As I drove to the busy four-way intersection, I steeled myself for the worst. My spouse and I were on the way to visit her family in Caimito, Puerto Rico, about four months after the hurricanes Irma and María had struck the archipelago. Even before the hurricanes, when things were more or less functional, this particular intersection could be a snarl. Today, I thought it would be even worse. After hurricanes Irma and María struck, the antiquated power grid along with most of the island’s infrastructure was in even worse shape than before. My in-laws had been without power since September, and here it was January. There was no electricity for the machines people need for survival like dialysis and oxygen, not to mention things we all take for granted like refrigerators, the internet, and traffic lights. Oddly, no one was honking their horn, and it seemed that traffic was moving even more efficiently than usual. Everyone was forced to slow down, recognize, and work with those around them or no one would get through the intersection. I would soon come to find that what I saw here was a microcosm of what was happening elsewhere on the island. The hurricanes and lack of official response had created disaster and death, but they also allowed for the possibility to create connections beyond the internet and the lighted pathways that give shape to lives. Without the energy necessary to fuel the technology that structures our lives, it was possible to see a different order, one built on a type of camaraderie, emerging from the rupture the hurricanes had caused. The rupture of capitalist realism allowed for the possibility to imagine a different present and future.
Mark Fisher repeats a phrase attributed alternately to Slavoj Zizek and Frederic Jameson, that, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to capitalism.” But as Jodi Dean argues in her article on Fisher, capitalism is the end of the world.1 As I drove through the intersection that night and during my travels and meetings with people in Puerto Rico the year after the hurricane, I saw the end of the world glimpsing at a temporary end of capitalism and perhaps the start of solidarity or camaraderie.
The twin hurricanes and lack of response by the United States created what Naomi Klein calls a “disaster after the disaster.”2 The first disaster was caused by centuries of colonialism and more recent neoliberal reforms by a government that wanted Puerto Rico to become the United States’ fifty-first state. The second disaster was caused by the hurricanes and the lack of official response to them. Since at least the 1950s Puerto Rico, like other countries in Latin America, became enthralled by developmentalism, an expansion of industry and technology and a move away from an agrarian economy. In this shift, Puerto Rico joined other nations in the capitalist world system, driven by a dependence on fossil fuels. This inclusion required that Puerto Rico, like other countries, become dependent on imports of petroleum to fuel its factories and power grid. Leaders at the time, led by the Governor Luis Muñoz Marín, thought by plugging into the worldwide grid, Puerto Rico would somehow become more sovereign and maybe even independent. Unfortunately, the result was not the brighter industrialized future he imagined but rather an increased dependence on the colonizing United States for jobs as well as imported goods.
Making matters worse, two laws were created in 1917 that impacted Puerto Rico’s dependence. One law made all Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens, requiring among other things that Puerto Rican men sign up for the military draft, and the other required that all imports to the island arrive on U.S. flagged ships. As the country moved away from producing its own food to join an industrialized economy, it became heavily dependent on imports of everything from the basic essentials to luxury commodities. As people left the country to work in factories, dependence on imports for food and other essentials became almost total. After the hurricanes, countries wanted to send aid to Puerto Rico but, due to the 1917 law and the relationship then President Trump had with the shipping industry, ships filled with aid sat off the coast of Puerto Rico as people starved.3
Perhaps not to be outdone, the governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Roselló, in his first public address after the hurricanes declared the island a “blank slate” or lienzo en blanco, declaring Puerto Rico open for business and investment. Roselló saw the devastated island as an opportunity to complete the neoliberal reforms that he had dreamed of. New laws encouraged Crypto Pirates to move to Puerto Rico along with venture capitalists and developers who purchased prime real estate at bargain prices to develop hotels and resorts inaccessible to Puerto Ricans themselves unless they were wealthy. The official response was to use the disaster as an opening to make things worse for most Puerto Ricans, encouraging them to leave the island in record numbers. If capitalist realism creates a feeling of cynicism and feeling stuck, it seemed that the disaster that felt like the end of the world did not put an end to capitalism or its offshoot, colonialism, proving Jameson right once again.
Fisher details that one way capitalist realism maintains its hold on us is through the images it produces. The “cyberspatial capital” that characterizes the current age addicts its users, us, to the instant gratification just a click away. The technology that Puerto Rican leaders in the fifties had thought would make them more independent, just plugged them into the capital’s cyberspatial sensorium, which resulted in what Fisher calls the “depressive hedonia” and creating what he calls the “debtor-addict”.4 As Fisher relates, “the condition I am referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as an inability to do anything except pursue pleasure”.5 Fisher argues that we become enthralled by the endless pursuit of pleasure and instant, though temporary, gratification made cyberspatial capital available to avoid the pain caused by capitalist realism. We pursue pleasure at the cost of association with people around us. The hedonic pleasure dome we often get lost in separates us from those around us. reducing the possibility of camaraderie. As Jodi Dean argues, the end of camaraderie is the end of the world because it is the beginning of capitalism.6 In Puerto Rico, during the months after the hurricane, the electricity necessary to pursue pleasure was unavailable, and as a result, people became violently unstuck from the hedonic pursuits of capitalist realism.
Though he does not specify how it might happen, Fisher mentions briefly the possibility for a rupture in capitalist realism when he mentions the difference between capitalist realism and the Lacanian Real. He inserts a quote by Slavoj Žižek into his argument that discusses the difference between the two definitions of real: “For Lacan, the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress, indeed reality constitutes itself through this repression”.7 It is not so much that capitalist realism is all there is, but rather that it works to obscure anything that might negate its totality. In that same quote, Žižek suggests that a way to deal with capitalist realism is to engage with the unrepresentable X of the Real “so one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us”.8 Capitalist realism provides us with entertainment, engaging us in the pursuit of pleasure to elude an engagement with its traumatic negation. For Puerto Ricans after the hurricanes, such an act of disavowal was not possible. They were forcibly cut off from the hedonic pursuits of cyberspatial capital.
As Dean argues, “The end of comradeship is the end of the world….and the pointless, disorienting insistence on the I”.9 The technology that allowed for dreams of independence in Puerto Rico had produced social fragmentation and isolation in capitalist realism’s hedonic bubble, resulting in an erosion of solidarity and comradeship. The disaster after the disaster, as Naomi Klein calls it, had also created the possibility for solidarity or camaraderie. In many instances, people were forced to leave the cyberspatial sensorium that allowed people to think that they are complete and entire unto themselves. Leaving that fantasy, they moved toward camaraderie and began to work together in order to survive.
Casa Pueblo, located in Adjuntas, for years had promoted sustainable agriculture, producing its own electricity and excellent coffee among other things. While it may have been something of a marginalized outlier before the hurricanes, afterward, the repurposed home that houses its headquarters was bustling with life as people came to charge cell phones, plug in dialysis and oxygen machines, and watch movies. In other towns, people created disbursement centers that circulated donated essentials, many of which were sent to them from family and friends living in the United States. In one town, people organized to replace poles that held power lines, and in others, bands of citizens cleared the roads making them passable. People joined together to do this because the neoliberal governments of Puerto Rico and the United States had abandoned them. Trump famously threw paper towels to a crowd in Guaynabo, one of the wealthiest communities that had suffered the least. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sent care packages filled with Skittles, and the Governor of Puerto Rico ignored the cries of its people to enrich his friends and investors. Pursuing Dean’s formulation, capitalism is the end of comradeship, which is also the end of the world. If that is the case, Puerto Rico showed the opposite can also be true. The disaster created the necessity for camaraderie in order to survive, which in turn produced the possibility of an end to capitalism.
Perhaps the hope for comradeship and a new beginning reached its peak shortly after the hurricanes. Roselló’s chats were made public revealing not only his homophobia, but also how deeply he disparaged the people suffering from the devastations the hurricanes and the years of austerity that characterized his reign had caused. Angered by his policies and lack of concern, people of all ages, classes, genders, and sexual orientations protested in front of the Governor’s Mansion for days until he resigned. Ricky Martin joined Bad Bunny and Calle 13 in the protest. Along with them, musicians from the Puerto Rican symphony played in the streets. People practiced yoga in front of the governor’s mansion. If capitalism had brought the end of the world to Puerto Rico, people also realized that the end of the world could also mean a new beginning. In her poem, “Me gustan las mañanas,” Miriam Montes Mock revels in how things have changed in the aftermath of the hurricanes. Rather than facing the TV screen on the wall, chairs are now arranged, “para mirarse las caras” [so we look at each other’s faces]. She also enjoys the new “encuentros” or encounters she can have in the “espacio nuevo” or the new space created by the lack of electricity and the noise it produces. But as she says in the closing line of the poem, full of melancholic prescience, “no sé hasta cuando perdurará” [I do not know how long it will last].10
With the protests, people left the hedonic sensorium of cyberspatial capital to take to the streets, ignoring their differences with a common goal in mind: that Roselló leave office. After he left, however, not much really changed. With the lights back on for most everyone no one seemed to care much that the new governor was from the same political party that espoused the same ideology as the one they had protested against. The neoliberal austerity and lack of concern for things like infrastructure and education and reforms in favor of privatization remained intact. The private energy firm from the U.S. that was contracted to restore the grid, LUMA, has been more than inept. Blackouts are commonplace years after the hurricane. Protests over camaraderie ended, and Puerto Rico joined the rest of us, stuck in capitalist realism once again.
In the short time that Puerto Ricans were forced to live with the consequences of climate change created by overproduction and accumulation, they had space and time to think about different relations. As in Mock’s poem, rather than looking at screens engaged in the hedonic sensorium, lives were rearranged to look at each other. In that moment, it was possible to glimpse what a world structured by camaraderie might look like. It was possible to imagine the end of capitalism.
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Endnotes
- Jodi Dean. “Capitalism in the End of the World.” Mediations: The Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, 33, 1-2. (Fall 2019-Spring 2022) 149-158.
- Naomi Klein. The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists. (Haymarket, 2018).
- Trump did allow some imports for a period of six weeks after several months of allowing Puerto Rico to suffer.
- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009), 25.
- Fisher, 22.
- Jodie Dean. Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging. (Penguin Random House 2019).
- Fisher, 18.
- Fisher, 18.
- Jodi Dean. Comrade, 127.
- Miriam Montes Mock. “Me gustan las mañanas.” Pa la posteridá: antología sobre el paso del huracán María por Puerto Rico. Lucía Orsanic y Jorge Fusaro Martínez editores. (Ediciones Flamboyán, 2018). 143-144.
John Waldron