Charles Mudede, "Exit Envy: BLM, MAGA, and the Continuing Crisis of Longevity"

Join us at e-flux on Thursday, October 15 at 7pm for Exit Envy: BLM, MAGA, and the Continuing Crisis of Longevity, a lecture by cultural critic, filmmaker, and writer Charles Mudede.

There is a close connection between longevity and capitalism. The latter would certainly collapse without the former. Why? Because longevity closes the door to the afterworld and forces workers to focus on the here and now, the restless realm of capital accumulation. If life were, as Hobbes put it, “nasty, brutish, and short,” the majority of a population would denounce this fallen world and completely invest in life after death. Such workers would be useless and impossible to manage. They are always not here (the factory, the store, the warehouse) but always there, God knows where. 

But if you’re likely to live until 80 or so, thanks to the vital element of capitalism, science, the end is too far away. Even at 40–which, in 18th century England, for example, was the average life expectancy–the eternal peace of the afterworld is still in the distance. This stretch of time, of years, months, days, hours forces one to “make heaven a place on Earth.” And so it is. Heaven can only be your retirement, which is also a long period of time. 

This condition has resulted in a crisis that’s not new but has grown in intensity in recent times. MAGA emerges from this crisis, the loss of an afterworld and the surrender to the worldly monotony of “another day, another dollar.” MAGA also sees BLM as having somehow escaped this condition, somehow found a way out of the spiritual rut. And it has good reason to: the movement, which reached its peak in the first years of the present decade, denounces this world with a fervor, a passion, a resolve that MAGA envies. It too wants to denounce the here and now, but not by way of rejecting one of its key institutions: law and order. That must remain intact. (MAGA has too much faith in worldly justice.) The result of this impasse has been not the destruction of the earthly church but the dead end of constructing an even bigger earthly church. But you can't go “all the way to heaven,” as Doug E. Fresh once put it, if you can’t decisively renounce this world, which requires a religious commitment to a legal order that protects, above all, the endless expansion of surplus value.      

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