bartleby would prefer not to do anything. But he cannot leave, for to do so
would render his entire sacrifice meaningless. He has dismissed the entire
wage relationship, yet he has nothing else and must manage to stay present
without contributing or taking from it in any way. “I observed that he never
went to dinner; indeed, that he never went anywhere. As yet I had never, of
my personal knowledge, known him to be outside of my office. He was a per-
petual sentry in the corner.” Bartleby is often described as ghost-like, and in
102 Work and protective escapism
this sense, he is the ghost of living labour: attached to the workplace, but not
serving any purpose for capital or workers. He continues to haunt the place
of exploitation. He also does not follow the lawyer when, having exhausted
all his options, the latter moves to another office. Bartleby stays and refuses
to work for the next occupant as well, eventually taking up residence in the
building corridors. He even refuses offers of becoming a gentleman’s com-
panion in European travels or staying at the boss’s house. It is the “hidden
abode” of capital that he escapes from, not from any particular employer,
occupation or location.
The narrator’s compassion, and the law itself with its attendant force, are
powerless against someone who will not move. The lawyer tries to invoke
charity, that great instrument for blunting class interests, as a matter of
both Christian principle and pragmatism: “Aside from higher considera-
tions, charity often operates as a vastly wise and prudent principle—a great
safeguard to its possessor.” But Bartleby refuses to respond to charitable
gestures, and the lawyer’s colleagues and friends’ constant observations
that he is still there, and still not working, suggest the external force of mar-
ket discipline. In a neat twist of ideology, the lawyer applies the power of
positive thinking to solve his problem – naturally enough since, as a director
of capital, he is used to his commands and desires being carried out:

Yes, as before I had prospectively assumed that Bartleby would depart,

so now I might retrospectively assume that departed he was. In the
legitimate carrying out of this assumption, I might enter my office in
a great hurry, and pretending not to see Bartleby at all, walk straight
against him as if he were air … It was hardly possible that Bartleby
could withstand such an application of the doctrine of assumptions.
But upon second thoughts the success of the plan seemed rather dubi-
ous. I resolved to argue the matter over with him again.

In Lacanian terms, this is the big Other speaking back to Bartleby, trying
to form him as an object. But of course, Bartleby refuses to be spoken to by
that Other: “I burned to be rebelled against again,” says the lawyer, but he
does not even have the satisfaction of Bartleby’s disobedience. The latter is
not governed by “the doctrine of assumptions” – assumptions that Bartleby
should have about his subordination as the seller of labour-power but some-
how does not. This is what puts the boss in an impossible position: he has
somehow taken possession of an uninterpellated figure, a worker who does
not work, does not acknowledge his place in the division of labour and yet
expects to live. When the nameless boss tries to pay him off by leaving a wad
of cash in the office, Bartleby is not tempted, much to the former’s chagrin:

“Why,” I added, unaffectedly starting, “you have not even touched that
money yet,” pointing to it, just where I had left it the evening previous.
 Work and protective escapism 103
He answered nothing.
“Will you, or will you not, quit me?” I now demanded in a sudden
passion, advancing close to him.
“I would prefer not to quit you,” he replied, gently emphasizing the
not.
“What earthly right have you to stay here? Do you pay any rent? Do
you pay my taxes? Or is this property yours?”
He answered nothing.

Bartleby refuses to sell his labour-power, and refuses to accept the market
logic of enclosure that sale is based on. He pays no rent or taxes and owns
no property. And yet he stays. He demonstrates his resistance through his
behaviour and not through any rebellion, spatially remaining at the point
of sale of labour power while being mentally absent. Bartleby declares his
escapism not as a violent overthrow of the existing order but through his
refusal to participate, a personal strike. His calm demeanour, not “ordi-
narily human” due to its lack of emotion, suggests an early depiction of
disengagement, being present while not being “there.” In the end, Bartleby’s
resistance rivals that of any martyr. Sent to prison for trespassing, he
refuses to eat, saying “I prefer not to dine to-day” in the same phrasing used
for refusing work. The capitalist lifeworld has extended beyond work to the
means of survival – in 1853, long before the neoliberal colonization of the
self or the social factory could even be considered.
Deleuze (1998) warns at the beginning of an essay on Bartleby that he is
“not the symbol of anything whatsoever” but ends by declaring him Christ-
like, one of Melville’s Originals, “beings of Primary Nature … inseparable
from the world…they reveal its emptiness, the imperfection of its laws…
throw[ing] a livid white light on his surroundings.” This suggests, at least,
that Bartleby is outside capitalist social relations, looking on in judgment.
Reed (2004) invokes him as a figure of partial resistance, not a direct
anti-capitalist presence (he starves himself and refuses to leave the place of
exploitation) but as a breaker of many circuits: capital, legality and of the
abstraction necessary in creating a commodity. As Marx showed in Capital
Volume One, creating something for the market means abstracting from its
particular useful qualities: one coat equals one portion of linen, and a mag-
ical substance called value binds them both. Bartleby refuses to let anything
be abstracted or circulate; he just stands there.
But if Bartleby is the breaker of the false equivalencies of commodities,
the fact that he does not break the one commodity he controls – his own
labour-power – reveals something fundamental about escapism: it is a way
out, not a pedagogy. Reed suggests that he is not trying to reveal “the dis-
equivalence at work in capitalism, for Bartleby is quite intent on another,
related goal: to get out of circulation entirely.” However, no one sabotages,
daydreams or works inefficiently to reveal disequivalences. The goal of
working class escapism is to leave, not to educate the ruling class on how
104 Work and protective escapism
to rule better, and Bartleby is no revolutionary leader. When Reed warns
that reading Bartleby too far Left “unwittingly recapitulates the gestures
of abstract equivalence used in the service of capital,” reincorporating “the
‘weird’ Bartleby… back into ‘a portrait from life’,” this is true but besides
the point. Bartleby is a figure for the Left precisely because he does not
break the fourth wall and tell the reader about how much he hates being
exploited. He is absurd: most workers do not go on a hunger strike when
they do not feel like working. But he is not a caricature, because he demon-
strates the bind most workers find themselves in – if you do not let yourself
be exploited, you die – and also the most common solution: escapism.
The story is told from the boss’s perspective, which is a distancing tech-
nique but also a way to entrap the reader. It becomes harder to sympathize
with Bartleby – and he becomes stranger and more “weird” – because we
are encouraged to empathize with the employer. Indeed, the thrust of most
writing on Bartleby simply tries to figure out his motives and what he repre-
sents. Yet anyone who has actually worked in a menial office job will have no
problem understanding Bartleby. It does not follow that, as Reed suggests,
that turning Bartleby into an emblem of alienated workers “sacrifice[s]
Bartleby’s strangeness by making him into a representative” of a political
meaning just like the lawyer. Bartleby is strange precisely because he is a
worker, confronted with the menial horror to which Turkey and Nippers
have succumbed and pursuing his own self-destructive coping mechanism.
The incomprehension of Bartleby’s motives is both a sign of the blindspot
escapism occupies on the Left, and evidence of its necessity. Barnett (1974)
counsels that seeing Bartleby as an alienated worker does not exhaust his
other symbolic meanings. Indeed, the glaring error – from a Marxian per-
spective – is that Bartleby ignores his colleagues and never considers joining
one of the many radical labour groups that Melville himself encountered.
His individualist protest is doomed from the outset, becoming one of the
many “cry freedoms” that Batalov (1985) calls typical of American roman-
tics fighting to be free from any external coercion. By 1853, the monop-
oly stage of capitalism was well underway, and Wall Street represented
the leading edge of global networks of finance and production. Bartleby’s
self-annihilation signifies loss – not of human essence, but of small-scale
entrepreneurialism, the capitalism of myth.
Bartleby sprang from a utopian romanticism, and one which may be
off-putting to contemporary readers baffled why someone would refuse a
full-time job. But his struggle marked the growing sophistication of capital
as it branched into New York real estate speculation, and Bartleby was an
attempt to conceive of a new form of alienation in response. This is the same
task Marx set himself, writing in Capital Volume One (1887/2010) on the
sale of labour-power: “He, who before was the money-owner, now strides
in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer.
The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other,
timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market
 Work and protective escapism 105
and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.” In those circumstances, who
would not suggest that they would prefer not to? If, as Kracauer (1998) puts
it, most people’s pressing concerns are not war, famine and crisis but “the
imperceptible dreadfulness of normal existence,” Bartleby’s strangeness
arises from being a worker with nowhere to run. In this, he forms a soli-
darity across genre and time with Daniel Blake: their shared commitment
escapism guarantees their destruction. Even a cursory reading of Marx lets
us understand that the poverty of the worker enables the wealth of the capi-
talist; and yet a deep understanding of that relationship would make labour
impossible for the worker. Bartleby is in that unenviable position, having
realized his position but lacking the capital to do anything about it. Not
participating is his only option, going on a “mental strike” that is doomed
to failure. Bartleby is a working class escapist, not an escapee – he never
leaves – but a subject, because he acts through not acting, by refusing to do
any extra duties and eventually any duties at all. He breaks the system of
ideological recognition, but only at the cost of his own life. For most of us,
the cost is too high – we would prefer not to, but we show up anyway.

Conclusion: avenues of escapism

Escapism is more than a feeling, although it presents as such: it is an unspo-
ken, yet universal response to the structured trauma of the capitalist life-
world, which features work as a central component. This does not invalidate
the self-respect obtainable through labour – but it is always contradictory.
To be a worker is to lack autonomy and be subject to the kinds of indignities
meted out to a broad range of occupations, as true today as it was 100 years
ago. Escapism emerges as a defence against these conditions. Bourdieu
shows us that the perceptual language of class can delineate different kinds
of escapisms, but they very much depend on one’s pre-existing trajectory: the
“distance from necessity” of a wealthy person is far closer to the actual act
of escape than that of a worker, whose distance must remain in fantasy. This
helps explain the appeal of the petty bourgeois and their imagined auton-
omy; however, the realities of the labour market are laid bare the moment
one is forced outside it into the constant indignities of unemployment.
Capitalism speeds up the circulation of capital in its never-ending quest
for valorization precisely by commodifying whatever it can bring into its
reach, and escapism is no exception. However, contrary to its image as feed-
ing consumers to blockbuster cinema and video game franchises, escapism
helps structure the experience of the social world and protect us from it
when necessary.
If, as EP Thompson suggests, belief in the salvation of the afterlife wanes
as hope for change on this earth rises, then escapism is one of the religions
of the secular age, fulfilling the same purpose – transcendence – but, cru-
cially, without real hope for salvation. Rather, escapism is a place to spend
this life, in a mental construction that wards off the worst excesses of labour.
106 Work and protective escapism
And as the possibility of escape recedes, escapism grows. The realities of
post-2008 capitalism’s vast increase in inequality and declining quality of
life for all but a small minority means that it feels more realistic to eschew
dreams about this world – which could be realizable, if the stars aligned
correctly – in favour of a dream-world. Escapism fills the gaps left by an
imperfect habitus and fragmented consciousness, expressed in a way of life
that fails to meet expectations or provide distinction. Dreams of abstract
freedom give way to those of freedom from the humiliations structured
into everyday life. Bartleby reveals himself to be a contemporary of today’s
workers, acting on those freedoms through his ability to equivocate. He
refuses to say he hates his work, and he refuses to take any action that might
be considered destructive or offensive. But just by taking up space where he
is not supposed to, Bartleby practically screams his lack of compliance. He
is estranged, not recognized as a subject and fights for his survival the only
way he knows how: through non-work. And this suggests that, as alienation
was present at the birth of wage labour, so was escapism.
The utility of all escapism rests on time, sparked by an impatience with a
future that has not arrived or does not appear to be getting closer. Bensaïd
(2015) called the pressure of expectations for social change “a dark time, a
sad lukewarm feeling.” But time is not fixed: it contains the possibility for
radical shifts. Even a present that seems like it might never end, is in fact
on its way to something else, which does not foreclose possibilities for the
“strategic present.” If we approach time with a commitment to overcoming
“the painful divorce between the probable and the possible,” then we are
never wholly “present” or captured by a capital that seeks to exploit us. This
is the lesson that Bartleby held for all alienated workers: although he had no
individual power to escape, he could still go to the site of exploitation and
refuse to participate. It can appear true, as Vaneigem (2001) argued, that the
“hope of escape, which prisons deliberately foster, can ensure good behav-
iour from convicts.” But it is also this hope that allows the survival of an
authentic personality, the muffled play of libidinal impulses and the desire
to share that expression with others. The struggle to protect some autono-
mous space for free expression and development is expressed in narratives
of dystopia and utopia.

Notes
1. A stereotype with some basis in reality, it should be added. For example,
MacQueen (2020) showed that, as of June 2020, the Canadian household debt
ratio stood at 176.9%, meaning households owed nearly $1.77 on every dollar’s
worth of assets. Although this percentage fluctuates according to consumer
confidence and government income support, it must be repaid eventually.
Highly-indebted households – with more than 350% debt to asset ratios – rose
from four to eight percent of the total between 2005 and 2014. Worse is the fact
that, as Schmidt (2016) argues, the entire economic premises of neoliberalism
are based on encouraging that debt, offering low interest rates to goad people
into mortgages.
 Work and protective escapism 107
2. From Marx’s (1852/2010) brilliant passage in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Napoleon, the petty bourgeois “believes that the special conditions of its
emancipation are the general conditions within which alone modern society
can be saved and the class struggle avoided.” The petty bourgeois believe their
class position can apply to every class-bound mode of existence. But as ide-
ologists, the particular occupation of the petty bourgeois is irrelevant: “Just
as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all
shopkeepers or enthusiastic supporters of shopkeepers. In their education and
individual position, they may be as far apart from them as heaven from earth.”
Their position in the division of labour between labour and capital structures
their desire for capital without capitalism, and class power without conflict:
“What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that
in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get
beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same
problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the
latter in practice.”
3. On how inequality and the pursuit of neoliberal status fracture the Self, lead-
ing to depression, further inequality and a “recognition gap” between how
people live and their lack of reflection in mainstream society, see Lamont
(2019; 2018). Also see Cherlin (2019) on how the effects of insecurity and anxi-
ety are felt more intensely, the further down the class ladder one slides.
4. After mass layoffs in India’s tech industry in 2019, Bhattacharya (2019) reports
that Indian smartphone installation of the employment app Linkedin grew
from 6% to 15%. At the other end of the labour market, Rai (2020) details
the creation of Apna, an app that supplies online business cards for its 1.25
million, mainly poor and non-English-speaking subscribers. Its Stanford-
educated creator, motivated by his difficulty in hiring a welder, has attracted
three million USD from investors and claims to have generated 800,000 job
interviews in July 2020 alone, by matching job-seekers with employers. Future
income streams depend on charging companies for access and job-seekers for
English and lessons in interview skills. Streamlining the hiring process is, of
course, a good thing; however, reducing unemployment to a technical prob-
lem of labour market access, for which many have to pay, evades the broader
social and policy issues at stake.
5. The extent to which Melville consciously wrote Bartleby as a critique is open
to debate, and most likely besides the point. Bartleby has been interpreted as
a figure of alienated labour, according to Barnett (1974); Deleuze (1998) has
painted him as a figure of distancing that reflects upon our imperfections;
Reed (2004) sees in him an act of estrangement from capitalist daily life; Kast-
ner (2011) weights Bartleby as an embodiment of legal contract, among many
others. There is no reason his diffident refusal cannot be mustered in the ser-
vice of escapism as well.

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4 Dystopias and utopias

At the end of the 1960s, in his book The Neophiliacs, Booker (1969) denounced
the froth of the British New Wave and the very idea of a post-war cultural
revolution. Mods, pop art and the anti-establishment mood were a media
invention and the purview of a narrow band of London-centric, middle class
bohemia. Booker pinned the blame for this squarely on escapism: “If it was a
dream, however, then like most dreams there would be a time when it would
find it hard to stand up to reality.” Elders had denounced the frivolity of youth
for hundreds of years, but the contemporary generational conflict was marked
by a quest for sensation and newness for their own sakes. The rapidity of tech-
nological change, the spread of mass media and the speed of everyday life
encouraged these escapist projections. The detritus of cultural ferment laid
the basis for neurosis, “based only on unreal, subjection projections of the
mind.” The looser one’s grip on reality, the more the external world flattened
into half-formed fantasies that fed dreams and nightmares. Worse, the result-
ing desire for identification and power opened a path for demagogues of Left
and Right, who could mobilize them into mass hysteria and political power.
At the root of Booker’s fear of escapism was an assumption of lost stabil-
ity, a problem shared by all conservative cultural critics. The path to indi-
vidual and group success lay in harmony: when this was threatened – and
it is always in danger for these critics – Booker bemoaned society’s loss of
“organic homogeneity” and the “lines of stress” appearing “between rulers
and ruled.” Rather than working together, each group dreamt of mechan-
ical order or unfettered freedom, respectively, as compensation for a lack
of self-discipline. The effort would be ultimately futile, given the hierar-
chies that guarantee each group has a role and place in the natural order of
things. As Peterson’s (2018) 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos puts it:

The order within the chaos and order of Being is all the more “natural”
the longer it has lasted … the dominance hierarchy, however social or
cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years
… [It’s] not capitalism. It’s not communism … It’s not the patriarchy …
It’s not even a human creation … It is instead a near-eternal aspect of
the environment.
 Dystopias and utopias 113
We can see parallels with the criticism of ego psychology levelled at Fromm:
the real truth of the personality and its drives lies in instinctual and ancient
conflicts. But even here, society rudely intrudes. Those who desire a return
to order – or claim “Order” has always existed, and that we violate it at our
peril – fail to notice that class society, the one we live in, has always been
split by irreconcilable conflict between those who own and sell their labour.
The model of order denied and re-established makes far more sense to the
ruling classes who benefited from it in the first place, by virtue of their pri-
vate control of the means of production, bolstered by the various arms of
the state. Those without that property, who attempt to adopt the propertied
mindset, will find themselves in an order that does not recognize them and
is content to let them sleep in the street, so long as they do not disrupt the
generation of surplus value. Indeed, Peterson’s rhetorical skill lies not just in
his rehashing of pop sociobiology, as Burgiss and McManus (2020) suggest,
but in making it accessible, breaking up “pull yourself up by your boot-
straps” into 12 simple steps so you know where to start. As Peterson sug-
gests, “Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.” Anyone can do that.
Faced with this exhortation to be capitalist in word, thought and deed,
from managers to self-help books, it becomes incredibly difficult to artic-
ulate any alternative. And many do not want to try: the legions of fans of
crude genetic determinism, in which the good society just happens to be
the one we had a few years ago when everyone knew their correct place, are
absolutely sincere in their desire to conform and adapt to the prevailing
order. It is a natural hope for survival, when any class conflict remains subli-
mated, and one’s hopes of reproducing oneself through wage labour depend
on pushing the injustice of exploitation and oppression into the recesses of
the unconscious.
Yet this is not a stable receptacle: what Booker called the “group-
fantasies” of escape, through leaving or revenge, are inevitable in a society
that generates surplus wealth but refuses to guarantee the survival of the
wealth-creators. Any critic who fails to recognize the disorder at the heart
of capitalism also fails to acknowledge the deeply personal effects of alien-
ation and exploitation on workers’ consciousness and livelihoods. Lukács
(1971) reminds us, “Consciousness does not lie outside the real process of
history. It does not have to be introduced into the world by philosophers;
therefore to gaze down arrogantly upon the petty struggles of the world
and to despise them is indefensible.” Rather than denounce these group-
fantasies, it is more useful to understand their origins. This chapter begins
by examining how fantasy is essential to the foundational and even pre-so-
cial aspects of the Self, as Freud, Marcuse and Bloch emphasized in different
ways. However, these drives are always mediated through the social world,
and Bloch’s concept of non-contemporaneity is useful for helping to under-
stand how escapism can reveal the future within the present. As Chapter 2
showed, alienation can only be expressed through mediation. Thus when
fantasies do appear, they often use the medium of the anamorphic stain:
114 Dystopias and utopias
a facet of reality ripped from its context, which appears so different that it
estranges what is considered to be normal reality. Art is the most common
avenue for this expression, in particular the literatures of fantasy and spec-
ulative fiction; however, there is a fierce debate on what, precisely, we need
to escape from. A figure like Tolkien names industrial society; later crit-
ics have responded that the social relations of capitalism themselves must
be made strange. The debate leads this chapter to a discussion of dysto-
pias and utopias: far more than simple negatives and positives, in different
ways they demonstrate an escapism from the life-denying social world that
produces them. Mark Fisher’s work lays out what is at stake, in terms of a
degraded present that has not fulfilled the promise of modernity. The TV
show Sapphire and Steel embodies this frustrated promise in its out-of-time
monsters. And, from the literature of Victor Serge to the rhythms of hip
hop and Detroit techno, dystopian and utopian art are shown to be forms
of Bloch’s objective non-contemporaneity, in which subjects produce cul-
tural forms that assert their distance from this reality and their desire for
a new one.

The motivation for escapism

We have seen that the pain of alienation, refracted through personal and
social development and wage labour, can lead to escapism. But why that
and not something else? Surprisingly, despite the bourgeois habitus of
Civilization and its Discontents, Freud (1931/1995) reveals a deep under-
standing of classed escapism. Contrary to the Freud we saw arguing for a
drives theory of personality, he argues that activity is central: “No other
technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality
as laying emphasis on work.” He waxes lyrical about how good it can be:
“Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen
one – if … it makes possible the use of existing inclinations.” Indeed, who
would not follow their inclinations when the choices on offer include “an
artist’s joy in creating … or a scientist’s in solving problems or discovering
truths?” These “satisfactions seem ‘finer and higher,’” and he remains per-
plexed why, despite these wonders, work “is not highly prized” and most
“do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction.” He
decides that it is simply “natural human aversion” (emphasis added), of a
piece with his gloomy conclusions about the inevitability of conflict.
Implicit in this feeling, but always left out, is that this should be a good
job, with creativity and autonomy – a vanishingly rare proposition for those
lower down the class ladder, as Chapter 3 showed. Yet, despite the mystery,
Freud understands how it works: those who can do nothing about their suf-
fering seek “satisfaction in internal, psychical processes … [in which] the
connection with reality is still further loosened; satisfaction is obtained
from illusions.” Our imaginations, “exempted from the demands of reality-
testing,” find pleasure in art and, when that fails to relieve the pain, renounce
 Dystopias and utopias 115
the outside world altogether. And here Freud opens the door to escapism:
“But one can do more than that; one can try to recreate the world, to build
up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are elimi-
nated and replaced by others that are in conformity with one’s own wishes.”
This is not an easy portal to close, despite his immediate qualification that
doing so will drive you insane.
Freud’s framing of the issue is in fact accurate, even if he de-historicizes
the categories. The neurotic individual turns inward while the active one
shapes the world. Freud’s attempt to be helpful, invoking the “cautious busi-
ness-man [who] avoids tying up all his capital in one concern” as a warning
against trying to work too much, simply reveals his inner capitalist. But
even here, who gets to change the environment, versus who has to adapt
to it, predicts who needs escapism. For the businessman, it “is a question
of how much real satisfaction he can expect to get from the external world,
how far he is led to make himself independent of it, and, finally, how much
strength he feels he has for altering the world to suit his wishes.” Everyone
else – those who have “not properly undergone the transformation and
rearrangement of his libidinal components which is indispensable for later
achievements” – can enjoy neurosis, alcoholism and drug abuse and, in later
years, psychosis.
Stretch the argument just a little further, and Freud is channelling Marx.
Those who do not expect much satisfaction from the external world can-
not control it; they are alienated, in the same way that Marx (1844/2010)
described in much greater detail in the 1844 Manuscripts. Consider that
mental strength also depends on external circumstances – the prudent cap-
italist stole the labour power of others to earn his own capital – and we
reach a materialist understanding of escapism. In this case, rather than con-
demning social change, Freud may be setting us a challenge: to revolution-
ize reality by escaping from its worst mental colonizations. This is why he
sets so much store in creativity as an outlet for frustrated libidinal drives,
compensation for a reality in which the individual cannot fully meet their
needs. In his lecture on creative writing (1908/1995), he argues that fantasy
is the exclusive property of the miserable, “a correction of unsatisfying real-
ity.” But even here, he is careful to situate fantasy developmentally: “the
various phantasies, castles in the air and day-dreams – are [not] stereotyped
or unalterable. On the contrary, they fit themselves in to the subject’s shift-
ing impressions of life, change with every change in his situation” and mark
psychological development.
Note the plasticity in Freud’s formulation: fantasy is adaptive, intimately
related to the “shifting impressions of life” i.e. the social world. As we have
seen, Marcuse (1998) used this to revise the death drive: no longer a force for
stasis, it could be transformative. The ego was a product of surplus repres-
sion, whose only function was to repress. “Phantasy,” which as we have seen
involves play, and imagining the utopian circumstances where free play is
always possible, could be a place of safety, where the exploitative reality
116 Dystopias and utopias
principle did not apply. 1 This made the release of libidinal energy a source
of utopia: the “revolt of the instincts,” or what he called “the Great Refusal”
invoked this heritage as fantasy, a protective gesture against the reality prin-
ciple. Freedom and a better future only seemed utopian because the reality
principle forced them out of this world, whereas “phantasy insists that it
must and can become real, that behind the illusion lies knowledge.”
Marcuse changed escapism from a necessary adaptation to adverse cir-
cumstances into an active tool for their transformation, and for that his
work deserves to be seen as foundational. However, it remained limited
by his need to settle accounts with Freud. Despite writing 30 years earlier,
Bloch (1986) grounded the concept more. He agreed on the necessity for
fantasies, or what he calls “the waking dream,” because fantasies are largely
under the dreamer’s control. They suggested, in distorted form, the world
the dreamer wishes for: a fantasy, driven by a “utopistically intensified ego”
– in other words, an adult desire, not instinctual gratification. This did not
mean all escapist fantasies are progressive but that they give the ego free rein
to imagine a life freed of constraints. Bloch named the disjuncture between
the society one lives in and the kind of life one expects as non-contemporaneity:
the old existing in the new. In its subjective, false form, earlier modes of
existence persist into the present. This is the familiar fascism of the small
businessperson who, driven bankrupt by competition, channels their bit-
terness into appeals to a threatened “pure” identity and status, invoking an
imagined history in their desire “for security, rootedness and community.”
But objective non-contemporaneity could also disconnect from the present
without any appeal to the past, and it is here that the utopian impulse lin-
gered. That impulse was not political, at least not at first. Workers’ dreams
of comfort and security became revolutionary to the extent that they
remained unrealizable. This was expressed through everything from pulp
fiction to antiques, in either reactionary fashion, full of easy resolutions and
unquestioning love for hierarchy, or utopian pathways, reflecting the desire
for freedom. The real enemy of humanity was not this kind of escapism but
nihilism, the loss of the capacity to dream at all.
Whatever Freud’s and Marcuse’s omissions, we need not reject the insight
that art and fantasy function as wish-fulfillment, to the degree individuals
suffer from an alienated subjectivity. It is true that when a fantasy of escap-
ism moves towards a past of inequality and fixed social relations, it can
hide the realities of the present and, paradoxically, cement them in place.
However, an escapism that moves towards the “not yet” reveals the future
within the present.

The anamorphic stain

The estrangement that Freud, Marcuse and Bloch all identified is a reaction
to reality; when it appears, therefore, it has to look strange. To understand
this requires anamorphosis, which Beaumont (2009) describes as a system of
 Dystopias and utopias 117
representation in which normal elements are stretched and distorted until
they appear incomprehensible. The grotesque becomes the way things
should be, and the viewer must change perspective for them to appear nor-
mal again. The concept is akin to the “negation of the negation,” Marx’s
(1887/2010) term for how capitalism first destroys older modes of produc-
tion, and then destroys itself by creating a collective subject, the working
class. But the concept is currency also for unexpected figures, like Tolkien
(2008), who invokes Chesterton’s (recounting Dickens’) backwards reading
of a sign – Coffee Room becoming Mooreffoc – as “the queerness of what
has become trite when seen suddenly from a new angle.” The stain is the
impact it leaves upon our world, suggesting that it is, in fact, not of our
world: both realms co-exist, held together in ways that are literally impos-
sible but dialectically intertwined. Hence the displacing effect of utopia, in
which two different totalities confront each other in the same political or
geographic space. Batalov (1985) shows that this confrontation has been
mined repeatedly, from Swift’s voyage to Lilliput to 19th-century utopian
manifestos by workers, farmers and governments, and on into speculative
fiction itself, where it exists as a regular technique of alternate reality forma-
tion. Dick (1987) defined the entire scifi genre as “the conceptual dislocation
within the society so that as a result a new society … [creates] a convulsive
shock in the reader’s mind, the shock of dysrecognition. He knows that it is
not his actual world that he is reading about” (emphasis in original). Suvin
(1979) famously drew inspiration from Bloch for the Novum, in which a new,
totalizing world confronts existing reality. When they clash, the disjunc-
tions are mined for everything from tragedy to comedy.2
From all these different approaches, we can see the anamorphic stain
seeping to the surface as a method of estrangement, allowing authors to
create a distance from reality, the better to criticize it. If we define escapism
as the impetus for anamorphosis, then it is literally everywhere and loses
analytical focus. But pace Booker, a useful, progressive escapism articulates
an anamorphic stain that acknowledges and proceeds from our own con-
flict-ridden reality.

Utopia: a desire displaced by alienation

The object of anamorphosis sounds very much like utopia, a concept impos-
sible to avoid when dealing with escapism and yet far more developed. Utopia
suggests a complete social organization and ethical system, usually created
as an object lesson about the author’s own world. If escapism is just another
variant of utopianism, the entire discussion is moot. What, then, is the dif-
ference between the two? Escapism begins as a more tentative and instinc-
tual response to social contradiction. Bloch (1986) acknowledges this when
he writes, “Anticipations and intensifications which refer to men, social uto-
pian ones and those of beauty, even of transfiguration, are really only at
home in the daydream.” Escapism’s daydream stops short of future utopia,
118 Dystopias and utopias
heading instead towards its interstices: the points at which another world
is gestured towards but not fully articulated. Bloch wanted to establish the
dream, story and drug-induced hallucination as potential precursors to uto-
pia, because in each of them the future is not fixed, and the dreamer has the
power (of imagination) to set it. But imagination is bounded by the society
of the imaginer. A complex dialectic results in which “the imagery of [imag-
inations’] mediated anticipations are fermenting in the process of the real
itself and are depicted in the concrete forward dream.” The concrete for-
ward dream establishes the form of escapism (a “mediated anticipation”);
the content depends on the social position of the dreamer.
Science fiction is the most obvious place to look, since utopia defines it as
a genre. Suvin situated utopia in a specific, highly limited place (“locus”),
with its internal organization thoroughly laid out, achieving its dramatic
strength through contrast with the author’s own world. It is this organi-
zation that marks utopia out as “[n]either prophecy nor escapism, [rather]
utopia is, as many critics have remarked, an ‘as if,’… an imaginative exper-
iment or ‘a methodical organ for the New.’” Avoiding the wholly negative
definition of escapism, Jameson (2005) called it “the break that inaugurates
a new era,” forcing us to focus on the gulf between the imagined future
and today’s political realities. The very fact that it is impossible gives rhe-
torical strength to the need and strategies to overcome that gap. Williams
(1978) goes furthest: escapism results from the failure of utopia. Those sci-fi
authors who simply extrapolate their imagined worlds from existing trends,
rather than conceiving of new ones, fall into dystopia. The desire they artic-
ulate to “live otherwise, commonly, is to be other and elsewhere: a desire
displaced by alienation and in this sense cousin to phases of the utopian, but
without the specific of a… potentially connecting transformation” (empha-
sis added). It is this lack of specifics that shunts their alienated desires into
dystopia and escapism. Williams cites Huxley’s Brave New World, whose
characters find liberation through escape from their brutal (and conceptu-
ally confused) capitalist-Communist dictatorship. Since Huxley believes
collective transformation to be impossible, he reserves his liberation for
the exiles from the system. This allows Williams to name the essentially
negative premises for escapism: “self-realisation and self-fulfillment are
not to be found in relationship or in society, but in breakaway, in escape…
like a thousand SF heroes... running to the wastes to escape the machine,
the city, the system.” However, while the premises of escape may be dysto-
pian, they are not wholly negative: when sci-fi describes other cultures and
worlds, it produces “a crisis of exposure which produces a crisis of possi-
bility; a reworking, in imagination, of all forms and conditions.” Utopia is
implied, but more importantly for our purposes, that re-working provides
an outlet for “desire displaced by alienation,” one which drives escapism
in the first place.
This openness to the utility of escapism is a minority position: for
Jameson, as we saw with the rest of the Left, escapism means avoidance. He
 Dystopias and utopias 119
suggests that sci-fi, like all of western cultural production, does its best to
repress political questions, and refuses “to connect existential or personal
experience, the experience of our individual private life, with the system
and suprapersonal organization of monopoly capitalism as an all-pervasive
whole.” In this case, when politics does arise, it can only be in contrast to
“galactic escapism,” not in concert with it. In demanding utopia be taken
seriously, Left cultural studies can be forgiven for not prioritizing escapism:
those committed to social transformation “of all forms and conditions” may
be a trifle impatient to get on with realizing their visions. Yet escapism, as
a practice of liberation, looms behind utopia as an unformed, urgent need.
Escapism can encompass utopia – the two concepts are not in opposition –
but does not have to, because it begins as a rejection of the present, not as a
clearly-articulated alternative. In moving towards the latter, it leaves room
for the inchoate, the unnamed and even the anti-social, coming as it does
from the introjection of anti-social existence and norms into the pre-social
psyche, and then erupting up again. As an expression of alienation it is hid-
den, unable to reveal itself fully because it is created by circumstances that
entrap the escapee. As a result, escapism appears as an anamorphic stain,
an intrusion into – or more properly, extrusion from – this world.
Not all escapisms do this, particularly the literary kind. Authors’ social
biases skew towards normalizing a system of exploitation and exclusion;
those who accept present social relations as given, applying some techni-
cal deus ex machina to resolve their plots, end up reproducing those rela-
tions. As Miéville (2000) says, “The problem with most genre fantasy is that
it’s not nearly fantastic enough. It’s escapist, but it can’t escape.” Tolkien
(2008) warns not to conflate “the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the
deserter”; the latter runs from a noble reality, the former from an unbearable
one. Escape is of a piece with “Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt,”
all worthy reactions to tyranny, which the escapist refuses to accept. Tolkien
is mustering escapism against “progress”3 but also militarism, and it is the
latter that provokes flight: “There are other things more grim and terrible
to fly from than the noise, stench, ruthlessness, and extravagance of the
internal-combustion engine. There are hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow,
injustice, death.” In their place, escapism offers temporary freedom from
the “ancient limitations” and reconnects us with nature: the romantic ideal
made anew. The escapist is more properly termed the “fugitive spirit.”
Tolkien can be lauded for taking escapism seriously. While it may be true
that, as Moorcock (1987) argues, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings seeks escape into
a religious, feudal idyll – the escape from death that he invokes is the Second
Coming, and the pastoral paradise of the Shire that begins the books is the
English home counties – this is besides the point: for Tolkien, as Scroggins
(2016) observes, escapism is legitimate from an unjust system. As we have
seen, escapism is a method, not an end in itself, and can carry progres-
sive or reactionary meanings. Le Guin (1974) warns that much sci-fi leans
towards the latter; what happens when we escape into a world of false
120 Dystopias and utopias
certainty, “where Science, plus Free Enterprise, plus the Galactic Fleet in
black and silver uniforms, can solve all problems”? This is the construc-
tion of falsehood, the flight from reality into madness. She roots escapism
in the search for simple, reactionary answers that avoid the complexity of
real-world problems, and contrasts escapism with a more open science fic-
tion in which “[a]ll connections are possible. All alternatives are thinkable.”
Moorcock also finds far more reaction than liberation, zeroing in on Lord of
the Rings’ depiction of the simple agrarian society of Hobbiton under threat
from the Orcs, who bring industrialization, stripping the land of its trees,
erecting smoke-belching factories and generally acting as agents of primi-
tive accumulation. Tolkien (2006) closely identified with the petty bourgeois
and made them the heroes of his book, something he wrote about to a fan:

I am in fact a hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmech-
anised farmlands; I smoke a pipe and like good plain food (unrefriger-
ated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these
dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a
field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative
critics find tiresome).

This mild-mannered eccentricity is escapism precisely because it represents

an unchanging, out-of-time Middle-English/Middle Earthness as a eulogy
to times past. The Shire only has power as a positive vision compared to the
nastiness of the Orcs and their Satanic mills, and Tolkien’s analogies (and
later vehement denials) of Middle Earth to Europe, and of the evil servants
of Sauron to Asians and Africans are well-known. Its political allusions are
obvious: Moorcock lambasts Tolkien and Christian propagandist CS Lewis
for “theories [that] dignify the mood of a disenchanted and thoroughly dis-
credited section of the repressed English middle-class too afraid, even as it
falls, to make any sort of direct complaint.” Their regret is that of the aging
ex-colonists of Britain’s failed empire.
But if literary escapism mostly swings conservative, with Tolkien as one
of the worst offenders, its significance is missing from Moorcock’s critique.
He sympathizes with Sauron – “After all, anyone who hates hobbits can’t be
all bad” – and roots Tolkien’s hatred of industrialism in an unthinking rejec-
tion of the far, the foreign and the urban alike. This is possessed most often
by urbanites’ “infant’s eye view of the countryside,” steeped in the nostalgia
of pastoralist fiction. It is a Right-escapist nostalgia of decline that, as we
have seen, Williams (1975) could trace back to the Magna Carta, and sim-
ilar complaints about the destruction of the organic whole of the farming
community to Greece in 900 BCE. There are echoes of this loss in Freud’s
tales of prehistoric groups torn apart by sons rebelling against their fathers,
their destruction lodging permanently in our psyche as the death drive.
Thus Moorcock is right to ridicule Tolkien’s escapism and Lewis’ clunky
novels as “corrupted romanticism” that leads straight to conservatism. This
 Dystopias and utopias 121
is how a reactionary escapism works: inventing a fixed point in historical
development and contrasting it with the degraded present, a subjective
non-contemporaneity warned of by Bloch. The abuse of this process was
already well-described by Marx and Engels (1848/2010) in the Manifesto of
the Communist Party as feudal socialism, “half lamentation, half lampoon;
half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty
and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but
always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the
march of modern history.”
However, simply denouncing “echoes of the past” does not explain their
importance. People use escapism, even in its reactionary forms, to escape:
not necessarily from their history or culture but from the circumstances
that history and culture have forced them into. Non-contemporaneity is an
ideology, the ripples of a previous mode of existence given new life through
the force of people’s desires, born of class trajectory imagined or real. This
inability to comprehend the present does not come from any personal failing
but because, for those who survive through the sale of their labour power,
life depends on not recognizing those circumstances. Were workers to “see
through” the circumstances of alienation en masse, they would simply stop
going to work, share their meals for a few days, lock the capitalists in their
mansions and re-organize work collectively. Discerning those circumstances
individually, in the absence of a political or social organization to change
them, leaves far fewer options. However much we desire it consciously, we
cannot overcome the contradictions of capitalism in our heads. Except for a
tiny sliver of the population blessed with control over the means of produc-
tion, we are not – and cannot be – the rational, self-actualizing subjects of
neoclassical economic theory, or even the entrepreneurs of neoliberal and
petty bourgeois selfhood we met in Chapters 2 and 3. We even struggle to
attain the working class’s gag version of this tragedy, which appears in the
re-framers of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, who fight negative thoughts
about self-loathing, defeatism and escape and emerge victorious, ready – in
its corporate version – to be useful objects of capitalist instrumentality once
more. Escapism only has power because it expresses an inchoate yearning
for the not-here, mediated through the very concrete and tangible realities
of an alienated existence. The fact that jailers love escapism does not really
matter, for their very presence – much like that of alienated labour itself –
continually recreates the conditions driving escapism. If it is the case, as
Miéville (2000) argues, that capitalism “represses just about every human
impulse you can mention,” including class conflict, then even something as
messily concrete as a revolution will appear first as a terrifying, necessary
fantasy.
Escapism is not utopian, because it does not begin with an ideal destina-
tion in mind. It is far more concerned with leaving the Now than conceptu-
alizing the Novum. In doing so, it can approach either utopia or dystopia,
and it is that approach that gives it analytical value. Escapist cultural
122 Dystopias and utopias
production articulates the mediated forms in which alienation must appear:
in demonstrating both the causes and effects of alienation, it gives voice to
the emotional responses of capitalist subjects. This in no way justifies the
reactionary, imperialist fantasies of Tolkien and his imitators. It does justify
exploring their popularity.

Dystopian escapism
Escapism is not escape: in its desire for change, it gets its power from the
feeling of immobility, and without hope for change, dystopia becomes a nat-
ural path for escapist impulses to follow. The possibility of escape is miss-
ing from Fisher’s (2014) Ghosts Of My Life, which describes a world that
has ground to a halt, culturally and politically. Whereas previous critiques,
from the deconstruction of Dada to Rousseau’s romanticism, highlighted
the contradictions of Enlightenment progress, Fisher mourns the loss of the
very possibility of that vision. He periodizes that loss within the neoliberal
triumph of the late 1970s, as counter-cultural anti-capitalism became a mar-
keting narrative, fully incorporated into the mainstream. In this dystopia,
it was neoliberalism and its “destruction of solidarity and security [that]
brought about a compensatory hungering for the well-established and the
familiar”: in a word, escapism. This is the risk of subjective non-contem-
poraneity ably exploited by figures like Peterson. But Fisher is defining a
new aspect of Bloch’s schema: more than a retreat from the present to the
uncertainties of the past, escapism can also be a refusal to deal with time
itself, a flight to an out-of-time where events proceed in an orderly, linear
and non-modernist fashion, or do not proceed at all. This “yearning for
form” appears as nostalgia for a future that never happened. This combines
with a breakdown in the sense of history itself, as constant juxtaposition of
forms from past and future – for example, through dead singers digitally
animated to endorse products – makes the past lose its definitive position.
Instead, nostalgia becomes roped to “the past” as a category, which has
very little to do with what actually took place. With no possibilities on the
horizon, capitalist marketing and media are content to re-package what has
come before, as commodities.
But the yearning for form goes far beyond marketing to encompass a
worldview. The idea that there is no “there” to look forward to is behind
the concept of zeerust, a joke coined by Adams and Lloyd (1993): “The par-
ticular kind of datedness which afflicts things that were originally designed
to look futuristic.” From the quaint dinner-drawings in the rehydrated
space food of 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, to 1995 Ghost In The Shell’s flip
phones, zeerust’s anachronisms have gained their own pop culture currency
as being more glamorous for their lack of realism. Today’s tech – for it is
usually gadget-based, itself a sign of the paucity of contemporary futurity
– stands in stark contrast to what others imagined. This sparks escapism
not to a future that might happen, but from a reality in which the viewer is
 Dystopias and utopias 123
immersed, despite knowing full well it could never occur. Zeerust’s appeal
lies precisely in posing its Modal of Lost Opportunity question: to what
extent could our future have been different? Implicit in this is a nostalgia,
not for the past but for the possible future embedded inside it.
Fisher is adamant that this is not simply our reading of the past; there
was nothing dated about the creative flowering that opened experimental
cultural forms like postpunk and Brutalism to a mass audience. In a nod to
Bloch, these “spectres of lost futures” are friendly ghosts that should haunt
our present and spark resistance. This openness to a positive reading of nos-
talgia is where Fisher’s hauntology and escapism converge. If the former is a
recuperation of spaces for cultural pluralism, escapism is, once again, more
tentative. It can look for utopic spaces, but in its flight from terror it can just
as easily look for non-spaces. The concrete, material referent disappears: in
its place is a phantasmagoria of frustrated hopes and unlived social rela-
tions, sometimes no more tangible than a feeling, with all the complexity
that suggests. But there is also the possibility for solidarity, once this shared
understanding has been established. Fisher invokes “Fugitive time, lost
afternoons, conversations that dilate and drift like smoke, walks that have
no particular direction and go on for hours, free parties in old industrial
spaces, still reverberating days later.” Or as Pulp put it in Glory Days (1998):
“Come and play the tunes of glory/Raise your voice in celebration/Of the
days that we have wasted in the cafe/In the station.” Pulp’s escapism at once
hearkens back to a classically modern (and wealthy male) version of the 19th
century flaneur, Flaubert’s dandy strolling Paris to lose himself in the act of
travel and observation. But it is also surprisingly contemporary, because a
wasted day in a cafe or on a walk is an accessible delay to constructing the
entrepreneurial self. These are not political acts in themselves: the intersti-
tial spaces where capitalism is imperfectly implanted, or where people can
practice non-participation in wage labour, are by their nature ephemeral.
But the act of “wasting” time by engaging in non-productive activity is itself
productive, in that it signals an open acceptance of escapism.
It is only when escapism turns to the imagined conditions of a lost future
that reality intrudes, in the form of the inevitable question: where is that
future? The sense one gets from Fisher is that it is gone, and there is no
escape; from the smirking, all-knowing Big Other that hides its own igno-
rance, to the politicians and managers who invent falsehoods and forget
they invented them, we are all complicit. Fisher allows for tears “in the grey
curtain of reaction” from unorthodox social movement organizing and
unionism, but they are negligible next to the weight of the critique. And
this is because Fisher is mourning not just the loss of escape but that of
escapism itself. The sorrow that seeps through every page is not simply from
the failures of past anti-capitalism but the lack of any routes away from it.
In Mike Leigh’s (1993) film Naked, the protagonist passes a worker pasting
“cancelled” signs over what at first glance look like concert notices, but in
fact are posters for real-life anarchist group Class War. For Fisher, the class
124 Dystopias and utopias
war has indeed been cancelled, and capitalism’s greatest success is in mak-
ing itself mundane: all history, imagination and dreams of alternatives have
been incorporated. This is the tragedy and central challenge of his work. He
vindicates escapism as a worthwhile imagining of the future, through an
active distancing from the present. But that level of intimacy leads him to
see that the cultural forms of escape that he analyzed so minutely have been
foreclosed. Without those forms, what hope is there?
To answer this critique, a few examples of both dystopian and utopian
works show what must be escaped from and the challenges of enacting that
escape. While hardly representative, they nevertheless suggest a way to
identify escapism as a genre, moving the phenomenon from a coping mech-
anism to a form of liberatory practice.

Dystopias 1: Sapphire and Steel

Fisher’s work helps name the paradox of contemporary escapism: late cap-
italism causes an intense desire to flee, while eliminating possible destina-
tions. But in his mining of lost futures, he also brought welcome critical
attention to ITV’s Sapphire and Steel, a short-lived sci-fi series from the
late 1970s. Its obtuse dialogues about ghosts being manipulated by time
demons presaged films like The Sixth Sense and Primer. Time-control
agents Sapphire, played with preternatural calm by Joanna Lumley, and
Steel, a permanently bent-out-of-joint David McCallum, embodied just
enough alien strangeness for viewers to forget they were dressed like shop
assistants and lacked the prosthetics or costumes that usually indicated
aliens. Their encounters with humans caught up in time loops, and mon-
sters threatening to break out of a time corridor, consisted largely of super-
cilious asides and exasperation at the humans’ inability to understand the
circumstances. No compassion was ever forthcoming: Steel snapped at the
victims, while Sapphire’s smiles always seemed patronizing. And this was
fitting, since their final adventure saw them imprisoned in a service station,
floating in space, marooned from time. It is this alien coldness in character
and plot that prompted Fisher to write, “21st-century culture is marked
by the same anachronism and inertia which afflicted Sapphire and Steel
in their final adventure. But this stasis has been buried, interred behind a
superficial frenzy of ‘newness’, of perpetual movement. The ‘jumbling up
of time’, the montaging of earlier eras… is now so prevalent that it is no
longer even noticed.”
The impact on utopia is chilling. The creation of a perfect future demands
teleology, a sense that events, if not prefigured, can at least progress towards
a resolution of social and political contradictions. Inertia is bad enough:
we no longer progress. But just as bad is the sense that we are in perpet-
ual motion, without any forward movement, discrediting the very idea that
utopia could be reached. If stasis suggests the future is unattainable, to
be replaced by the constant recycling of cultural tropes and their material
 Dystopias and utopias 125
avatars in the shape of commodities, then the very idea of utopia is lost.
Even a stuck clock suggests that its hands once moved.
But this is not the only possible conclusion to draw from Sapphire and
Steel. If the final story represented the neoliberal present, a banal horror
without end, then Story Four, Episode Two, The Man Without A Face, sug-
gested that while we may be trapped by capitalist subjectivity, the prospect
for escapism remains within dystopia. In the episode, Sapphire and Steel
are trying to track down an entity who steals the images in old photos and
manifests them for its own purposes. It appears as a man who rarely has
features, and more often has a head resembling a fleshy egg. He appears in a
storeroom of old images, and sometimes in the images themselves. Sapphire
sees both:

SAPPHIRE: Yes! Just here. A man shape. A man –

STEEL: A man who is a photograph?
SA: No, it can’t be.
ST: But you said –
SA: The structure is here, the texture is here but not the subject. There never
was a subject.
ST: A photograph of nothing?
SA: Of nothing human, yes.
ST: And the children, the children that attacked you?
SA: Oh, they were human – once.

To be clear, this is not a Lacanian fable, in which the subject is an ideologi-

cal construct. Sapphire means that the monster never was a human subject
but has been able to corral and transform the children (us), its victims, into
ghosts: “they were human – once.” The monster itself has no equivalent. An
android is the closest analogy, but this “man shape” is not human or human-
built, and its relationship to human society is different: it was unleashed by
our activity. It broke through into our world in a “new process,” trapped in
the first photograph taken in 1839, which a hapless amateur photographer
released in modern-day Britain 140 years later.
The dystopic nature of the monster becomes clearer: what better meta-
phor for the power of the industrial revolution and the resulting alienation
of the working class, bent to the machine? It is a force we did not create, and
which nonetheless appears in our images to devour us. What was actually
being harnessed in capitalism was the suppressed rage, longing and desire of
the working class, the libidinal energy directed to “useful” ends and alien-
ated from real people, made strange. In Sapphire and Steel it had nowhere to
go, and it set about destroying those that had made it. The Subject of capital
ate the subject of the people.
Sapphire and Steel’s broadcast in the late 1970s, around the time when
capital alighted upon neoliberalism to solve the problem of stagnating prof-
its, cannot help but convey the sense of a loss of control. The feeling of being
126 Dystopias and utopias
overpowered by a force “we” created is a perfect metaphor for the Volker
shock and the structural adjustment unleashed upon states and public ser-
vices across the globe. Read as a tale of the destruction of utopia, The Man
Without A Face is a monster of neoliberalism that has stolen the soul of
the dead. Even in its human structure and texture, it resembles nothing so
much as a corporate person, defined by Dan-Cohen (2013) as an organiza-
tion with legal personhood but with vastly more power and agency than an
actual person. By representing subjectivity in its own image, neoliberalism
has destroyed any claim to a Subject the human once possessed. Instead,
subjectivity is annihilated by The Other: in its terrible, dominating act of
representation, it assumes the form of human while consuming the lived
essence of the individual.
In the climax of the episode, Sapphire attempts to turn back time, liter-
ally, so Steel can catch a glimpse of the monster. But there is a barrier and
she fails. In the aftermath, she realizes the creature is not in the first photo
but in every one ever taken. When Steel demands to see the monster’s real
shape, he is asking the impossible because it does not have a single shape. It
is omnipresent, existing:

SA: … In every photograph there ever was.

ST: Well, who is he in this one? Him? Him? Him?
SA: No, they have their own faces. The figure we’re looking for will always
be half-seen or turned away like that, or not even seen at all.
ST: What about that one?
SA: Could be behind the fence or in the street beyond or in the next room.
ST: But always in there somewhere?
SA: Yes.
ST: So every photograph is a photograph of infinity.

With this, Steel begins to abandon his foolish – though understandable –

quest for the subject, as he realizes the subject is impossible without its con-
text. Real humanity has its own face because it is always individual. But
along with use-value comes exchange-value, the capitalist appropriation
of the human commodity. Our alienated labour power, congealed into the
social relation of capital, exists everywhere. We do not need to see it directly
because it is “in the street beyond”: its social existence shapes ours. Every
photograph is the infinity of alienated capitalist social relations.
This is why the man without a face cannot be destroyed: he has success-
fully colonized reality. He reveals himself to Sapphire and Steel, appearing
as two different people. When they ask to see his real face – fixing the enemy
of subjectivity – he escapes into a nearby photograph. When they find him
in it, he vanishes into another one. Steel vainly declares that every pho-
tograph must be destroyed, and reminds Sapphire they destroyed a time
monster that way in a previous adventure. But Sapphire wisely points out
this is impossible: “That was one painting in one house. This is the whole
 Dystopias and utopias 127
process, the entire art of photography. Now do you have time to destroy
every photograph that exists in the world?” Steel has no answer; individ-
ual instances of exploitation can be eliminated, but the process of capital
accumulation itself? This is Walter Benjamin turned on his head; copying
images does not remove their aura, it just spreads their alienation further.
Worse, when Sapphire and Steel make contact with Ruth, a woman who has
been trapped out of time into a photo and exists solely in her memories, she
begins to wake and the faceless man burns the photo, destroying her. The
faceless man – the capital-S Subject – assumes a human likeness, destroys
actual humans and then presents itself to everyone as the “real” humanity.
To extend the analogy to its conclusion: the faceless man’s photos are
the likeness assigned to us as individuals, the capitalist subjectivity that
leers back at us from every Instagram account, mirroring our lives as they
should be rather than as they are. As Bloch and Marcuse repeatedly empha-
sized, humans have an incredible capacity for ingenuity, to imagine ways
out of this world and into new ones. In this reckoning, that capacity has
been wiped away. There is no independent likeness, no subjectivity to be
created through ever-greater appropriations of reality. Fisher would agree:
it is impossible to destroy all the photographs in the world, because iden-
tity in late capitalism depends on those photos, even as the subjects sink
into nervous hedonism, mental illness and precarity in response. You are
nothing without the thing that is destroying you. That there is no escape is a
given: but here, there is no escapism either.
If this sounds suspiciously like Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no alter-
native,” it should. Of course the capitalist would argue there is no alterna-
tive to capitalist subjectivity, because the malevolent spirit of capital must
act to restore normality. Ruth must not be allowed to understand her real
situation, the fact that memory and temporality has been taken from her.
But here we must part ways with Fisher, Steel and Sapphire. If capital must
continually reinforce its timelessness, its feint towards eternality, then it rec-
ognizes the space for alternatives exists, and that alienation is never total.
In this way, Sapphire and Steel’s photos – not to mention the agents’ fate to
be lost in space and time in the series’ last episode – suggest escapism within
dystopia. Images of this world do not have to trap their viewers, and flight
from this world does not necessarily lead into the waiting arms and overar-
ching, structured imagery of the faceless capitalist.
The traditional definition of a dystopia is a utopia in reverse, exaggerat-
ing the holes in the capitalist lifeworld to make them visible. Sapphire and
Steel’s dystopia extrapolates present-day despair into a never-ending future,
a move so common that it has infiltrated daily life as one of Raymond
Williams’ structures of feeling, in which personal meanings derive from
broad socio-economic and technical developments and crises. As Mirrlees
(2015) argues, Hollywood is only one fictional note of a chorus that includes
the World Economic Forum, the American National Security Agency and
even dozens of senior US military figures who, Femia and Werrell (2019)
128 Dystopias and utopias
explain, are planning for a global heating catastrophe. The US Department
of Defence are not philosophers; the fact that dystopias have reached the
highest level of officialdom suggests that the Situationists were right about
capitalism eating its critics. From “bleak future” TV shows like Black Mirror
and Westworld to what Willems (2016) identifies as the washed-out colour
palette of the Marvel Universe, hope and progress have drained from mass
medias’ depictions of the future. The immediate messaging of these dramas
may be straightforward – Ortberg’s (2015) well-known criticism of Black
Mirror as “what if phones but too much” – but they capture the structure of
feeling driving dystopic escapism. It is low-hanging fruit.
However, literature has effectively engaged with dystopias before, in a
way that poses questions rather than just provoking an emotional response.
Freud (1917/1995) marked the difference between mourning, a coming to
terms with loss, and melancholy, the inability to process it and remaining
mired in sorrow, fixated on a once-solid object attachment shattered and not
rebuilt. Politically, Left hopes affixed themselves to various objects, which
were either shattered or emptied of their transformative content: revolutions
from Spain and China to Vietnam and Chile managed to be contained or
crushed by the forces of capital, despite the heroism and political victories
of their combatants. Yet mourning has been supplanted by melancholy,
described by Traverso (2016) as an exhaustion of historical time in which the
future only belongs to previous generations, not the present. All that is left
of history is “a landscape of ruins, a living legacy of pain.” Escapism would
seem a natural response to such a legacy which, like Benjamin’s angel of his-
tory, helplessly watches the past and is blown into the future as the bodies
pile up. But the pain of melancholy results from trauma, not only shock: it
is the inability to detach identification from history, or ego from object in
Freud’s terms. This is a good explanation of antipathy towards escapism:
it feels like a betrayal of the past’s “imagined futures,” and yet, with no
realistic prospect to achieve them, the shattered object looms overhead, an
overwhelming presence.
Even though Traverso suggests melancholy can be a first step to
mourning, rather than a block, this puts a lot of weight on a mode of con-
sciousness to do anything in particular: consciousness is, after all, held
by people. As Miéville (2018) suggests, “neither mourning nor anticipa-
tion, generate radical, emancipatory politics on their own… The ques-
tion has to be what… they provoke in us in particular circumstances,
and, more, how they are deployed.” In other words, an escapism that is a
response to history, in its social, collective and political cataclysms, can
help move beyond the block of melancholy. Of course the contradictions
of capitalism are felt by billions of people who are rarely troubled by
thoughts of structural crises or the viability of communism. However,
those who desire social transformation, and who have set their sights on
the highest development of society, have subsequently further to fall. So
to move from the everyday horrors of which Sapphire and Steel warn and
 Dystopias and utopias 129
towards escapism, it is useful to see how it looks when history conspires
to make a better future unlikely.

Dystopias 2: The Unforgiving Years

When escapism is lost, so is the ability to project an anamorphic stain,
along with the Novum itself. Arguably the greatest observer of the Russian
Revolution, Victor Serge struggled with this premise. Having witnessed the
rise and fall of Bolshevism as a critical, ardent participant, in 1939 he was
still defending the revolutionary project, 20 years after its apex:

It is often said that “the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its
beginning”. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained
many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived through
the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious socialist revolu-
tion ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs
which the autopsy reveals in the corpse – and which he may have carried
in him since his birth – is that very sensible?

Serge knew that his utopia, and that of generations dedicated to the spread
of socialism, might not happen. Indeed, he lived to see the physical destruc-
tion of all the Bolsheviks who could have enacted it. But Serge was also
dedicated to seeking and nurturing the spark of liberation in impossible
conditions. If we take a step back from contemplating utopia – either the
fully realized system of the theorists, or the vague wishes for peace and free-
dom Bloch points towards – and consider the process of how one generates
a utopia instead, escapism appears as a vital first step. It is a recognition
that present-day conditions are intolerable, and even more importantly, it is
a mechanism by which to flee from those conditions towards an alternative.
What made the Russian Revolution important was the jump from dreams to
reality, the realization of escapist projections from the mire of war, famine
and exploitation to the hopes of social transformation. Serge knew first-
hand the fleetingness of escape: he was imprisoned in Siberia and was only
freed by an international campaign of French literary luminaries. However,
his deeper tragedy is that he had to question whether escapism itself was
possible.
His final book, The Unforgiving Years (2008), written a year before his
death in 1947, is an attempt to come to terms with that legacy and, through
this lens, the end of the dream of socialist utopia. Structured through four
vignettes, it is bookended by tales of escape. In the first, set in the febrile
atmosphere of pre-World War Two Paris, the loyal Communist Party opera-
tive D is heartbroken. He has seen all his old comrades executed by Stalin’s
secret police and realizes that if he ever expresses that heartbreak, he will
be next in the firing line. D suspects he may already be slated for removal,
resigns and plots his escape. Out of respect for his longtime comrade Daria –
130 Dystopias and utopias
who has learned of his letter of resignation and whose superior has sent her
to convince him out of his decision (or to simply entrap him) – he meets her
in a park, where he describes the betrayal of his principles, and their shared
sorrow at hearing old comrades confess to made-up crimes. He laments that
the Communists destroyed the souls of people by the rigid application of
rationalism. But conscience endures:

There’s a stubborn little glimmer all the same, an incorruptible light

that can, at times, shine through the granite that prison walls and tomb-
stones are made of; an impersonal little light that flares up inside to
illuminate, judge, refute, or wholly condemn. It is no one’s property
and no machine can take the measure of it; it often wavers uncertainly
because it feels alone-what brutes we’ve been, to let it die in its solitude!

In defending the Soviet Union’s brutality, he has been forced to justify

destroying the people who built it and their dreams of a better society. D
recounts how the communists eliminated all the precepts of bourgeois soci-
ety, from property and money to empire and oppression. But they reap-
peared in the planned economy. There is only one option:

…I’m getting out. I’m escaping. You must escape too … [but w]hat are
we escaping to? I’m talking as though one could escape into space. The
whole edifice is collapsing, and the only certainty is the coming war
which will be continental, intercontinental, chemical, satanic. We’ll be
left to ruminate sullenly in our corner, isolated, unknown, and useless,
muzzled by what cannot be told, as the catastrophes move closer …

The coming catastrophes were planetary in scale; there was no escape short
of leaving civilization, and that was less likely than death, itself swiftly
approaching. Just like in a global market for labour-power, the individual
hoping to stand on principle found themselves powerless. Here we see the
consequences of the loss of utopia and escapism, not just for an individual
character’s but for an entire world-historical movement, snuffed out shortly
after it arose by capitalist invasion and Stalinist counter-revolution: “[Stalin
has] a kind of madness of suspicion and fear, born of the sense of a crush-
ing mission that is too heavy for those unexceptional shoulders …. There
is some of that within us too, a vast psychosis of the threat that has hung
over us ever since we began to exist … Salvation lay in opening the windows
and letting in the air.” Yet it is doubtful whether D (or Serge) believed that
to be possible. There was no room for reform or honest accounting of the
crimes committed in the name of “socialism in one country.” The hopes of
the past had sustained the true revolutionaries, including Trotsky, as he ral-
lied the remnants of the Bolsheviks into the Fourth International, believing
through the force of theory and experience that real socialism could still
be built in the USSR. This judgment can justifiably be called escapist, not
 Dystopias and utopias 131
in the traditional, moralistic sense as a refusal to face reality, but in a more
nuanced way, as an attempt to live through the contradictions of the present
by invoking the “not yet” of the revolutionary past, in order to salvage the
future. Their hopes were revealed as a misreading of the balance of forces
between dwindling numbers of revolutionaries, an aggressive new capital-
ist class in Russia and its horrific secret police, and an acquiescent work-
ing class. This was Serge’s dilemma: faced with the severed link between
escapism and utopianism, the “old Bolshevik” had no option but to actually
escape, and yet that was impossible.
The failure of Soviet utopia would plunge the world into total war.
Serge’s own trajectory, never accepted politically by any group, and as
Weissman (2001) suggests, often at odds with those socialists whom he
felt met an uncertain situation with stock phrases, suggests that the end
of escapism imposes a heavy intellectual burden. If we do not run towards
dreams of a better world, and if capital does not have to command us with
human-seeming monsters because we have internalized its edicts, how is
life even possible?
Serge believes it is not. Once escapism is lost, only brutality is left. Writing
of the Eastern Front, Daria observes, “This is what man has become, this
murderous worm! Machines for riddling puny human bodies, smashing holes
into concrete, pulverizing the earth, whipping snow into squalls, drowning
the night under torrents of fire, orchestrating screams of agony, drinking
the blood of sacrifice.” Descriptions of the horrors of war are hardly rare,
yet the context of a failed utopia makes them all the more significant: with-
out the ability to even imagine leaving, we are harvested by the inhuman
machines that feed on human life. Serge is under no illusions that escape
exists as an abstract category freed from capitalist social relations. Daria’s
flight from Europe to Mexico forces her to reflect on her own social posi-
tion: “The glaciers of the Himalayas, the jungles, deserts, and oceans have
been conquered by motors more magical than any flying carpet; but this has
not made escape, or the fulfillment of dreams, in any way easier. In order
to cross borders, however fluid, you need to possess the mystic bureaucratic
passwords of secret services and government stamps.” The spies and gov-
ernment agents can cross with ease, but “the stateless refugee, the veteran of
selfless struggles (for what could be more suspect than the generosity of ide-
alists?)” are trapped in the net. This passage no doubt reflects Serge’s own
flight from the Nazi advance through France in 1940, when he witnessed
columns of refugees being cut down, children abandoned at railway sta-
tions and wealthy anarchist, socialist and pacifist friends turning him away
from their country chateaus. Escape is a privilege for those with means;
but this does not invalidate it as a source of hope. On the contrary, it sug-
gests that without a critical escapism, which moves towards utopia while not
being bound by schematic doctrine, the prospect of building a better world
is doomed. The inspiration for change depends on the belief that present cir-
cumstances are not eternal, and that the free play of ideas and possibilities,
132 Dystopias and utopias
including the most minute and half-formed, takes their place in the pan-
theon of radical thought along with strategy and tactics.
Serge did not believe the revolutionary phoenix could rise from the ashes
without a reckoning with all the forces of history, and he was not naive
enough to believe in a final victory. The Unforgiving Years’ tragedy, in which
D and Daria are reunited only to find there is no escape from Stalinism,
could be read as a condemnation of escapism. But the characters never give
up, even as their circumstances defeat them. Serge’s life and works rebut
the anti-escapist thesis: confrontation can fail, and blind action can serve
tyranny. Sometimes escapism – utopian dreaming in dystopian circum-
stances – is the only option for keeping one’s sanity and understanding his-
tory. As Serge (2011) wrote during his final exile in Mexico in 1943, “Men
have no choice but to make long detours through hypotheses, mistakes, and
imaginative guesses, if they are to succeed in extricating assessments which
are more exact, if partly provisional: for there are few cases of complete
exactness. This means that freedom of thought seems to me, of all values,
one of the most essential.”

Utopian escapism
The fact that escapism is usually bounded by the horizons of dystopia makes
its utopian alternative hard to conceptualize, let alone explore. In one sense,
the two contradict each other: escapism is a flight away from turmoil, not
a plan for an ideal destination. However, while a progressive escapism may
refuse to detail the actual shape of utopia, it does articulate the unspoken,
unmet desires of those who need to get there. If utopia is the goal, escapism
is the process. An escapism that aims at utopia articulates a world freed
from social contradiction, along with an expanding of creativity and poten-
tiality that is impossible for the vast majority.
Indeed, the focus on conscious, realized utopias crowded out utopian
escapisms. Mumford (1922) attempted to drive a wedge between them, coun-
terposing utopias of escape to those of reconstruction: the former “seeks an
immediate release from the difficulties or frustrations of our lot,” leaving
“the external world the way it is,” while reconstruction “attempts to provide
a condition for our release in the future,” seeking “to change it so that one
may have intercourse with it on one’s own terms.” This binary of “aimless”
versus “purposive” utopia provides a framework for those who dream and
those who act. Mumford had sympathy for those who live in a “small, pri-
vate Utopia,” who “leave their bleak office buildings and their grimy facto-
ries, and night after night they pour into the cinema theater … [to] live for
a while in a land populated by beautiful flirtatious women and tender lusty
men.” He admitted a world without the need for escape would be hard to
imagine, but staying too long in its imagined utopia was dangerous, “for it
is an enchanted island, and to remain there is to lose one’s capacity for deal-
ing with things as they are.” In Mumford’s non-place, “life is too easy in the
 Dystopias and utopias 133
utopia of escape, and too blankly perfect – there is nothing to sharpen your
teeth upon.” Against this lazy escapism, inventors, engineers and the social-
ist utopians of the 19th century all built utopias of reconstruction that tried
to change the outside world. Thus Mumford’s utopia fell within an activist
schema, in which those who dream only matter if they act.
In a contemporary review, Becker (1923) suggested the gap between
escape and reconstruction was not so large as Mumford made out – that
the two in fact co-exist for most people, and pleaded for him “to accom-
pany his story of consciously constructed utopias [with] the story of those
unconsciously constructed utopias in which large numbers of men have at
different times taken refuge from a world which they found, or thought they
found, intolerable. These utopias have had a greater influence upon the his-
tory of mankind than the others.”
Becker may have been correct, but the fact that his call went unan-
swered is understandable: “unconsciously constructed utopias” are hard to
observe because they are unconscious. More importantly, they also have
fewer “teachable moments” than heroic attempts to transform the world.
Yet what they do teach is the classed nature of people’s lives. For example,
a fantasy of winning the lottery allows access to the Ultra-High Net Worth
Individuals’ rarefied world, all of whom actually do live lives of comfort
and ease surrounded by gadgets, magnificent houses and fine food. This
imagined world is real for them, and whether it is utopian or not depends on
one’s control over capital. A truly utopian escapism would be one in which
personal wealth ceased to function as a metric of survival or status. But
this would require the overturn of existing social relations, and those who
denounce socialism as “utopian” are really saying existing relations cannot
be overturned. For now, therefore, a utopian escapism is a comment on this
world, and not entirely a fantasy – or rather, a comment on the world that
turns an unalienated existence into a fantasy. If almost all escapist accounts
tend towards the dystopic, it is necessary to articulate non-spaces, in which
the horrors of history and everyday miseries of exploitation have been
negated. These spaces function as anamorphic stains to reveal dreamers’
utopian desires. Much more than cultural production that confronts and
expresses current conditions, utopian escapism establishes distance from
those conditions.

Escapist techno
Echoing Bloch, Fisher (2014) suggests a reactionary escapism enforces
existing social relations at the expense of the possibility of new ones,
looking backwards to a real, exploitative past. A more progressive escap-
ism estranges itself from a destructive present. This estrangement could
be effete, as in the New Romantics of the 1980s who married synths to an
out-of-time, camp aristocratic aesthetic, the deliberate invocation of the
alien as “an escape from identity, into other subjectivities, other worlds”
134 Dystopias and utopias
or, conversely, Joy Division’s bleak elegiacs to feeling trapped. One could
add the era’s alternative comedy of TV series The Comic Strip Presents…
(1982), whose intro featured a bomb dropping onto the animated idyll of the
English countryside and whose actors attempted to wreak the same havoc
with British social conventions. All attempted to escape their origins and
comment on their bleak cultural landscape. Yet the end of popular mod-
ernism moved the public mood indoors, from collective romance to individ-
ual sorrow, and electronic dance music enabled what Fisher (2014) calls an
“exile back into privatised selfhood.” Pulp said as much in their blistering
Last Day of the Miners’ Strike (2002):

By now I’m sick and tired of just living in this hole

So I took the ancient tablets, blew off the dust
Swallowed them whole
Ah, come on let’s get together
Come on the past is gone

In the detritus of the UK 1984–1985 miners’ strike, a major defeat for the
British working class movement, Pulp called on the age-old wisdom of
escapism, taking the “ancient tablets” – both Commandments and ecstasy
– to eliminate the past. Whereas Lennon and Ono took out a full-page New
York Times ad in 1969 to tell the counter-culture that “War is over! If you
want it,” Pulp saw 1980s activists saying the same thing about the class
struggle. Yet history did not end, and the amnesiac tablets fuelling rave cul-
ture tapped into a pre-existing escapism of which the mothership genre,
techno, has always been a part. Techno became progressive because it was
escapist: it aimed to transcend existing conditions for the working class,
black and queer progenitors of the genre.
1981’s Sharevari is widely acknowledged as the first techno track, inspired
by the tracks played by DJs at block parties in Detroit. The city was declin-
ing, its malaise stemming from the industrial decline of both the auto indus-
try and cultural industries like Motown. White flight led to de-population
and ghettoization, and repeated failures of urban renewal created a depopu-
lated downtown ringed by commuter suburbs. Sicko (2010) suggests that “[a]
ware of both the city’s former glory and its future possibilities, [techno] art-
ists found hope in a decaying infrastructure where none apparently existed.”
This found echoes in the pop-industrial rhythms of German techno pio-
neers Kraftwerk: their music was played across the US at the time, and,
Aldridge (2019) relates, genre founder Juan Atkins first encountered it in his
early teens. This was reciprocal: Kraftwerk themselves listened to Detroit
Motown and funk. Pattie (2011) argues that Kraftwerk and other experi-
mental German groups were practicing their own form of escapism, trying
to find musical forms and instruments untainted by Nazism.
This search for alternatives led Atkins, along with Rik Davis, to form
Cybotron. The duo helped initiate techno in the early 1980s, and it was
 Dystopias and utopias 135
pioneers like the Underground Resistance (UR) collective, formed in
1989, who spread it. Robert Hood, a UR member, found his love of music
through radio play of Ital-disco and local artists and enjoyed the music for
its estrangement effects. As Detroit suffered through the crack-cocaine epi-
demic of the 1980s, electronic music was his escape, along with many others.
Hood (2018) explained: “I had a series of ups and downs in my personal life
that made me realize that music was saving my life. This is my way out. This
is my vehicle into the future, you know, it’s like Model 500: Techno can be
your cosmic car … And I said, ‘Well I want my own cosmic car! I want my
own space ship so I can travel and get out of here.’”
For Hood, the fact that the future was unknown allowed it to be a space of
hope. The song Hood quotes, Cybotron’s Cosmic Cars (1983), spoke directly
to the escapist urge:

I wish I could escape from this crazy place

Fantasy or dream, I’ll take anything
Suddenly surprise, right before my eyes
All I see are stars, and other cosmic cars

Escapism was a form of resistance because it was collective: everyone wanted

to leave. Atkins (2011) says of the track, “it has always to a certain degree
been about a certain escape, an escapist attitude. Because there are some
times that you could be in a city like Detroit and it could get really bad. And
you just want to fly away. And sometimes you wish you could dream, that
you could just sail off to another time and space. A lot of my tracks allude to
that kind of adventure.” Hood saw techno as a way past the racial oppres-
sion and class exploitation that defined black America: “Our grandparents
afforded us the ability to dream. We didn’t have to be sharecroppers, we
didn’t have to be picking tomatoes and cucumbers and cotton anymore. We
could dream and be what we wanted to be. That’s what I’ve come from in
this crop of electronic musicians, dreamers and builders.”
Schaub (2009) suggests a contrast between early escapist techno and
UR’s firm commitment to activism and community uplift, for example
by members bringing young Detroit musicians with them on tour. Thus
it is important to emphasize that harnessing techno to escapism does not
mean avoiding or denying oppression: rather, escapist techno arose because
of black history, geography and politics and, for the genre’s founders, it
became synonymous with resistance. Pragnell (2020) musters techno for
the cause of Afrofuturism, in which UR’s music provides the high-tech
soundtrack to not just anti-colonial struggles but the entire black libera-
tion imaginary. Eshun’s (1998) manifesto for techno eulogizes this potential,
shining with positivity for the liberating power of rhythm and futurity. He
invoked the anamorphic stain in multiple ways, calling the Cybotron “the
electronic cyborg, the alien at home in dislocation, excentred by tradition,
happily estranged in the gaps across which electric current jumps.” This
136 Dystopias and utopias
is more than wishful thinking; techno represents techne, the possibility of
speed and future made silicon-flesh: “Detroit Techno is aerial. It transmits
along routes through space, is not grounded by the roots of any tree.” An
invocation of futurity – an escapism that restarts the cancelled future – is
built into the structure of the music.
The nuances within and between electronic music subgenres are vast and
labyrinthian, but it is worth noting that Detroit techno tends towards sim-
plicity and purity, more so than other genres of electro. The build-ups and
breaks of commercial EDM are non-existent, and the songs and lyricism
that accompany more uplifting genres, like house and its infinite variations,
are mostly absent. If anything defines Detroit techno, it is machine-like rep-
etition. The music is, of course, human-made, with all the experimentation
that marks artwork. But the art of the digital audio workstations available
to anyone with a laptop involves the manipulation of loops, sampled or gen-
erated, placed onto a virtual workspace and distorted far beyond their orig-
inal sound. They would play forever if the producer did not hit the “stop”
button. Applied to Detroit techno, this closely approximates the escape into
the machine: a pure sound unsullied by human limitations. It is more than a
soundtrack to a dream: in its unrelenting and unstopping rhythms, techno
refuses the listener the emotional catharsis of trance or house. It is a place
to escape to, but it is not necessarily a comfortable one; techno, particu-
larly its Detroit incarnation, can leave the listener or dancer with a sense of
unease, like she has come to inhabit a world of machines that do not care
whether she is there or not. The skittering washes of background noise or
the staccato hits that might once have been a cymbal are not human noises.
In techno, we are truly leaving the human world behind. A Brechtian realist
might wonder whether, in denying any comfort to the listener, and leaving
full affiliation as the only option, Detroit techno could be the purest form of
alienating music: the anamorphic stain that tells its listeners there is another
world possible, but to find it we have to destroy this one. Those who find
that prospect frightening might consider what it means when escaping the
present is better than celebrating it.
Yet this does not exhaust techno’s possible meanings. Despite its flight
from less-mediated sound – such as the plucking or hammering of a string
by a human – techno is not anti-humanist. To hear techno as the chorus of
fascist trans-humanism – a conceit most famous from Vangelis’s soundtrack
to 1982’s Bladerunner, and repeated many times since – is to fundamentally
misunderstand its ambiance. Even in its most stripped-down, alien forms,
techno is about humans embracing the chance to shed their existing con-
straints. Sometimes that is a comment on the present, as Detroit super-
star Jeff Mills (quoted in Glasspiegel and Bishop, 2011) says of UR’s “The
Theory”: “I think that that track really sums up a lot about Detroit and
the people, and this idea about the future and the consequences of always
reaching further and further and further.” But other times it is celebratory:
as activist and UR label manager Cornelius Harris says of the up-tempo
 Dystopias and utopias 137
“Strings of Life,” “you know, it’s not called ‘Strings of Death.’ It’s all about
this great future that we’re a part of; it’s about looking for something else.
We’re trying to find a place where we can do what we want to do and not
be tied into other crap.” The escapist potential that Harris names matters
because of the music’s external, circumstantial constraints. Under condi-
tions of decay and crisis, the escapism of early Detroit techno was not a
delight for dilettantes but a necessity. It is very much like one of Mumford’s
utopias of reconstruction, in that Detroit techno continues to be an at-times
conscious, at times unconscious attempt to hear the sound of the not-yet,
and a definite invocation of phantasy. Yet techno was not the only music
genre that speaks to escapism. In its ability to describe a reality to a mass
audience that might never experience it directly, hip hop has also grappled
with the desire to flee to a better place.

Escapism in hip hop

Eshun calls hip hop’s affirmations of street credibility “putrid corpses of
petrified moralism,” the figure of the gangster becoming yet another tradi-
tionalist icon to set black culture in amber. He counters hip hop’s posing
with that of techno’s alien or cyborg, creating ruptures rather than con-
tinuities. This seems a rather abrupt judgment, particularly in 1998 when
the “Golden Age” of hip hop, roughly from the mid-1980s to the early
1990s, was fresh in memory and, as Dyson (2004) points out, the corpo-
rate-label gangsta-rap artists both spoke in code about their communities’
struggles and shared the stage with conscious hip hop artists. In fact, as
the music of hip hop culture, rap reflects the same debate over escapism
as any art form.
Consider one of the Golden Age’s famous conflicts: Mobb Deep’s attack
on Keith Murray’s (1994) song Escapism. Murray had penned a cannabis-
infused ode to space travel (or vice versa), with lightweight bars like “I went
through a Milky Way of stars/And landed on my destination, which was
Mars,” Prodigy of Mobb Deep responded in 1995’s The Infamous Prelude:
“to all them rap ass n_____ wit ya half assed rhymes talkin bout how much
you get high, how much weed you smoke and that crazy space shit that don’t
even make no sense: don’t ever speak to me when you see me, knowaimsay-
ing?” Prodigy’s threat of violence is tempting to dismiss as an overreac-
tion – it is, after all, a song about getting high with Martians. But he did
reflect some of rap’s antipathy towards artifice and expressed the founda-
tional concept that artists must reflect where they came from, not selling
out their community’s representation for personal fortune. Why rap about
travelling to Mars when there are far more important issues at hand? In a
genre dedicated to keeping it real, how to depict the fight against cultural
appropriation and for accurate reflections of the social context? Or as Public
Enemy’s (PE) Chuck D. put it in Escapism (2007), “two million black folks
in the penile/Got a world of white folks thinking it’s style.”
138 Dystopias and utopias
While rap has had more than its fair share of imitators, happy to mimic its
form while disregarding its content, the line between escapism and confron-
tation is not a clear one. Many artists have a healthy appreciation for escap-
ism: rather than counterposing “shit that don’t even make sense” to reality,
they examine that reality to find the escapism within it. It is no secret that
much of rap is about substance-based escapism, from the entire output of Tha
Alkaholiks and Cypress Hill to genres like sizzurp, fuelled by codeine. And
this has not gone unnoticed; as Prince Paul (1996) put it in Drinks (Escapism),
alcohol provides a shield against the everyday tragedies of a bad job, a dys-
functional marriage and annoying friends, before eventually failing:

Do try to escape, escape from yourself

You try everything, movies, television Zen Buddhism, travel
But wherever you go, you go too, and spoil everything
I don’t know man, just give me another drink

This resignation was what PE railed against in 1991’s One Million Bottlebags,
when they denounced the pushing of alcohol and drugs onto poor black
neighbourhoods:

Genocide kickin’ in yo back

How many times have you seen a Black fight a Black
After drinkin’ down a bottle or a malt liquor six-pack?

But even the harshest critics of escapism must acknowledge its utility as a
survival function. When PE returned to the topic 16 years later in Escapism
(2007), they invoked the massive numbers of black people in prison and the
failing education system, suggesting African Americans have used escapism
to evade their history:

They say eighty-five percent of Black folks forgot

We were slaves once up inside this box

However, this is not a condemnation. As PE list the crimes of America,

from stunted black lives to wars in Iraq, their repeated chorus of “Got to
get out of myself/There must be some kind of way up out of here” suggests
that escapism is not, in fact, a retreat from knowledge but a necessary sur-
vival strategy. Escapism here means imagining freedom from oppressive
circumstances:

If the prison is that skin you in

And your cell is sitting up inside your skull
They say you can’t get away from your damn self
When your earth is heaven and your world be hell
Check your head because Armageddon’s at the foot of your bed
 Dystopias and utopias 139
Knowledge of self may be avoidable, but the “Armageddon … at the foot
of your bed” is not. PE reverse the traditional injunction against escapism,
suggesting escape from the “old TV/In lyin’ color brother/Gots to getaway
to the other side, uh/Talk about escapism.”
This more nuanced approach cuts against a knee-jerk dismissal. Consider the
producer’s producer, Pete Rock, who along with C.L. Smooth (1995) recorded
Escape. Smooth raps about those who are jealous of his success and demand
money and favours. Every major stanza ends with the refrain “escapism,” until
it is clear that the musicians are advocating their own escapism, away from the
material world in which friends have transformed into bloodsuckers. There is
no need for a fantasy-mediation of escape; Rock and Smooth are leaving now.
It may be a statement of class differentiation – they are becoming wealthy, the
only reason they are being targeted by fairweather friends – but they are none-
theless taking a stand against those who would reduce them to money:

Hey, the number’s changed and the crib’s a little fatter

But if you was real, you’d see it really wouldn’t matter
Check the stat in fact yo, don’t ever try to peep this
Don’t mistake my kindness for a weakness

Rock and Smooth want their talent recognized, regardless of the money
involved, but the greed of their friends, and the sheer misery of everyday
life, make them dream of escape. As Havoc from Mobb Deep (1995) put it
the same year in Trife Life,

It’s the everyday, get the loot then breeze

Though my goal is to leave outta state, push ki’s
But all this bullshit holding me down, I can’t leave
Fuck a 9-to-5, I get the loot with ease

The bravado of Havoc’s character conceals the fact that full-time jobs are
scarce and poorly-paid, leaving dealing as the only source of income, which
serves to entrap him further. In which case, he and Prodigy might have
taken a second look at Murray’s advice: when he finished his trip, “Upon my
return n_____ thought I was in jail/Nah kids … I escaped from the world.”
His fantasies provided liberation.
Escapism (Gettin’ Free) (1993), by Digable Planets, celebrates this act of
leaving one’s environment. In a light-hearted invocation of a club night, the
song describes music bringing all parts of the community together, even vio-
lent rivals. It’s a way to not only “let down your nappy hairs” but build black
pride: “the beats is givin’ life like air.” Yet this is no frothy ode to a party; the
realities of black life in America are known to all: “Jams make me kite, if they
slam then it’s life remember this.” These prison-related terms are weighted
with dual meanings, as kiting means to surreptitiously share materials, and
black Americans are targeted with jail time far in excess of other groups. Yet
140 Dystopias and utopias
music is a way escaping that painful reality: a good song can remind the lis-
tener of a life left behind. For those who cannot escape the prison-industrial
complex, and for the lucky ones getting to enjoy a night of peaceful collective
celebration, escapism is a vital way to free oneself. Or, as Harris (quoted in
Orlov, 2018) said of the early UR club nights, “It was therapy. People would
talk about music being their drug, and the club as a way to escape, as an
alternative, a certain kind of freedom that you might not have outside a club.”
From survival to celebration, escapism has maintained its power to act as
anamorphic stain upon daily life. Eshun’s manifesto-like desire for escap-
ism appears in a new light, illuminating both techno and rap:

Escapism is organized until it seizes the means of perception and multiplies

the modes of sensory reality. Which is why you should always laugh in
the face of those producers, djs and journalists who sneer at escapism for
its unreality, for its fakeness; all those who strain to keep it real. These
assumptions wish to… handcuff you to the rotting remnants of tradition,
the inherited stupidities of habit, the dead weight of yourself.

Seizing the means of perception rather than production reverses Marx’s rev-
olutionary edict, or at least delays it. But the chance to change “the modes of
sensory reality” is often the only one available; this makes hip hop’s escap-
ism a form of objective non-contemporaneity, in which those with no stake
in either maintaining the present or nostalgizing the past seek to conceptu-
alize the future. The act of conceptualization signalled distance from the
crumbling lifeworld of capital as much in the angry, hopeful 1990s as in the
frightened, introspective 2020s. Both techno and hip hop form utopic imag-
inaries that bridge the gap between Mumford’s conscious reconstructions
and the unconscious variety, where artists desire to leave hopeless circum-
stances: as Murray told the martians, “I said, ‘I escaped from the planet
Earth/To let my mind untwirl because I’m mad at the world.”

Conclusion: towards a culture of escapism

Booker was right to identify escapism as a foundational response to con-
flict, even if he blamed it for social turmoil of which it was a symptom,
not a cause. The desire displaced by alienation appears in many forms,
from Freud’s creative displacement and Marcuse’s pleasure principle to the
estrangement of non-contemporaneity. All are forms of fantasy, a necessary
articulation of desire for those whom capitalism entraps rather than uplifts.
The fact that the anamorphic stain of escapist fantasy can sometimes veer
reactionary, as with Tolkien, does not change its value as a tool of estrange-
ment. The cultural production of this desire can be dystopian or utopian,
devouring subjects like Sapphire and Steel’s monster without a face, rear-
ing up from the depths of history like Serge’s flight from Stalinism or cel-
ebrating black artists’ humanist machine-music in a Detroit club. Despite
 Dystopias and utopias 141
the broad and necessarily schematic nature of these examples, the common
thread binding them together is that escapism is not simply a cultural prac-
tice, to be observed and collated, but a necessary response to alienation. Its
liberatory impulse suggests a world that cannot be realized in this society
but also cannot be denied.
Escapism must appear, because the straitened nature of work and repro-
duction in a capitalist society, not to mention its secular crises that land
with such raced, classed and spatial force on people, spark resistance from
its subjects. Cultural production and consumption are not so commodified
as Fisher believed: the material contradictions of capitalism raise their ugly
heads multiple times to signal uneven integration, both in the construction
of progressive, forward-thinking escapisms, and in the resistant reception of
reactionary escapisms. Indeed, there is an irony in Fisher citing Sapphire and
Steel as inspiration for a stalled pop culture on endless repetition, when their
entire oeuvre was devoted to changing time. 4 The degeneration of late capital-

ist culture and its enclosure of escapist possibilities is undeniable, but it is not
permanent, any more than capitalism can maintain itself as a stable system
of exploitation. Its constant volatility creates class conflict, in the Marxian
canon; however, it also creates competing conceptions of estranged worlds,
both in content and form. Subjective non-contemporaneous escapism fixes
ideal capitalist social relations, enforcing harmony and order in the fanta-
sies of Mars colonization or building underground bunkers to survive the
apocalypse. Objective non-contemporaneity appears as a form of denaturing,
a flight from the projections of bourgeois selfhood that content the ruling
class and torment everyone else. Not coincidentally, the entire Marxian tradi-
tion can be read as an anamorphic stain: workers and capitalists inhabit the
same world, but in radically different relation to it, so that their perspectives
– accurate enough when applied to their own class – appear utterly foreign
to the other. A classed escapism can prefigure communist social relations, in
which the act of imagining utopia derives from Eros, the drive to connect with
other humans that expresses itself through “fulfillment without repression.”
But more commonly, escapism is defined by its starting point rather than its
destination. In boarding cosmic cars to non-places, where creative flourishing
rules rather than acquisition, or simply articulating the effects of oppression,
escapist art reveals non-ideological truths.
If the cultural production of escapism is inevitable, due to the tectonics
of capitalism grinding and slipping beneath the surface of everyday life, this
inevitably poses the question of social transformation. Marcuse’s euphe-
misms in Eros and Civilization for socialism – “the progress of conscious
rationality”; “the highest maturity of civilization”; “a rational organiza-
tion of fully developed industrial society after the conquest of scarcity”
– are based on the overcoming of the performance principle and with it,
the end of sublimating instinctual needs. But escapism cannot be opposed
with a demand to confront reality. This is because it represents a refusal
of that reality, a recognition that the contract between socially-derived
142 Dystopias and utopias
expectations and lived experience has been broken. A return to reality, the
scene of our failure to transcend exploitation or oppression, not only fails
to solve the problem that sparked escapism in the first place, it fails to hear
the truths embedded in the escapist impulse. Escapism is the Hyde to cap-
italism’s Jekyll: it could not exist without it, and in its fantastic shapes we
see the frustrated hopes of the working class, the savagery of suppressed
emotions, the toxic shapes of arrested development – but also dreams of
freedom. Escapist art that articulates those truths does us a vital service:
even in its most dystopian forms, it demonstrates a clear non-desire for the
Now, and opens up a range of possible avenues for change.

Notes
1. Post-Marcusian psychoanalysts Cohen et al. (1993) emphasize the vital pre-
figurative aspects of play and fantasy, as ways to teach constructive planning
and self-expression.
2. The anamorph is easy to spot in genre fiction, even in times when one might
expect it to remain hidden. Consider that, during the high point of US imperial
hubris in the 1980s, the comedy-horror genre spawned films like They Live
(1988), in which anamorphs lurk among us unnoticed except when wearing spe-
cial, capitalist-spotting sunglasses; Chucky, the object of comfort turned into
rebuke of family values and raging id in Child’s Play (1988) and sequels; and
the shape-shifting anamorphs of Society (1989), who devour workers unlucky
enough to be drawn into their orbit. Anamorphosis more broadly reached peak
popular appeal in the “‘fish out of water”’ class comedies like Brewster’s Mil-
lions (1985), in which a minor league baseball player is forced to spend $30 mil-
lion in order to inherit $300 million; or the working class salesman attaching
himself leech- like to the professional banker in John Hughes’ (1987) Planes,
Trains and Automobiles. Practically the entire Hughes oeuvre relies on the ten-
sion between characters thrust out of their usual class environments, and their
popularity attests to this feeling being shared by a good many.
3. Tolkien becomes militant – or militaristic – in his denunciation of the “bar-
barity” of ugly street lights and the increase in traffic: “it is not possible to
preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences,
without actual offensive action… How real, how startlingly alive is a factory
chimney compared with an elm-tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream
of an escapist!” His constant invocations of feudal, agrarian socialism make
more sense in this light.
4. Sapphire moves time forward and back in every story: it is one of the key con-
tinuities between episodes, marked by the same special effect (her eyes turn
bright blue). As she explains in the Fifth Assignment (O’Riordan), “Time is
not as rigid a concept as most people would believe.”

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5 The uses of escapism

Give me back the Berlin Wall –

a thousand dwellers in free fall
moonbase domes, a man on Mars
humming fast electric cars …
You say the future’s murder, brother?
You don’t like this one, try another.
When yesterday’s tomorrow went
Today was made by accident.

Looking Backward, on The Year 2000 (as it appeared from the year 1970)
or The Future, with apologies to Leonard Cohen, Ken MacLeod

Written decades after the break-up of the Soviet Union, MacLeod’s (2006)
poem evokes the analogue, as-yet-uncancelled future that the triumphalist
era of high modernism was racing towards. As a riff on Leonard Cohen’s
(2011) The Future, it repeats the first line, “Give me back the Berlin Wall”;
but where Cohen pairs Berlin Wall with “Stalin and St. Paul” – the mur-
derous myths of Communism, Christianity and all meta-narratives of pro-
gress – MacLeod defends dreaming of a better world. “You say the future’s
murder, brother?”; so is the present, here “by accident.” Without democratic
social planning, human society slips inexorably towards barbarism, and a
technologically liberated future slides out of view.
And yet, it would be equally foolish to dismiss Cohen’s sense that some-
thing has gone deeply wrong: “The blizzard, the blizzard of the world/Has
crossed the threshold/And it has overturned/The order of the soul.” One
need not root that loss in the decline of European tradition (“There’ll be the
breaking of the ancient Western code”), or mourn a lost overturned order,
to agree with Cohen that the triumphalist futurism was rife with contradic-
tions, and that looking back to simpler times does not abate the blizzard.
Without social transformation, the high-tech future would be alienating.
With apologies to Lyotard, no amount of jouissance would turn people into
machines: the old question of who controls the machines, and to what pur-
pose, has to be answered first.
 The uses of escapism 147
Rather than descending into The Future’s myth that all meta-
narratives of progress lead to murder, MacLeod defends dreaming of a
better world: “a thousand dwellers in free fall/moonbase domes, a man
on Mars/humming fast electric cars.” MacLeod asks Cohen, “You say
the future’s murder, brother?” and answers: “You don’t like this one, try
another.” The answer to Cohen’s cynicism and MacLeod’s utopian frus-
trations, then, is political, and as of 2021, redistribution and social justice
are back in the public eye after a long absence. In the UK, the Labour
Party witnessed 4 years of social democratic leadership under Jeremy
Corbyn, before he was outmanoeuvred by the Conservative Party and
rightists in his own organization; the Occupy Movement in 2011 brought
the concentration of wealth among ruling elites into global focus. Bernie
Sanders’ insurgent presidential nomination campaigns of 2015 and 2019
contributed to a demand for public healthcare in the U.S.; the success of
the Democratic Socialists of America and some of their affiliated rising
stars, like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, made the hitherto
unthinkable moniker “socialist” into an acceptable term of public debate
and discussion. None of these developments could be considered revolu-
tionary – although, in this author’s opinion, they are absolutely neces-
sary for rebuilding any future transformative movement – but they are all
firmly political and on the Left. Given that, why be content with escapism
as an object of study, when changing the conditions creating it should be
the main concern?
The expression of a desire for social change is, of necessity, mediated.
Politics and escapism overlap, but they must be bridged, not conflated.
Escapism cannot be saddled with the weight of strategy, because as soon
as it approaches politics, it runs up against the very reality it tries to evade
and the dismissals outlined in Chapter 1 gain new currency. But neither can
political strategy evade escapism: as we have seen, calls to “face reality” will
meet resistance from those who face too much of it already.
This chapter briefly examines the “real utopias” articulated by Erik Olin
Wright and others. The barriers that small-scale utopias face in competing
with capital in the market for labour power and other commodities restrict
escapism as a practice. Escapism has few direct implications for the latter;
instead, it is best understood as a sign of human agency. As we have seen,
the experience of the capitalist lifeworld is one of innumerable constraints
on and distortions of the Self. Far from being a complete human essence
waiting to break the bonds of capital’s chains, the Self remains underde-
veloped, mediated through the alienated external conditions it is born into.
In this way, this chapter suggests that escapism is a form of what Lukács
defined as class consciousness, in which the working class becomes aware of
and acts to change its circumstances.
We have finally arrived at late escapism, in which a system unable to resolve
its crises sparks new forms of self-conception and affiliation. Rejecting
the dangers of commodified aesthetics, escapism appears in practices like
148 The uses of escapism
fandom, most notably in the global followers of k-pop superstars BTS, who
embody a resistant response to neoliberal mastery. The reasons for escape
from the capitalist lifeworld are as varied as the alienated subjectivities of
the working class: the growth of escapism reflects the decline of late capi-
talism, and the rise of a new collective self-understanding that the system
cannot satisfy human needs.

Turning escapism into escape

Jameson’s (2003) famous quote, “Someone once said that it is easier to
imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” may be
a joke born of exasperation, but it appears increasingly true. The covid-19
pandemic that appeared in late 2019 and spread worldwide by the following
March posed the problem concretely, in that the end of the world seemed to
be well on its way, while alternatives remained sporadic and fitful. The neo-
liberal social order can still be shaken by street protests, and there are victo-
ries for women’s rights, indigenous sovereignty and other movements borne
of patient, long-term activism. However, the monster of the value-form and
its lack of consideration for human life looms large. The move to escapism,
and the sense of the future being cancelled, is an ideological reflection of the
crisis of neoliberal regulation. Living in the hangover of deindustrialization
and its effects – the rise of the gig economy and wage stagnation, among
others – sparks a desire to leave.
Escapism speaks to the repressed desire for happiness that Marcuse
identified as a social-civilizational goal. That is not articulated as a goal
of wealth and power redistribution – and outside of an organized col-
lective alternative, it cannot be, for individual workers confronting the
labour market remain powerless to change the terms of sale. When the
majority in that circumstance find no outlet for their repressed desires
and frustrations, their “collective individualism” gives it social force. It
would be no surprise to Marcuse that late capitalism has yet to blos-
som into a state of play. Freud’s prediction of the triumph of the death
drive may yet come to pass, if runaway climate change and the pandemics
it feeds increase in scale and rapidity, to say nothing of the usual con-
flicts caused by capitalism’s anarchic and competitive global order. It is
precisely this seeming inevitability of disaster, coupled with the lack of
agency to resolve it, which leads to escapism, as a form of agency when
all others are unavailable.
Given the generalized apocalyptic mood the 21st century established
early on, it is a reasonable question whether escapism is good for more
besides signalling distance, important though that may be. Escapism in
practice converges with utopianism, not only in the daydreams and night-
mares described in Chapter 4, which vanish on the last page or at the end
of the song, but on the ground in community-building. This suggests that
escapism can turn into escape, and that the new world can be built now.
 The uses of escapism 149
Batalov (1985) identifies two types of utopian dreams: the Right-escapist
technocrat who, as we saw in Chapter 1, removes the subject altogether, con-
structing a system without human imperfections, and the romantic utopian,
who tries to create perfect subjects instead. Rejecting large-scale coercion,
the romantics attempt small-scale experiments in ethical living and moral
appeals. For example, intentional communities had a vast influence in 19th
century America, where hundreds of utopian colonies sprung up based on
the communistic plans of Owen, Fourier and others. Most plans failed,
but the 1960s saw a resurgence in intentional communities, often rural
and farm-based, some of which continue to today. Kanter (1972) defended
the new experiments by pointing out that their anti-utopian detractors are
often capitalist ideologues, who denounce any non-capitalist enterprise as
“escapist.” These real utopias are, in fact, pragmatic, trying to narrow, not
eliminate, the gap between the ideal and reality.
This has been nuanced by contemporary theorists, who have observed
the heirs to counter-cultural communities creating more diffuse and less
“intentional” practices. What Cooper (2014) names everyday utopias
“don’t place their energy on pressuring mainstream institutions to change,
on winning votes, or on taking over dominant social structures. Rather
they work by creating the change they wish to encounter, building and forg-
ing new ways of experiencing social and political life.” Facing mainstream
dismissal and disdain from the Left, they nonetheless prefigure utopia
through process, not goals. Small-scale ethical projects provide a pedagog-
ical solution to escapism, harnessing its liberatory energy towards realistic
goals and, through that, inching closer to a better world. This broadens
the definition of utopia from the intentional communities Kanter describes
to creating and engaging with social institutions and practices, which as
Levitas (2013) explains, embody change and “a form of knowledge about
possible futures.”
This approach has much to recommend it, because creating an alternative
walled off from the world, using methods – and people – thoroughly steeped
in the system they reject, can lead to problems. Federated small communities
tend to quash common values and goals as they scale upwards. For example,
Kanter’s descriptions of Synanon, the former ex-addict community that mor-
phed into a group of communes, replete with demanding physical work, sleep
deprivation and continual intra-group criticism sessions, suggest that com-
mon values are not necessarily social. With no way to expand these models
beyond the old principle of propaganda of the deed, Kanter suggested more
research. But an easier solution would be to abandon the aspiration to change
the world altogether: freed from the heartbreak of revolutionary practice,
utopian projects could create spaces at a remove from the exploitative and
patriarchal spaces from which practitioners are excluded.
This appears to be a straightforward case for escapism, which itself
eschews world-building or strategic plans. Co-ops, farm-to-table schemes or
alternative currencies are a step back from the more ambitious intentional
150 The uses of escapism
communities, in that they are not designed to be all-encompassing, or even
that separate. As Cooper points out, “Far from offering totalizing expres-
sions of what an ideal self-sufficient life could be, everyday utopias are more
akin to hot spots of innovative practice.” The loaded terms of “totaliz-
ing” and “ideal” are, of course, criticisms: discursive representations that
erase the marginalized and oppressed as they attempt impossible goals. It
would appear far better to provide temporary reprieve in the form of vege-
table boxes or ethically-sourced olive oil. An innovative practice is an ideal
space for escapism, expressing the same basic content as the dance floors of
Detroit in the early 1990s.
Yet shifting the problematic does not remove the problem: if every-
day utopias are always temporary, small-scale, and not reproducible in
different localities or at different sizes, then it is a legitimate question
as to whether they prefigure anything utopian at all. This is fine if the
goal is simply temporary escape and the release of frustration with a
set of unchanging circumstances. However, what the earlier utopians
got right was their systemic understanding of the problems they faced.
The utopian communities would have rejected “hot spots of innovative
practice” not because they revelled in being marginal (though many may
have done exactly that), but because small, partial solutions were not
commensurate to the scale of the problem. When society is irredeemably
compromised by consumerism, patriarchal gender norms or secularism
– whatever the commune wants to change – then new forms of knowledge
will not compensate: external society itself needs to be radically trans-
formed. One can disagree with the methods of intentional communities,
but they follow logically from the goals. According to Kanter, “[u]topian
communities are society’s dreams” that attempt “structural reform”
and “the creation of new social worlds or communities where the old
problems no longer arise.” This “romantic, optimistic, utopian vision of
human potential” is mainly a “mode of thinking” (emphasis added) that
“strives to implement ideals of a better way of living and relating.” Both
communes and everyday utopias make changes in perception their pri-
mary goal, but the former used that perception against the society that
communal adherents rejected. Contrast this bold vision, even with all the
organizational problems described above, with Cooper’s rather pallid
description of everyday utopian practice: “everyday utopias can revital-
ize progressive and radical politics through their capacity to put every-
day concepts, such as property, care, markets, work, and equality, into
practice in counter-normative ways.” Does showing non-market forms
of care and work help build political alternatives to an alienated society,
or does it simply reproduce the distance from necessity that the comfort-
ably-afflicted middle classes claim as their birthright? Are the everyday
distances established by, say, alternative schools simply a meek utopia?
And if projects fail, do they discredit even incremental social change?
The founders cannot be blamed, because they have good intentions – is
 The uses of escapism 151
the problem then human nature? What happens to those seeking to turn
their escapism into escape, through deep-seated social transformation?

Real utopias?
Batalov claims that both human and technocratic utopias evade these ques-
tions by rejecting politics, in the sense of understanding the system and
acting to change it. In which case, everyday utopian practice’s primary
accomplishment is to make participants feel better about themselves. This
is without question a worthy goal, but it is more commonly known as a
hobby. In contrast, even the trans-humanists could be lauded for having the
courage of their terrifying convictions.
Moving from utopian theory to practice means confronting a host of stra-
tegic questions about the relationship between the state, capital and political
actors. Wright’s (2010) “real utopias,” projects that are inside capitalism but
point outside it, are a good example of the difficulties involved in this tran-
sition. In harnessing utopian ideals to post-capitalist planning, they evade
the foundational question of what to do when capital refuses to be out-
moded. Wright’s schema describes four different kinds of anti-capitalism,
from revolutionary socialist rupture to projects that erode capitalism from
within. The localist everyday utopias, operating as islands of equality in a
capitalist sea, have little direct political value but could prefigure collective,
democratic forms of production and consumption. Wright further identifies
projects that erode capitalism but are oriented outwards, not just towards
the survival or flourishing of the participants: this fourth strategy moves
practically towards a future society. Both Cooper and Levitas refute the dis-
tinction between the last two strategies, suggesting local everyday utopias
shift worldviews and, in doing so, prepare communities for broader social
change. Wright might agree, but his key insight is that, rather than assign-
ing solely pedagogical value to economic micro-alternatives, he argues that
they can be anti-capitalist strategies in and of themselves. He names a series
of different production systems as hybrids, non- and anti-capitalist sys-
tems, from nationalized corporations all the way down to non-market fam-
ily reproduction, encompassing co-operatives and peer-to-peer networks.
These are not frontal assaults on capitalism, but – in keeping with a mis-
sion for practical escapism – tiny spaces of democracy that can be defended
and widened. These real utopias embody socialist values while working to
change the world.
Wright’s call to utopia is vital and squarely within the Marxian tradition.
This may seem odd, given that Marx and Engels harshly criticized Comte,
Fourier, Proudhon and many others who substituted ideal worlds for social
analysis. For instance, in The Civil War in France (1871/2010), Marx argued
that the working class has no utopias of its own, ridiculing the “didactic
patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their
ignorant platitudes” on the subject of how society should be organized.
152 The uses of escapism
Class struggle is a long-term proposition, passing “through long struggles,
through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and
men.” But the goals are not mechanically constructed: “[Workers] have no
ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which
old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.” Determining what those
elements might look like and how they might act is the task utopians adopt,
and in that sense we – those of us who are not well-wishing bourgeois-
doctrinaires, at least – must observe the actual “elements of the new society,”
rather than building them according to our own desires.
But as Draper (1966) reminds us, Marx and Engels admired those same
19th century utopians for grasping the contradictions of capitalism before
anyone else and their boldness in posing alternatives, no matter how fanciful
those might appear. Their critique of utopianism was not that it made future
plans, but that it neglected to ground those plans in a thorough analysis of social
forces: the balance of power between capital and labour, the myriad of ways
capital acts to lower costs and raise profits, and how labour organizes to resist
those changes. For lack of this complex social, political and historical under-
standing, capital could be treated solely as an abstraction or even ignored. This
is, unfortunately, what Wright and the everyday utopians have in common.
To recap and deepen our very brief discussion of political economy from
Chapter 1: Wright points out that capitalism grew up in the interstices of
feudalism. The story in the birthplace of capitalism, England, is that feudal
landowners needed extra revenue from their tenured farmers and granted
them more land rights, until the landlords went bankrupt and were bought
out or transformed into capitalists themselves. If it happened once, it could
happen again, and Wright calls for the slow colonization of markets by
non-market activities. However, capitalism is qualitatively different from all
the systems that came before it. All dominant classes impose their own sys-
tem of exploitation, and after the capitalist class overthrew or absorbed the
land rights of the feudal lords, they secured the conditions for their private
ownership of the means of production as a class. This involved the creation
and refinement of states, laws, armed forces and norms to make these sys-
tems of domination appear eternal. The end result of this, Marx and Engels
argue in the Manifesto, is that the working classes “have nothing of their
own to secure and to fortify.” Workers cannot, en masse, create property
to secure and fortify their class’s power within capitalism, because by defi-
nition capitalism excludes them from ownership. By this, Marx and Engels
do not mean exclusion from owning the means to live, like a house, but
from collective, social ownership of the factories, offices, farms, shops and
services that produce social wealth. Due to this historical and continuing
dispossession, workers have to sell their labour power, and the surplus it
produces is appropriated as capital, which further cements the private own-
ership – and thus power – of the capitalists. In short, private ownership of
production presupposes the existence of a class of disenfranchised workers.
They must enter the labour market as supplicants.
 The uses of escapism 153
Everyday utopians face a serious challenge in economically subverting
a system that uses workers’ own dispossession against them. Sometimes,
workers are able to muster enough capital to start a more democratic firm,
but as I (2017) have argued previously, those firms cannot compete unless
they adopt two different strategies. They can find market niches, such as
wealthy ethical consumers, and escape the imperative to cut costs. This is
why local and “ethical” goods usually cost more: they must compete against
market goods produced with economies of scale, including giant, efficient
distribution networks. Or they can slowly drop their commitments to sol-
idarity, mirroring the capitalist firms they seek to supplant. Witness the
co-operative Mondragon Network’s staffing of their grocery chain with
non-co-op labour, opening non-co-op factories in Mexico and China, and
more fundamentally, being exposed to the 2008 financial crisis through the
Spanish housing bubble. Even if these contradictions did not exist, there is
an upward limit to ethical production’s expansion. As Luxemburg (1964)
pointed out, the only possible customers for firms making household goods
are households. To conquer the heights of industry requires taking over
massive industries like construction, mining and shipbuilding, whose cus-
tomers are other firms. It is unlikely that shareholders will be convinced to
become everyday utopians.
The same rules apply for state-led non-market initiatives, such as a uni-
versal basic income (UBI), in which the state provides income to all citizens
regardless of employment status. Wright suggests that if worker co-op mem-
bers pooled their UBI funds, they would no longer have to rely on the mar-
ket to meet their needs. However, the market encompasses more than just
wages. First, as Engels (1872/2010) demonstrated in The Housing Question,
subsidies to workers’ incomes can just as easily be captured in other parts of
the circuits of capital. If wages go up, so do prices. If rents go down, wages
can go down. Second, the power of a UBI, like all of these schemes, depends
on whether there is a political will to implement it. Zwolinski (2019) musters
Friedman and Hayek to argue that a UBI is perfectly compatible with clas-
sical liberalism, fulfilling the goals of efficiency and reinforcing property
rights, as the direct payments of UBI form an individual check on overar-
ching state power. In context, UBI can further fragment workers’ ability to
demand collective social provision.
Wright believes non-market, real-utopias can colonize and overcome
capitalism, in the same way an alien species comes to dominate a new eco-
system. This ecological metaphor is useful, but not in the way intended.
Invasive species thrive in an ecosystem with no natural predators, whereas
the entire capitalist ecosystem is full of predators ready to destroy non-market
alternatives, or to let them provide the means of workers’ survival so capital
can slough off costs it would rather not bear. Capitalist firms will outgrow
their invaders to reduce the labour power embodied in the commodities they
make and lower the market price, to achieve economies of scale, corner the
market, drive competitors out of business and so on. They do so not because
154 The uses of escapism
they are evil but because if they do not, another capitalist will take their
place. This is what makes capitalism so destructive: not just its habitual
slide into crises, but that it cannot stop growing in a way that causes crises.
Any account of capitalism that does not emphasize its coercive nature gives
too much autonomy to the spaces outside of it.
There are organizing lessons from collective social provisioning outside
the market, such as the community gardens that provide nutrients for – and
subsist on the unpaid labour of – poor city-dwellers living in food deserts.
Yet these forms of provisioning are necessarily defensive, much like any
movement that forgoes broader political demands in favour of survival. For
example, Sedgewick (1976) describes the retrenchment of the British student
movement in the 1970s, which found itself shifting from battles against war
and oppression to the gritty indispensables of tuition and rent; “the tradi-
tions of rebellion that had been constructed in the clouds had to find their
proof, or else their refutation, here on earth.” The student movement’s vision
narrowed to immediate, tangible problems like income supports, without a
plan for changing broader conditions “Circuses have no pull when there is
such a widespread and intense preoccupation with bread.” Radical politics
became bound to a concrete defence of the everyday, and then disappeared
altogether.
At this point, a practical utopian might reasonably ask whether outlining
the different ways that capital controls the rules of the game is another way
of accepting helplessness. Would it not be far better to act than to dwell on
the ways action is curtailed? Must escapism remain in the realm of desire?
And this is a fair critique, because as we have seen, many everyday utopias
do not harbour such lofty ambitions as systemic transformation. Yet the
“practice of counter-normative ways” is a political position, acknowledged
or not. Everyday utopians can condemn the pretensions of radicals who
preach strategy while refusing to engage in the messy, real-world problems
of organizing; but they must also acknowledge that trusting to the power of
a good example is not sufficient, if it fails to address the systemic dynamics
driving exploitation and environmental degradation.

Structure and agency

If everyday utopias are the closest thing to a lived escapism, and they quickly
run up against the exigencies of the global market, is there any practical role
for escapism in changing the world? The short answer is no: escapism’s pri-
mary role is to resist the present. To valorize action risks once again elimi-
nating the utopian dreaming that the late capitalist lifeworld tries to either
snuff out or channel along safely commodified passages. Yet it is the conten-
tion of this book that escapism is a form of class consciousness. Its expres-
sion of the desire to flee normality is an anamorphic stain upon the rigid
mind-object of neoliberalism. Articulating escapism is a way to show that
working class subjectivity – the basis for class consciousness – still exists.
 The uses of escapism 155
This is a controversial topic, because the failure of the working class to
accomplish its historical mission has not gone unnoticed. Generations of
theorists have declared that workers actively subscribe to their subjugation,
having been distracted by brightly-coloured consumer goods like avaricious
parakeets. Frankel (1987) describes everyone from new leftist Andre Gorz
to post-industrialist Alvin Toffler conducting the postmortem of the work-
ing class, finding it stratified and dissipated by its new occupations, stripped
of its coherence by donning power suits, or subsumed under a mass of new
social movements and identities. These analyses fail on many fronts: their
focus on the Global North ignores the vast growth of the working class at
the frontiers of the capitalist economy in the Global South; their conflation
of goal with process erases the many reforms won by working class move-
ments at the heart of the wealthiest nations; and theoretically, they confuse
occupational categories with class and reduce consciousness to a matter of
individual consumer choices. The contradictions between the forces and
relations of production, which manifest in multiple ways between use and
exchange, overproduction and low profits and other dynamics continue in
novel and disturbing ways.
But if the working class never went away, it remains true that neoliber-
alism has been incredibly successful in opening up new spaces of accumu-
lation that were previously off-limits, like public services and the housing
market. In the process, it has disintegrated counter-systemic organizations
and the coherent spaces of work and community that nurtured them. While
rejecting the idealist proposition of a disappearing working class, it is fair
to ask the whereabouts of Bloch’s (1986) Novum, “the horizon of utopia”
that goes beyond laws of history and frivolous novelty to arrive at “creative
anticipation, this reddening dawn in the human will.”
In this question, keen observers will detect the relationship between Self
and society that animates every attempt to understand consciousness in
capitalist society, escapism included. As the debates over the political and
psychoanalytic concepts of the Self showed, humanism tried to re-centre
alienation at the heart of a Marxian theory of consciousness. Theoretically,
this put agency back at the heart of the global subject, the working class-
for-itself. However, Creaven (2015) suggests the model had a voluntaristic
flaw: if Marxism made a fetish of human agency, such that social struc-
tures lost any coercive impact, then workers would only be held back from
power by their lack of class consciousness. The focus of political organizing
could become prefigurative, changing consciousness through lifestyle alone,
direct action or socialism brought to the masses by enlightened bands of
elites. Those fully empowered to act as revolutionary subjects right now
simply needed to wake up and revolt. If that rarely or never happened, it
would be the fault of the workers themselves.
Althusser’s structuralist alternative asserted the need to understand how
different ideological, economic and political structures dominated capital-
ism at particular points in history, which meant a rigorous analysis of the
156 The uses of escapism
balance of forces: the relative strength of the organizations of class power,
like unions and employers’ groups. However, it also made the leadership of
the Communist Party vital in determining the nature of the conjuncture
and what to do about it. Later, Althusser nuanced this position, recasting
the encounters of workers with social structures as contingent. But this
remained within the bounds of overdetermining structures, giving prime
agency to things that moved objectively according to logics outside human
control. However unintended, this led to a mechanical vision of social
change, similar to Batalov’s systems analyst utopia that functioned so long
as no actual people got involved. For structuralism, people were akin to
billiard balls: they moved, but not of their own volition. If capital is a total
subject, as either structure or mental construct, there is no escape, and thus
no agency whatsoever. In this vein, Adorno (2003) gloomily suggests: “The
forces of production are mediated more than ever by the relations of produc-
tion, so completely, perhaps, that the latter appear to be the essence; they
have become second nature.” In practice, that mediation makes things that
govern our lives, like money, wage-work and private property appear nor-
mal rather than an expression of power. That power “is more palpable than
the power of any other single institution that has been tacitly constructed
on the basis of this principle, which is thus drummed into people.” We are
all constituted by the mediation, and “[t]he impotence of the individual in
the face of the totality is the drastic expression of the power of the exchange
relation.” Moving away from structuralist “impotence,” others suggest con-
sciousness is contested, not an inexorable slide into stasis; Cheal (1979) draws
on Gramsci’s concept of “contradictory class consciousness” to remind us
that the lived experience of being working class creates an understanding of
exploitation. Values and ideologies follow accordingly, and are fought over
by intellectuals and institutions of both capital and labour. Benton (1984)
disrupts the opposition between structure and agency, as actions of collec-
tives – those of a political organization, for example – become far more than
the sum of their parts, even though they are impossible without many indi-
vidual wills. Likewise, structures do not exist as tangible objects external
to the people acting upon and within them, and are better understood as
“conditions of possibility of action.”
Marx clarified this in his own elegant definition of consciousness in the
Eighteenth Brumaire (1852/2010): “Men make their own history, but they do
not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circum-
stances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted
from the past.” Those conditions are not simply resources, politics or geog-
raphy, but direct mental constructs that form thinking and acting, between
agency and the structures that condition it. The system does not function
without its “hands” – the workers driving the machines – who, unfortu-
nately for the capitalists, also have the power to reason.
Pursuing this logic, and like many socialists at the time, Lukács (1971)
believed the defeats of the post-World War One revolutionary wave were
 The uses of escapism 157
no more than temporary setbacks, and the belief in the immanence of com-
munism informed his comrades’ “messianic, utopian aspirations.” Yet as
events dragged on, and that wave receded, Lukacs found himself forced
to seek out “those often-concealed mediations that had produced the sit-
uation” (xv). Synthesizing his experience as a Red Army commissar in the
1918 Hungarian revolution, Lukács could have been forgiven for some tri-
umphalism. However, he did not see an automatic path to revolution. The
first task “is equally the struggle of the proletariat against itself: against
the devastating and degrading effects of the capitalist system upon its class
consciousness. The proletariat will only have won the real victory when it
has overcome these effects within itself.” Even at a moment when the global
movement for socialism was at its height, Lukács put overcoming “effects
within itself,” the struggle over culture and ideology, at the heart of devel-
oping class consciousness. He was certainly no utopian, yet it seems signif-
icant that the main proletarian task was internal, workers becoming aware
of their central position at the heart of the capital-labour conflict. This class
consciousness was the precondition for seizing the means of production
and storming the Winter Palace. No one is born with a systemic worldview:
coming to consciousness is a process and is filtered through ideology. This
is most pronounced when it comes to cultural questions, “the organic bonds
connecting these issues with the immediate life-interests of the proletariat
as well as with society as a whole.” To move from utopian thinking – revo-
lutionary dreams with no basis in reality or hope of being achieved – to real
social transformation required planning, class organization and leadership.
But more than that, it required a struggle over consciousness itself.
Putting consciousness and culture – understood in its full “intellectual
and spiritual” sense – at the centre of social transformation, however, is
simply a first step. Moving from an abstract understanding about the poten-
tial for agency, to a concrete plan to recognize and foment that agency, is
much harder. As Wolfreys (2000) argues, “the problem is not that workers
are duped or hoodwinked by ruling class ideology, but that their desire to
fight what they know to be unjust is constantly thwarted by the sense that
there is no alternative to the status quo. It is this sense of powerlessness
which blocks change.” That powerlessness can equally arise from both a
structural and humanist approach. Too much time as a bearer of structures,
as Althusser termed workers, would be enough to induce apathy in anyone.
Seeing ideology as a site of contestation may be accurate, as Gramsci char-
acterized it, but it also gets more tenuous the longer the revolution fails to
materialize. A practical impatience with playing the long game arises, and
Thompson (1959) calls the result “demonism”: blaming treacherous leaders
for betraying the struggle and causing mass apathy. Its opposite, what could
be termed the “angelism” of picking a few examples of strikes or demonstra-
tions to prove the imminent return of class struggle, can collapse under the
weight of its long-term expectations and create impatience as well. These
mechanical models fail to sufficiently integrate the empirical facts of wages
158 The uses of escapism
and poverty with their expression in psychology and affect. Worst of all,
they make it easier to ignore the circumstances of the vast majority of peo-
ple who, despite being potential revolutionary subjects, show little appetite
for their historic mission.
Adorno did not despair, seeing in the 1960s and 1970s social movement
upsurges “resistance to blind conformism, the freedom to choose rational
goals, revulsion from the world’s deceptions and illusions, the recollection
of the possibility of change.” Wolfreys cites the 1995 uprisings in France for
“the transformative effect of [collective] struggle” that creates embryos of
a new, democratic social order, and the same could be said for the numer-
ous rebellions since. Clearly, human agency has not disappeared, and it
responds to and constitutes the structures that envelop it. At the same time,
these movements have appeared against the backdrop of multiple, intersect-
ing crises rooted in capitalism’s inability to create sustainable reproduction,
for itself, its human raw material or the environment it feeds upon. It would
be hard to deny the cancelled future Fisher identified at the beginning of the
21st century.
Blunden (2005) suggests, “if society is riven by irreconcilable contra-
dictions, then the subjects active in that society will internalise those con-
tradictions in their own subjectivity.” These contradictions include flight:
escapism would never have the hold it does unless the mass of people were
trapped by the over-determination of the value-form and had to fantasize a
way out. What Bloch variously terms “process which brushes death-statics
the wrong way,” “subject and object in dialectically material process,” and
“the still undischarged future in the past” are all metaphors for a work-
ing class whose material existence holds the potential for un-alienated con-
sciousness. The emphasis must be on potential. Jameson (2016) emphasizes
that consciousness is imperfectly colonized, not total: “That’s the logic of
the commodity system: it’s virtually impossible for us to escape it, except for
brief moments.” This is also the mournful logic of escapism: it exists because
the present is unbearable. Yet it improves on powerlessness: neither open
resistance nor complete acquiescence, escapism signals non-acceptance.
Without this critique, we are left with something like Rojek’s (1992) Ways
of Escape, which follows conformist culture down a well-trodden path. For
Rojek, the spectacle of mass commodity society embodied in the symbolic
economy of leisure overwhelms class identity. The commodity form and
experience structures reality “rather than an enduring evolutionary pattern
of progressive class consciousness.” Following Benjamin, the end of origi-
nality and its aura is supposed to create revolutionary change, as workers
refuse commodity logic. Yet “how plausible is it to maintain that conscious-
ness-raising and radicalization are the only, or even the principal responses
to mass reproduction and standardization? … do some of the masses … not
prefer ‘the glamour of distraction’ to revolutionary objects?”
This strange formulation uses Marx to fight Marxism. It invokes evo-
lution as a principle in forming class consciousness, attributing it to the
 The uses of escapism 159
Marxist tradition, when it is in fact evolutionary socialism that Marx and
Engels spent their lives fighting against. Observing how commodity logic
has overwhelmed perceptions of reality and thus individuation itself, Rojek
then infers, “does what we know about the action of Modernity support the
view that history should be seen only as a pattern of evolution?” And as a
result, “Has not working-class consciousness succumbed to the same pro-
cess of internal fragmentation” as bourgeois consciousness?
In fact, fragmentation is foundational to a Marxian concept of moder-
nity, as Berman (1983) pointed out, and Marx and Engels took pains to
emphasize in the Manifesto nearly 140 years before that. It is a strange argu-
ment that sites all of cultural studies and the Birmingham School on an evo-
lutionary path, suggests that class consciousness slowly agglomerates and
then, naturally finding this untenable, gets back to reality and observes the
results that workers often prefer their mass-produced leisure time to revo-
lutionary struggle. From a Marxian perspective, it is precisely the ruptures
and discontinuities of the capitalist lifeworld that produce revolutionary
ideas, which themselves trail far behind revolutionary actions and usually
appear after the fact. Socialist thought appears in fits and starts, and only
progresses to the extent there are organizations and institutions available
to act as repositories of experience. It also points towards the need for an
understanding of escapism, as produced by the very alienation that Rojek
identifies but does not name.
Searching for enthusiasm and strategy amidst the wreckage of late capi-
talism demands not just fortitude but a certain distance from reality – and
from necessity, as Bourdieu suggested. Understanding where escapism
comes from and what it looks like helps avoid condemning those who do
not participate in social movements except at key historical moments. In
this way, escapism can be seen as a form of class consciousness: far from an
ideological weakness, it is a response to the material and ideological dislo-
cations of capitalism itself.
This brief discussion hardly encompasses the full debate on structure and
agency, except as a reminder of Ollman’s premise: Marx’s system is inter-
nally related, and escapism is one of the possible circuit pathways between
agency and structure. Exploitation is hard-wired into capital’s machine
for generating surplus value. Alienation is also objective, in that capital
relies on conscious, social workers to create value, yet this consciousness is
deformed by the conditions that bring it into being. Alienation is felt, both
as a response and as a constitutive factor of the personality. The shape of
that alienation is what gives us escapism.

Escapism and social transformation

Ascending further to the concrete determinations of everyday life, the
question of how people mediate their realities through culture, ideology
and psychology is not an addition to politics; it is at its centre. Reich (1973)
160 The uses of escapism
argued that, during the rise of the German Nazi Party, the realm of culture
and consciousness was overlooked by leftists concerned with meta-strategy
and grand gestures. From furniture and dress to parties at home, the Left
ignored the everyday habits of the working class while the Right celebrated
them as incubators for patriarchal, conservative norms. When the Left did
not ignore them, it pandered to them, mimicking the social forms of ban-
quets and patriarchal family celebrations that the Right had already made
its own. When the crisis hit, workers faced destitution, and the Left could
provide no answers that solved their problems programmatically or psy-
chologically. The disappointment of the working class in both the failure
of capitalism and the failure of the Left to change anything about daily
life laid the pathway to fascism. Reich pleaded: “We must pay more, much
more, attention to these details of everyday life. It is around these details
that social progress or its opposite assume concrete forms, not around
the political slogans that arouse temporary enthusiasm only.” It must be
emphasized that the “details of everyday life” are not simply economic
but non- contemporaneous. This was something realized much later by the
American New Right, which Kincheloe (1983) and Apple (1990) show plot-
ted its cultural war as a long march through the institutions that the Left
either ignored, like county and school boards, or had little access to, like
the mass media. As we saw in Chapter 1, Right-escapists were able to mobi-
lize the norms of “everyday habits” to speak to fears of decline and chang-
ing racial and gender divisions, while movements for social justice became
bureaucratized and lost ground. The fruits of this labour continue today as
Trumpism and its aftermath, the rage against a declining standard of living
and more general sense of loss that US President Trump was able to mobi-
lize, while the Democratic Party, in or out of office, did little to improve
healthcare, housing or working conditions.
Faced with a Right that has successfully mobilized a reactionary escap-
ism to its own ends – not just in the United States but, with varying success,
through global Right-populist movements – Gramsci’s famous aphorism
about capitalist decay rings true: “the old is dying and the new cannot be
born.” Yet this shifts rebirth into the passive tense, so that it is not clear
who is the mother or the midwife. The blame for the failure of revolutionary
projects cannot be placed on the Left when its organizational forces are so
diminished; however, as Lerner (1986) found, those seeking social change
were most likely to blame themselves for their failures, and this becomes
truer when the horizon of possibility shrinks closer to the present. Those
who fight for a better world struggle on valiantly in their groups, having lost
hope in the prospect of the masses throwing off their shackles, and conclude
that their audience is unwilling or unable to learn the wisdom of critique.
This frustration goes far beyond politics. The Mormon missionary trudging
sweat-stained through the heat of an equatorial city, looking for someone to
talk to and wearing down their heels on foreign concrete; the Scientologist
who has failed to meet their monthly sales quota of Hubbard’s tomes and
 The uses of escapism 161
must buy the unsold copy themselves; anyone on a mission can feel angry
that the ignorant masses refuse to let themselves be saved, and that the hard
work falls to those who have already grasped the truth. The more time spent
trying to change the system, the more an apathetic audience can look like
the enemy, sometimes greater than the real enemy of ruling classes, Satan
or body thetans. Meanwhile, radical liberation makes no sense to onlookers
because it lies so far outside of everyday life and experience as to be no dif-
ferent than any other fantasy. Those who suspend disbelief and seek change
through social struggle can discover that building liberation movements is a
lot more work than expected and not always fun.
It is an axiom that ideas change through struggle against unjust insti-
tutions or reactionary groups: in agitating against specific miseries, peo-
ple learn how to organize campaigns and come to believe in their own
collective power. Yet, when those movements face defeat or stagnation,
the staying power of those lessons can ebb and flow along with them. The
same experience of inequality that leads to a social explosion can also
create a desire to avoid or run away from it. The apathy that so many
on the Left observe can be more properly understood to be a masking
emotion, as Thompson (1959) explains: “Sometimes we catch a glimpse
of the immense potential of human energy and sympathy draining away
for lack of channels of expression: the unutilised yearnings for something
positive with which to identify oneself.” If contemporary imagining is
bounded by nihilism and repetition, then the goals of those wishing to cre-
ate a new world must include simply making it imaginable. He argues that
“[e]nduring militancy is built, not upon negative anxieties, but upon posi-
tive aspirations … It is always the business of the Left to foster the utmost
aspiration compatible with existing reality – and then some more beyond.”
Note that Thompson says “foster,” not “create”; it is people themselves
who aspire beyond reality, which the Left must articulate in ways that
make it part of acceptable political discourse. From there, pushing reforms
beyond what is acceptable is like opening a radical Overton window,
which looks out onto property relations rather than public opinion: “if
the people move towards objectives which prove unattainable within the
framework of capitalist society, their experience will complete their politi-
cal education.” If historical conditions have once again separated the pro-
letariat from its mission, even the perception of Lukács’ “organic bonds”
might appear utopian, or escapist. In this case, a progressive escapism
would function as anti-ideology, revealing class interests.
In fact, escapism can be found at the heart of even the most radical
organizational model. For example, Le Blanc (1990) explains that the role
of a mass revolutionary party is to de-fragment the working class, distill-
ing the experience of its many members into concrete demands and pro-
viding organizational continuity between events. This matters because
class struggle has a “discontinuous character,” and so does everyday life:
the “day-to-day fragmentation” of working class life splinters into political,
162 The uses of escapism
emotional and intellectual confusion. The mundane activities of organizing
a group – meeting, studying, discussing tactics and participating in cam-
paigns – provide an anchor to activists who would otherwise be cast adrift.
But as anyone who has spent time as an activist knows, the nuts and bolts
of organizing is not all that happens; on the sidelines of the meeting, on
the demonstration or in the cafe afterwards, discussions often veer towards
future possibilities or even impossibilities. In this way, a political movement
can harbour a necessary form of escapism, in which people who have devel-
oped a critique of an exploitative society synthesize their fragmentary expe-
riences and articulate collective desires about the shape of an unalienated
post-capitalist world.
A politics of escapism that acknowledges and empathizes with peoples’
predicaments is a part of that critique. Rather than beginning with an admo-
nition about not paying attention, a politics of escapism asks what problems
must be escaped from, and what people’s own alternatives might look like,
without the limitations of present-day restrictions. The most utopian fan-
tasy contains at its heart a political question about the transformation of
existing social relations. Living rent-free in a rotating hub many miles above
Earth conceals the problem of why so many must pay rent today. Dreaming
of a replicator that creates perfect meals at the touch of a screen begs the
question as to why the caring work of reproduction takes so much money
and time. For the vast majority who have no affiliation to formal politics,
their escapism reflects the contradictions they sense but may not be able
to articulate directly. Listening to that escapism is a way to engage with
those who might otherwise never consider taking an active role in their soci-
ety. This is in one sense a hearkening back to Marcuse and his politics of
eros. We need to express the drive to connect that capitalist alienation so
cruelly denies us. However, the hopeful invocation of play does indeed run
up against the immiseration of daily life, and it cannot stand the weight of
political strategy anyway. Escapism is a way around this dilemma, as a more
tentative exploration of libidinal energies rather than their suppression or
expurgation.
Escapism cannot be the sole answer to the cultural hegemony of the Right
and the hollowness of the neoliberal centre. It can provide neither the tem-
porary succour of an everyday utopia nor the foundation-shaking challenge
of radical politics, the latter of which is probably healthier now than at
any time in the past 30 years, thanks to the explosion of online Left cul-
ture and the offline movements it feeds. Escapism also cannot stand in for
strategic thinking: the defence of living standards is the basis for any Left
renewal. However, escapism cannot be set aside politically. Previous move-
ments generated questions of utopia and revolution at the same time as they
fought for concrete demands. It would be a boon if the Left had to contend
with widespread but unrealistic demands for revolution, but in a context
where even an “intense preoccupation with bread” sounds dangerously old-
fashioned, looking for hidden sparks of utopian longing becomes a necessity.
 The uses of escapism 163
Redistributive politics poses questions about why society is organized for
profit rather than human need, and this in turn provokes larger questions
about how this social organization distorts our subjectivities.
We can give one more word on consciousness to Adorno (2003): “No over-
all social subject exists. We could formulate this illusion by saying that all
social phenomena today are so completely mediated that even the element
of mediation is distorted by its totalizing nature. It is no longer possible to
adopt a vantage point outside the hurly-burly that would enable us to give
the horror a name.” At first glance a statement of despair, the internality of
alienation is in fact a starting point, not an end point. Adorno is not saying
that our subjectivity has been erased out of existence; as Chapter 2 showed,
human agency has a stubborn way of asserting itself even in the toughest
circumstances. In a system that strives to totalize, imbuing everything with
the sickly glaze of alienation, the most arcane effects of those mediations not
only help explain the system but suggest ways to change it. An escapism that
musters objective non-contemporaneity denies the present without mythol-
ogizing the past. It recuperates an identity caught between being driven to
produce and its own drives, not to gather strength for future exploitation
but as a genuine destination. Escapism lets us seek the Novum much closer,
in daily life.

Escapist aesthetics
As sociologists would be the first to remind us, daily life is a contested,
ideological category, which can be mustered for lived experience and com-
mon sense erasures of difference. It would be futile to gesture towards aes-
thetics that represent daily life – that is much too broad a category to be of
analytical use – and yet, the grand folly of escapism is that it is universal.
People yearn for other places they cannot reach. In this case, the aesthet-
ics of escapism are representative of daily life in the capitalist lifeworld, no
matter the breadth of that category, because they indicate the universally-
lived experience of alienation and how one might respond. Escapism is part
of unlearning the ideological everyday and embracing the anamorphosis,
which turns out to be much closer to disjointed reality than any smooth
narrative arc.
For Marcuse, even apparently childlike desires represented “the repressed
promise of a better future,” in which “the unreasonable images of freedom
become rational.” The most obvious place to look for those images is cul-
tural production, and it is tempting to see the artist as the eternal outsider,
holding society’s face to the mirror and articulating the grand truths of
alienation and rebellion. But however true this might be for individuals,
art as a social practice is firmly embedded in capitalism, Venäläinen (2018)
suggests, from its valorization of the so-called creative classes to the artist’s
status as the canary in the coalmine of the precarized, always-on social fac-
tory of post-Fordism. Subject to the same ideological battles of any other
164 The uses of escapism
industry, art becomes a temporary escape at best: what capital cannot fully
subsume, it will sell on its unique qualities instead.
Yet the very fact of art’s commodification is further proof of the need
for escapism, and aesthetic mediation; however narrow, still provides the
space in which escapism appears. Therefore it is important not to approach
aesthetics under capitalism from a position of blanket condemnation. The
common critique of the Spectacle’s images is that they hide alienation, and
Haug (1987) denounces advertising for sugarcoating commodities. The
products of an alienating system, set up to separate use-values from the
workers who made them, appear to satisfy deep desires when they actually
frustrate them. The erosion of equality and justice is embedded in every
aesthetic choice that promotes, rather than challenges the social order. One
could easily add escapism to the list, from console gaming systems to car
commercials showing solitary drivers on winding roads: a fantasy of escap-
ing the system that creates the needs for those goods can be sold just like
any other commodity.
This critique is, on the one hand, obvious: why would the aesthetics of
consumption even exist, if capital did not need to circulate its products
regardless of social need? We have seen in Chapter 1 the insatiability of the
lure of oniomania, and Zola’s bright white department store sought to blind
consumers to their peril. But on the other hand, if it is so obvious, why has
it lingered for so long? Generations of critics have warned of the dangers
of consumerism, to little avail. To take two examples: X-Ray Specs’ Art-
i-Ficial (1978) speaks cogently about feeling constructed by one’s purchases
and nothing else (a feeling reprised on 1995’s album Conscious Consumer);
Wings (2012), by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, tells the story of coveting,
obtaining, and being bullied out of a pair of Nike Air Maxes. This suggests
the problem lies not in the images’ veracity – we are so clearly being sold an
external, corporate identity – as in their function. Capitalist aesthetics cer-
tainly stimulate needs, often with tragic consequences, but the impetus does
not come from consumers too weak or stupid to see they are being lied to.
Rather, these aesthetics sell a world in which identity is unmediated and can
be incorporated onto bodies, into houses and into identities, in a way that
much of fragmented contemporary social life cannot. Commodity fetishism
only functions when workers have something that they have lost and need
to restore. This would be the passive Self we met in Chapter 2, which holds
a repository of unmet and undeveloped creative capacities.
This raises the thorny question of oppositional aesthetics: whether it is
possible to avoid prettifying the appearance of a system that should prop-
erly be disfigured or revealed in its true, monstrous form. If so, then any
fascination with the Spectacle – and any escapism that suggests coping,
rather than confronting it – is also monstrous. In Benjamin’s (2013) words,
“Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead
a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change prop-
erty relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving
 The uses of escapism 165
property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into
political life.” The problem is that the Left’s intended audience, the alien-
ated masses, blithely insist on participating in this veiling of monstrous cap-
italism. They not only actively consume the spectacle, but want to produce
it; when, as Smith (2013) points out, children value fame and YouTube views
far more than community spirit, this sounds like a ringing endorsement of
narcissism, status-competition, and the death knell for collective solidarity.
The lifestyle and fashion content creators of Instagram showcase immacu-
lately constructed images of joy and beauty, and the consequent rise of You
Only Live Once is an inevitable response, along with the resentment that
comes with inequality. Aesthetics long ago colonized political life; in this
context, escapism becomes a gesture of resignation.
But escapism has a dual purpose, reflecting the conflicted relation
between agency and structure. Even in its most fantastic aesthetic choices,
escapism becomes an imagined resolution to social conflict that prefigures a
real one. The latter may never get expressed openly, but that is not the point.
It remains a repository of utopian imagining that indicates the direction of
consciousness for broad layers of the working class. No one would suggest
that escapism needs to be a plank of a political platform – but then, very
few platforms have ever formally dictated correct forms of cultural produc-
tion and mental expression (and those that have, have tended towards the
nightmarish). Taking a step back, however, the semiotics of revolutionary
expression matter and their appearance is not foregone.
The very contradiction between use- and exchange-value, which Marxists
are so quick to draw upon when defending a systemic critique, cannot both
be true and yet not be reflected in consciousness. If commodity fetishism is
an objective process, and not dependent on education or attitude, then false
consciousness, as this book has argued, does not explain much of anything.
If to be a worker is to live with constant insecurity or hidden boredom,
then the Spectacle is more than mass distraction: the escapism of following
social media-perfect lives is a way of resolving the disjuncture between use
and exchange in everyday life. After all, it is entirely rational to believe that
there will be no secure job, living wage or housing awaiting you in adult-
hood. The only reasonable alternative is to self-brand, the entrepreneurial
nous of millennials. Wanting to be a celebrity is a form of self-preservation.
From this, a whole fascination with, and appreciation for those who present
themselves well unfolds.

The politics of aestheticization: BTS

At the time of writing, there is arguably no more influential global music
culture than k-pop, which has become South Korea’s foremost cultural
export. Talented adolescents compete to be chosen for years of gruelling
training and to become the singing, dancing, distant-yet-empathetic pop
gods that have graced screens and stages for over two decades. The roots
166 The uses of escapism
of contemporary Korean popular music lie in the first public performances
of the group Seo Taeji and Boys, in 1992, who brought previously-unknown
styles like hip hop and reggae to mainstream attention. In the wake of the
1997 Asian financial crisis and GATT-enforced liberalization of the media
industries, the government began loosening cultural industry regulations,
first targeting film. After some early hiccups, Korean films and TV dra-
mas achieved huge popularity domestically, throughout Asia and with dias-
poric audiences elsewhere, due to a confluence of factors, which Chuang
and Lee (2013) and Oh (2017) identify as a mix of displaying contemporary
wealth while referencing ancestral traditions, and a sensitivity to viewers
enamoured with romances both courtly and contemporary. It also does not
hurt that, in other markets, Korean imports were cheaper to broadcast than
local productions. This was not lost on successive governments, who began
expanding investment into other arts exports. According to Roll (2020), the
Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism now invests $5.5 billion
USD in pop music production and export annually. There is some irony in
this, given the long-standing antipathy of Korean government censors for
popular music, due to concerns over its importing foreign influences and
violating public morals. Yet the systematic application of capital to cultural
production has yielded results: from the early success of H.O.T. and BoA
in the 1990s to the second wave of Girls Generation and SuperJunior, to
today’s Blackpink, Red Velvet and undisputed lords of the genre, Bangtan
Sonyeondan (Bulletproof Boy Scouts), or BTS.
BTS have earned a fiercely loyal global fanbase, who proudly display their
affiliations on social media. As industry outsiders, the group built their
fame in a reciprocal relationship with fans, appealing to their audience as
co-creators. On social media, terms like “self-love,” “family” and “affec-
tion” appear repeatedly as members and followers of fan club Adorable
Representative M.C. for Youth (ARMY) demonstrate their intense levels of
identification. To take one representative sample, Duan (2019) explains that
their lyrics deal with “Fear of love. Of loss. Of not knowing who they are.
Of being who they are. Of not being known. Of being trapped … They know
what it is to suffer. To struggle with their identities. To feel as if they are
living a lie.” This identification is enhanced when, as Varma (2018) demon-
strates, ARMYs push back against sexist and racist criticism of BTS for not
conforming to Asian and gender stereotypes. Fan loyalty is both personal
and political, encompassing the music, the performers and the aesthetic to
both speak to and construct gender, ethnic and regional identity.
This public identity formation has a political economy. BTS’ manage-
ment company HYBE, formerly Big Hit Entertainment, handles all aspects
of their career promotion, from brand endorsements to concert streaming,
and set up digital platform WeVerse to provide an exclusive content ecosys-
tem. This centralized control over the product allows deep fan engagement;
for example, one of its most popular outputs includes footage of BTS mem-
bers playing and travelling, establishing a virtual intimacy unheard-of in
 The uses of escapism 167
the industry. In fact, Dooley and Lee’s (2020) deep dive into ARMY organ-
ization shows that HYBE and its fans exist in a near-symbiosis, as the latter
translate lyrics, promote YouTube view counts and buy sponsored content,
all without being paid. HYBE and BTS may represent a new phase in the
capital circuit, in which digital technology collapses the distance between
producer and consumer to the extent they appear, if not identical, then
intertwined.
This relationship between group and fans demonstrates an admira-
ble strain of communization, which suggests that capitalist society only
appears to be transactional and competitive. In reality, it depends on the
close co-operation of workers to produce surplus value and reproduce the
workforce. The former is underpaid – workers never receive the value of
what they produce – while the latter labour goes entirely unpaid. As we
have seen in Chapter 3, most of workers’ labour time is granted grudgingly,
with escapism held as a defence against exploitation. The consumption of
BTS has managed to short-circuit that relation: fans actively participate in
the group’s promotion, and likewise take moral – and, in the case of buying
shares in Big Hit’s first IPO in October 2020, actual – ownership over its suc-
cesses. In doing so, ARMY reveal how tenuous the anti-socialist arguments
about innate human greed are: their self-organized co-operation demon-
strates human yearning for connection unmediated by money. It does not
have to be carefully constructed; the communized future exists right now in
the present.
However, this also demonstrates the other side of the communization
thesis: capital is happy to commodify the genuine gifts of creative capac-
ity. HYBE is not a co-op and profits are not shared out among fans. In
this way, BTS represents the limits to the communization of capital, the
latter of which is happy to encourage consumer-directed marketing, as long
as it reaps the rewards. More insidiously, BTS represents the paucity of
emotional recognition offered by the cultural landscape of late capitalism
and a commodification of the real disconnect fans feel from their world.
Commodification means attaching a market or exchange-value to a genuine
use-value, and in that sense, the Boys of BTS are affective labourers, gener-
ating vast amounts of surplus value for their capitalist by working as objects
of projections for a global audience, itself scarred by alienation. That they
do this well, with the sincerity of both performers and fans, is what makes
this relationship so important and so fraught with meaning.
BTS’s manager and label founder Bang Si-hyuk, himself worth $1.4 bil-
lion, is careful to nuance their appeal. Bang (quoted in Bruner, 2019) sug-
gests, “their message resonated with a certain demand, and through digital
media it spread quickly. And BTS touched something that wasn’t being
addressed in the U.S. at the time.” Without specifying exactly what that
message was, Bang acknowledged that “K-pop idol fans want to feel close
with their idols.” The mystery of what “wasn’t being addressed” lies in the
motivation for feeling close: at the pinnacle of their craft, BTS represents a
168 The uses of escapism
new form of escapism, for which the context is neoliberal mastery. BTS vid-
eos and performances are perfectly choreographed, international art direc-
tors are hired, historical epics are recreated, and live horses trot nervously
on stage. Costumes reference cultures and time periods with postmodern
abandon. The members themselves are not only beautiful, they are prac-
ticed: they move with ease through routines that would maim anyone not
at peak fitness. This alone would be an escapist display of mastery over the
impossible performance of neoliberal subjectivity, which BTS accomplish
with no apparent effort – unlike the rest of us. Yet BTS’s members are reg-
ular people, not superheroes. This is precisely their appeal: they worked
hard, remained neglected by their industry, succeeded thanks to their fans
and remain grateful and down-to-earth. Their polished externality is cou-
pled with an internal relationality, which evades the casual observer and yet
defines the BTS universe.
Thus to understand BTS’ mass appeal requires going beyond lyrics and
looks. The Smiths in their 1980s heyday made a living from externalizing the
pain and loneliness of millions of teenagers. However, Marr and Morrissey
did not have a phalanx of cameras recording their every move; BTS, in con-
trast, have their rehearsals, holidays and even their meals recorded. They
are rarely “off”: whether they are just coming off stage breathless and sweaty
after a stadium performance or painting canvases on holiday, group mem-
bers share their reactions with the camera. Media suffuse their lives to a
degree unheard of by other performers: BTS produce both the call and
response, the music and the reaction video. The latter are typically fan-
responses to songs posted on social media, but BTS are recorded reacting
to their own, early performances. They erase the line between private and
public: both are offered up to the consumer spectacle. This goes far beyond
media production to touch on daily life. Kam (2019) details how the Boys’
public use of products from fabric softener to lip balm has caused eight
brands to sell out overnight in South Korea. Yet this hyper-exploitation is
also a form of (unintended) critique, because it conforms precisely to the
instability of the lives of their fans, who also do not know the privilege of
having strict limits between work and play. A younger, often female and
racialized fanbase knows better than most the pressures of self-branding
and projecting the perfect self-image outwards, in an always-on social
media universe. BTS’s work is theirs, too.
BTS leaven their pain with community: for many fans, the joys of fandom
come from witnessing the group members relate to one another with such
obvious affection, a relationship often missing from fragmented and toxic
online spaces. ARMYs try to mirror this relationality in their own com-
munities, and this has had direct political ramifications, such as when the
group pledged $1 million USD to Black Lives Matter and fans matched the
donation in a single day. BTS’s message is not simply the straightforward
release of negativity, but that they overcome personal and social challenges
through connectedness and belonging – and, by inference, so do fans.
 The uses of escapism 169
This external-internal dynamic marks BTS as escapist because they have
suffered, succeeded against the odds and have not slackened: in everything
from their outfits to their fan-service videos, they are the personification
of labour humanized. If members RM, Suga and V can survive as lovable
human beings under such intense conditions, then so can everyone else. BTS
represent the hope of a dis-alienated social life, a world in which, as young-
est member Jung-kook (2020) put it about their song Magic Shop, “When
you want to escape from the reality, you open the door in your mind, there
will be Magic Shop & 7 of us in there.” This access does not come easy:
BTS are perfect in their imperfections because thousands of people work
to make them that way, from hairstylists to studio engineers. In that sense,
BTS embody the formal/informal split of the capitalist labour market itself,
in which value is produced equally at the site of production, and through
hidden, unpaid reproductive labour, often by gendered and racialized bod-
ies. But in this case that labour is also from the fans themselves, who have
worked hard to co-create a spectacle that is theirs. In fact, to speak of image
construction is irrelevant to fans, who have never enjoyed the privilege of
inhabiting space outside of capital anyway. For them, the consumption and
construction of both “private” and “public” BTS – in reality the same thing
– is a chance to take ownership over a cultural sphere that has remained
remote and unreflective of their needs. Escapism is foundational to this
desire: in their making explicit what has remained hidden, injecting fan-
tasy into the mundane realities of exploitation, BTS and HYBE valorize
escapism, suggesting that those realities can be overcome through collective
action. If this book has suggested anything, it is that the anxieties and hopes
of the working class who form the bulk of people in ARMY must be taken
seriously. Their escapism tells us about the yearning to refuse the perfor-
mance principle and establish a more humane world.

Conclusion: towards an escapist subjectivity

This book began with escapism as a cry of anguish against the miseries of
the capitalist lifeworld; it ends with escapism as a gesture towards liberation.
This chapter has shown the practical limits that markets and economies of
scale place upon constructing everyday utopias. However, escapism’s value
lies elsewhere: it demonstrates that the alienated working class consists of
real people, who may be constituted by power relations but are not fully
integrated by them. As Marx showed, the social conditions of existence are
in our heads as well as all around us, and escapism is a sign that we are
not wholly turned into objects. Politically, this means that imagining new
worlds and the desire to flee from the old one is part of social transforma-
tion, not a distraction from it. When Orwell (1968) denounced pro-Soviet
writers willing to overlook the crimes of the USSR, he demanded “the free-
dom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt” and called “The familiar
tirades against ‘escapism’… merely a forensic device, the aim of which is
170 The uses of escapism
to make the perversion of history seem respectable.” Despite the dangers
posed by an integrative aesthetics, escapism need not be a flight from real-
ity but, as BTS’s example suggests, a fantasy in which that reality is fully
acknowledged, coped with and even changed through the power of com-
munity. This is precisely the politically liberating moment of escapism. It is
something we can control, when all other hopes have failed. It gives us an
exit, into a future that moves.
The loss of that sense of control is a key fixture of self-representation in
the late capitalist lifeworld. A fantasy of rational, atomistic mastery recedes
before the mass of people drowning in debt, the class barriers that, despite
brief shake-ups after World War 2, remain remarkably persistent over time,
stagnating and gender wage divides, and now the startling rise of far-right
populism. All evade neat categorizations because their presence suggests a
failed symbolic order. As this book has documented, 40 years of neoliberal-
ism has introduced vast changes into workplace organization, governance
regimes and society at large. There is a widening split between a well-paid
minority of technical professionals and a vast majority of logistical, ser-
vice and manufacturing workers. Rates of mental illness have skyrocketed
because we are adapting ourselves, imperfectly, to the new realities. The
social necessity for work has become inextricably coupled with the knowl-
edge that work is not guaranteed or valued. And unlike previous stages of
capitalism, the promise of new forms of governance, technical innovation
and, most crucially, class-based social organization to promote the inter-
ests of workers are no longer present. Escapism’s presence signals lack. It
designates a social character in as much as it signals the functioning of a
frightened and fragmented workforce.
Lukács (1971) believed that capitalist social relations had to have an
intellectual reflection, and any time something appeared obvious and
unmediated, it was then most directly a form of ruling class ideology.
The “immanent meanings” of these mediations demonstrated “their men-
tal reflection in bourgeois thought, now become objectively effective and
[which] can therefore enter the consciousness of the proletariat.” Ideology
had to be totalizing, otherwise workers might stop believing in capitalism
as a meritocracy, or the bourgeoisie might begin to see the consequences
of its actions. Rulers “must suppress their own moral instincts in order to
be able to support with a good conscience an economic system that serves
only their own interests.” And this is indeed a function of Right-escapism: it
plays a crucial part in suppressing the moral instincts of the capitalist class,
positing a way around the limits to profit and environmental sustainability
by simply pretending they do not exist. In this way, Right-escapism is essen-
tially a form of narcissism. Whitebook (1984) typifies the narcissist Self as
malformed rather than maladaptive, rooted in the inability to achieve inde-
pendent development. His description of its emptiness, rooted in “fragmen-
tation anxieties concerning the intactness of the self,” is fairly standard,
but the adaptive fantasies are more specific: the usual pursuit of money and
 The uses of escapism 171
power, but also a Dorian Gray-like obsession with warding off disease, age
and weakness. These “grandiose, narcissistic fantasies… in many instances
prove socially adaptive.” (Emphasis added) Whereas Marcuse’s id psychol-
ogy inspired a generation to revolt, de-sublimate sexuality and return to
Eros, the narcissism of neoliberal capitalism refracted Right through the
financiers and tech capitalists. Yet neither hubris nor punitive social spend-
ing cuts could resolve the secular crises of capitalism that they set in motion.
If narcissism matched the decades-long euphoria of neoliberal ideology, the
belief that marketization would destroy the inertia of declining productivity
and restore profit rates, then escapism arose at the end of that ideology.
Neoliberalism saw the bourgeoisie retreat from their Keynesian illusions
about counter-cyclical investments, let alone the planned economies in
which the bourgeois economists of Lukács’ age dabbled. This had a conse-
quence: when the bourgeoisie no longer believed its own lies, and its confi-
dent narcissism subsided, Lukács argued, “we find the utter sterility of an
ideology divorced from life, of a more or less conscious attempt at forgery.
[The class] concerns itself only with the defence of that existence and with
its own naked self-interest.” Inequality, the inability of capitalism to restore
profitability, and the looming crisis of ecological disaster is wearing away
the fantasy of meritocracy.
Today the bourgeoisie is abandoning its attempt at forgery. It sees threats
on multiple fronts: Coats (2019), US Director of National Intelligence, not
only predicted the covid-19 pandemic in his warning of animal-to-human
disease transmission, but spoke of threats from global heating’s displace-
ment of peoples and intensified inter-state competition. The 2008 financial
crisis has had lingering effects, as Roberts (2016) shows that the billions
spent to prop up the financial system led to a massive increase in public-
and private-sector debt, without any corresponding investment in pro-
ductive facilities that might generate new sources of profit or tax revenue.
Rather, corporate profits have been shunted to dividends and shares, to the
benefit of the shareholders and CEOs themselves. A hundred years ago,
Lukács could write with the certainty of the revolutionary crisis and the
mature development of imperialism, “This ideological crisis is an unfailing
sign of decay. The bourgeoisie has already been thrown on the defensive.”
However, it had many weapons remaining, in the form of new technologies
of machines and organization, new forces of reaction to marshal, and new
ways of bringing peripheral territories into the circuits of capital. It would
be wise not to predict any final crises this time; what is certain is that con-
temporary Right-escapism signals a bourgeoisie lacking confidence in its
own leadership, unable to contain the fratricidal and systemic crises that
threaten global order.
But those in charge do not have a one-way transmission belt into our
heads. The operations of resistance – the decoding and encoding of texts –
are less relevant to this discussion than their roots in alienation. Those who
sell their labour power also create the commodity form – indeed, they have
172 The uses of escapism
a much closer relationship to it than the bourgeoisie, who are far removed
from the production process. This means that people have a much stronger
vested interest in crafting a response to the systems that are deforming
them. Lukács admitted that “in so-called periods of normality … the gap
between appearance [of ideal capitalist forms] and ultimate reality [of the
conscious working class] was too great for that unity to have any practi-
cal consequences for proletarian action.” Consciousness never disappears;
it simply loses its “practical consequences.” Even in flight from the dismal
realities of class, immanent meanings shape how people run.
This suggests a positive use of escapism. To say that an alienated society
needs escapism is a judgment on the society, not the coping methods of its
subjects. If anything, escapism shows how imperfectly integrated people are
into late capitalism, and the stubborn spark of creativity that illuminates
the darkness. They are well aware of how capitalist subjectivity does not
apply to everyone. Escapism reflects a general change in social conscious-
ness, and it is a desire to disengage, rather than aspirational bourgeois indi-
vidualism, which increasingly defines working class consciousness today.
Just because “there is no alternative” to capitalism – yet – does not mean
that those subject to its rule accept their lot. There are plenty of social forces
constituting counter-hegemony, though none possess the power to form a
stable political or social alternative. Practical escapism suggests it is possi-
ble to escape these looming conflicts through everyday utopias like localism
and ethical consumption, but far broader are the fantasies of non-conflict,
the ideal non-classed spaces where workers no longer have to struggle to
survive.
Naturally, individual escapism can be little more than a coping mech-
anism, albeit a necessary one. But collective escapism augurs a partial
break from ideology, suggesting the mediated emergence of a new, demo-
cratic subject. This does not mean creating a false ego, but a redefinition
of individuality itself: the escapist subject redefines society as a collective
that includes the individual as one of its constituent parts, Marx’s internal
relations writ small. We are back to Fromm’s concept of social character,
but this time as a solution: consciousness as the social introjection of the
collective capacities and egalitarian norms of a class-free society. This move
towards a positive escapism must be abstract, because it emerges mediated
by the life conditions that destroy individual subjectivity in the first place.
However, an escapist subjectivity gets concretized whenever it approaches
reality. Escapism can reveal dreams of freedom that, if they were ever imple-
mented, would require collective democratization and freedom from the
burden of wage labour. This is part of the vital function that escapism plays
in inner life. It is a means of dis-identification with the ruling order, a way
to leave behind the ugly realities of selling oneself and alienating one’s fun-
damental abilities. It is necessary for survival, a way to live in this world
and yet outside of it, guarding an unalienated self-understanding from the
vagaries of exploitation.
 The uses of escapism 173
The lifeline escapism offers is that, freed from immediate practical con-
cerns, it can imagine entirely different spaces – Serge’s germs of many pos-
sible futures – including utopias, without codifying them. This makes the
escapist a truer utopian than either the romantic rebel or systems analyst
who wants to bend reality to their particular version of it, because to study
escapism means observing the development of social and class conscious-
ness, rather than imposing a direction. Thompson’s (1959) interpretation
of this task applies directly: “The work of changing peoples’ values and
attitudes and the summoning up of aspirations to further change by means
of utopian critiques of existing society, remains as much a duty of socialists
as the conquest and maintenance of working-class power.” Escapism is a
clear means to those “utopian critiques,” which remains valid, not as the
alternative to the conquest of power but as a means to it. Only by imagining
utopian alternatives as an act of escapism, unbounded by strategic consider-
ations first, is it possible to then work backwards to where we are at present.
There is no escape from alienation. The vast majority still have to work,
which often involves precarity and struggle. Everyone develops in a soci-
ety that traumatizes and separates them from their creativity, desires and
capacities. Escapism matters because these fantasy landscapes are vital to
the ability to survive. The trees, the houses, and the streetlights of our dead-
ends are inflected with our desires and our imagined futures.

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Index
addiction: dopamine response 9;
opioids 9–10; stress 12–13;
oniomania 10–12; rational 32–33;
somatic 59–61
Adorno, Theodore: culture industries
29–32; integration in capitalism 55,
57; critique of Fromm 65–66; agency
in 156–8; consciousness 163
Adverse Childhood Experiences 6
alienation: agency 162–164; Bartleby
the Scrivener 104–106; constitutive
159; consumerism 29; escapism 33;
exploitation 73–76, 113, 115; forced
non-recognition 73; material reality
50; mediation 52–53, 64, 121–122;
mind-object 61; neoliberalism 98–99;
pop music 99–100; Sapphire and Steel
125, 127; subjectivity 42, 45; trauma
65; utopia 117–119; value-form 57–58;
work 47, 89
alienated labour 47; structuring
consciousness 65; 107, 121;
and anti-work sentiment 77–78
Althusser, Louis: humanism 43;
critique of 156; ideology 52–53;
structuralism in 155–157
anamorphic stain: anamorphosis
116–117; dysrecognition 117; as
escapism 119, 154; Marxian 141;
reactionary 140; techno 135–136;
utopian 133
autonomy: anti-capitalism 154;
escapism 84; oniomania 11;
ideology 51; petty bourgeois 73–74;
see also work
Bartleby the Scrivener 100–105:
absurdism 104; rebellion 103;
see also capital; utopia
Batalov, Eduard: romantic utopians
122, 149; technocratic utopians 39,
149; utopias 135, 151
Black Panther Party: addiction 7–8
Bloch, Ernst: right-escapism 18–19;
fashion 87; non-contemporaneity 116;
Novum 155, 158; utopia and dreams
117–118
Bourdieu, Pierre: class and symbolic
order 85–86; habitus 61, 86; mind-
object in 62–64; petty bourgeoisie
87–89
BTS: aethetics and affect 166;
fan construction of 167; labour
167–168; political economy
166–167; production of 169
capital: abstraction 46; accumulation
47; Bartleby the Scrivener 102–106;
class conflict 84–86; coercive power
47–48; cultural production 164;
de-industrialization 8; habitus 62;
ideology 51; Freud 115; logic 43–48,
75; Marx’s conception 44; monster
126–127; petty bourgeois 73–75,
88–90; political culture 18; primitive
accumulation 120; right-escapism
20–24; small-scale 151–154; subject
156–157; totalizing 47, 51; Weber and
Marxian conceptions 86; see also
addiction; alienation
capitalism: agency in 75–76; neoliber-
alism 2–5; commodity fetishism 49,
164; contradictory consciousness 121;
ways of coping with 9–11; cultural
production 163–164; escapist stage
64–68, 171–172; labour discipline
81–82; harnessing of libido 125;
human development 44–46;

inclusive 21; instability 141; labour
under 73–74; non-market alternatives
151–154; personality 58–59;
subjectivity 56; social conflict 113;
time 94
class: basis for escapism 97–99,
114; conflict 113, 141; consciousness
28–29, 51–53, 75, 155–165; exploita-
tion 135; trajectory 87, 121; mind-
object 59–61; perceptual 86; petty
bourgeois 88–89; struggle 152,
161–162; taste 85–86; see also ruling
class; working class
commodity fetishism: as critique 165;
definition 48; dual-sided 49; lack 164;
mind-object 59; value-form 58
Cybotron 134–135
Digable Planets 139
dystopia: military planning 128;
structure of feeling 128; see also
Fisher, Mark; Sapphire and Steel;
Serge, Victor
ego psychology: see Fromm, Erich
escapism: affect 122; agency 147–148;
anti-ideology 170; avoidance 118;
betrayal 128; class consciousness
51–53, 89, 106, 172; constitutive 33;
coping mechanism 43, 75, 122, 151;
counter-ideological 53, 65; creative
sublimation 64–65; defence against
denial 78; drive for relationality
65; flight from Self 60; freedom
84, 119; individualism 32; labour
process 67, 82; libidinal drives 68;
material determination of 87; lost
futures 123, 128; maladaptation 54;
materialist 115; mechanism of flight
129; mediation 52, 113, 163–164;
non-space 31–32, 123, 133; passivity
25–27; path between agency and
structure 159; performance
principle 67; reaction to surplus
repression 54; reactionary 116,
119–122, 133; rejection of the
present 119; response to aliena-
tion 53, 87, 121, 141; response to
lack 60, 170; versus reality 64,
158; from time 122; transcendent
105; solidarity 123; see also class;
Left-escapism; negative humanism;
Right-escapism; utopian escapism
Index 177
Eshun, Kodwo: defence of escapism
140; hip hop 137; techno as futurity
135
fascism: aesthetics 165–166, 18–19;
see also ideology
false consciousness: see ideology
fantasy: alt-right 17–19; consumerism
164; creative fulfillment 65; desire
displaced by alienation 140; devel-
opmental 115; dreams 116; human
nature 53; mastery 66, 170; mind-
object 59–61; resistance to reality
principle 116; resistance to objec-
tification 108; revolutionary 121;
utopian 133, 162; see also Marcuse
Fisher, Mark: capitalism realism 2, 158;
third spaces 31; dystopia 122–124;
electronic dance music 134; end of
history 122; hauntology 123; failure
of anti-capitalism 123, 134;
reactionary escapism 133
Fromm, Erich: drives 56; ego psychol-
ogy 56–60; against escapism 41; social
integration 67; humanism 57–58;
critique of id psychology 56; materi-
alism in 45; mind-object 60; negative
humanism 57; pathology of normalcy
58; social character 56, 65, –68,
67 172;
social unconscious 56–57, 65
Freud, Sigmund: capitalist ideology
of 114; creative work and escapism
114–116; drives 53–56, 65; fantasy as
developmental 115–116; id psychol-
ogy 54–55; model of the Self 54;
mourning 128; trauma 53–55, 65, 128
Gramsci, Antonio: class consciousness
43, 156–157; revolution 160
habitus: see Bourdieu, Pierre
health: chronic illness 5–6; and con-
sumption 89; physical 5–7; men-
tal 12–13, 55; public 147; see also
addiction
hip hop: escapism in 137–140; non-
contemporaneity 140
Hood, Robert 135
human nature: fixed and mechanical
42–43; outside human development
44; utopian failure 151; as violent 14
humanism: abstract 43–44, 53, 155;
concrete 44–45, 61; trans- 22, 136,
178 Index
151; see also Althusser, Louis;
Fromm, Erich; negative humanism
ideology: capitalist 20–24, 56–57; class Marx, Karl: abstraction 103; against
outlook 51; competitiveness 51;
escapism as break from 172; false
consciousness 50–51, 68, 157, 165,
172; freedom and autonomy 22, 30,
51; as methodology 50; naturalized
170; neoliberal 171; of non-
contemporaneity 121; overdetermin-
ing 53; partial 42; productivity 81;
ruling class 51–53, 81, 84, 157;
totalizing 170; working class 22, 172
id psychology: see Freud, Sigmund
inequality: income 4; commodification
85; austerity 96
James, C.L.R.: against moralism 27
Jameson, Fredric: utopia 118;
commodity logic 158
Kracauer, Siegfried: anti-capitalism
28–29; daily life 104; status 88–89;
unemployment 94
Kraftwerk 134
labour: see work
late capitalism: fracturing of Self in
67; integration in 172; motivation for Mumford, Lewis: activist utopia 133;
escapism 31–33; source of commodity
fetishism 59; stresses of 9–10
Left-escapism: affect 29; as avoidance
24–27, 32; everyday life 27–28;
see also Adorno, Theodore
Le Guin, Ursula K. 119
Lukács, Gyorgi: commodity fetish-
ism 49; class consciousness 68, 113,
147, 172; culture 157; mediation 41,
156–157; ruling class ideology 52,
170–171
Macleod, Ken 146–147
Maté, Gabor 9–10, 33; see also
addiction
McGarvey, Darren 9, 59
manic defence 42; adaptive escapism
60–61; class society 65–66
Marcuse, Herbert: alienated labour
91; escapism as social transforma-
tion 116, 148; escapist aesthetics
163; libidinal drives 55; nihilism 59;
performance principle 67; phantasy
115–116; politics of eros 162; reality
principle 55–56; socialism 141;
surplus repression 55, 115
evolutionary socialism 158–159;
alienation 47, 115; class struggle 25;
commodity fetishism 48–50; con-
crete, historical individualism in
42–45, 58–59; concept of creative
labour 46, 55, 76–77; consciousness
156; feudal socialism 121; ideology
50; materialism 45–46, 169; petty
bourgeois 88; use- and exchange-
value 64, 126, 165; value-form 46;
workers’ competition 90–91;
workplace 104–105
Mechanical Turk 79
melancholy 128
Melville, Herman: see Bartleby the
Scrivener
Miéville, China: escapism 119, 121, 128
mind-object: adaptive escapism 60–61,
63; alienation 75–76; ego formation
59; neoliberal 66–67, 154; parallel
with commodity fetishism 59; trauma
68; work 90
Mobb Deep 137, 139
Moorcock, Michael: critique of feudal
socialism 119–120
escapism 132; see also utopia
Murray, Keith 137, 139–140
negative humanism 58–59, 68, 155;
repressed subjectivity 65; see also
Fromm, Erich
neoliberalism: austerity 96; crisis 3–5,
148; debt 3; dystopia 122; entrepre -
neurial self 94, 99; era 2; identity
11–12, 29; individualism 75;
inequality 4, 100; mastery 66,
168, 170; working class 155
non-contemporaneity: objective 116,
140–141, 163; subjective 116, 121;
see also Bloch
non-market alternatives 151; critique of
151–153
nostalgia: cancelled futures 2, 122–123;
empire 17; imaginary relation 53; past
19, 120; progressive 28
Novum: confrontation with reality 117;
in daily life 163; escapism 121, 129;
utopia 155; see also Bloch

Ollman, Bertell: laws of capitalist
motion 20, 49–50; Marx’s internal
relations 43
Osborn, Reuben: against escapism 41;
the unconscious 68
petty bourgeois: escapism 88–90; hab-
itus 89; isolation 88; in Lord of the
Rings 120–121; Right-escapism 24;
working class aspiration 73
Peterson, Jordan B. 12–13
poverty 4–5; capitalism 105; coping
97–99; intergenerational 12; trauma 6
Pete Rock & CL Smooth 139
Prince Paul 138
Public Enemy 137–139
Pulp 123, 134
Reich, Wilhelm: critique of Stalinism
80; fascism and emotion 18–19, 160
Right-escapism: alt-right 16–19; capi-
talist 20–22; culture 160; economic
crisis 18; emotion 18; hierarchy 17;
inclusive capitalism 21; libertarian
21–22; nostalgia 121
Sapphire and Steel: alienation 126–127; Underground Resistance 135–137
capitalist subjectivity 125–126;
destruction of the subject 127; dys-
topia 127; inertia 124; neoliberalism
125–126; time 124, 126–127
science fiction: apolitical 119; dystopian
118; reactionary 120
Self: active and passive 82; alienation
77, 155; contradictory 60–61;
entrepreneurial 66, 68, 121, 123;
escapism 60, 84, 97; fractured 67;
narcissism 170–171; performance
principle 56; petty bourgeois 88;
psychoanalytic model 55–58;
relational 43, 56–58; work 66, 90
self-blame 84, 93; class 95–96, 99–100
Serge, Victor: dystopia 129; escapism
131–132; Russian Revolution 15, 129; value-form: alienated labour 65;
Unforgiving Years 130–132
Sève, Lucien: abstract labour 47–48, 84;
psyche in capitalism 43, 53
Smith, Adam 22–23
social character: see Fromm, Erich
subjectivity: agency 154–160, 163;
alienated 116; capitalist 48, 56–57,
125–127, 172; contradictory 158;
escapism 50, 154; historicized 58;
Index 179
mind-object 66; repressed 65; Self 59;
work 87
Stakhanovism: neoliberalism 81;
80–81, 94
Suvin, Darko 117–118
techno: black history 134–135; catharsis
136; Detroit de-industrialization 134;
futurity 135–137, 140; humanism 136;
utopian 140
Thompson, E.P.: class struggle 179;
demonism 175; secularism 105
Tolkien, J.R.R.: anamorphism 117;
anti-industrialism 119–120;
reactionary 120
trauma: addiction 1, 10; physical effects
of 9–10; poverty 6–7; Resignation
Syndrome 9; social 7
Tuan, Yi-Fu: escapism as ethics 14–16;
flight from reality 16; non-
contemporaneity 116; Russian
Revolution 14; violence and human
nature 13–14
Ultra High Net Worth Individuals
20, 133
utopia: alienation 117–118; anamor-
phosis 117; Bartleby 104; cultural
production 140; destruction of
124–127; difference from escapism
117, 119; drives 55; Eros 141; everyday
150–151; failed 130 –132; phantasy
115–116; prefiguration 149; romantic
149; socialist 129, 157, 162; see also
Batalov, Eduard; Bloch, Ernst;
dystopia; Wright, Erik Olin
utopian escapism: against 121; as pro-
cess 133; consciously constructed 132;
individual 27; political uses 157, 162;
in science fiction 118–119; as unalien-
ated existence 173; see also Mumford
commodities 46; consciousness
47–50; domination of 41; entrapment
158; social relations 58
Williams, Raymond: nostalgia of
decline 19; science fiction and utopia
118; structures of feeling 19, 127
work: art 29; abstraction 47;
anti- 77–78; alienated 46–47;
180 Index
autonomous 77, 89–90, 96–97; 84, 87; emotions 169; job-seekers
caring 29; as commodity 46; condi- 93–95; migrant 80; socialist
tions 12; creative 76–77; dehumaniz- revolution 44
ing 47, 90; drive 56; exchange-value of Wright, Erik Olin: real utopias
84, 100, 102, 144, 185; factory system 151–153
45; family life 90–91; forced 81–82, Wu-Tang Clan 49
84; as manic defence 66; precarity
29, 67; unproductive 123; see also zeerust 122
Adorno, Theodore Zola, Emile: oniomania
working class: collective subject 113, 10–11, 164
117; dispossession 25; escapism