Introduction

The previous chapters have underlined the reconfiguration of labour markets to facilitate efficiency, flexibility and profit. The evidence presented so far falls within the context of systemic violence and the negative motivation to harm. Unintentionally harmful outcomes are driven by institutional and organisational responses to deep level structural attachment to ideological commitments of competition, efficiency and profitability. The reorientation of management practice and organisational culture to meet these imperatives originates a specific set of normative cultural values, rules and expectations. The absence of stability creates insecure and precarious conditions of employment and working practice. Within this context, these institutional absences hatch a culture imbued with a further absence; the absence of moral or ethical responsibility for the Other (Whitehead, 2015; Smith and Raymen, 2016; Whitehead, 2018). This absence manifests as the positive motivation to harm another individual (Winlow and Hall, 2016). This positive motivation reflects a ‘subjective distancing’ whereby those subjects of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher, 2009) or ‘cynical disaffection’ (Stiegler, 2013) withdraw from positive social bonds and increasingly view the ‘other’ as competition; the negative ideology of neoliberalism fosters a negative solidarity (Adorno, 1973) where subjects identify the Other by their differences, not similarities. When co-workers, employees and customers appear higher or lower on the slopes of inequality and hierarchy, they can become obstacles to overcome. Accordingly, some individuals imbue themselves with a ‘special liberty’ (Hall, 2012a), which grants them the right to act as they wish, unencumbered by the constraints of ethics, morality or duty.

Chapter Two elucidated the core-periphery model at the heart of macro-level analysis of capitalism. The generative core of capitalism, the release of the amoral and non-ethical essence of libidinal and sublimated energy, has systematically eroded the ethical shield and regulatory sleeve constructed at the periphery in the post-war settlement. The locus of morality existed at the periphery; virtue, ethico-cultural norms and shared values of trust, mutuality and solidarity that had been affixed to temper the excess of capitalism's generative core (Whitehead and Hall, forthcoming). The neoliberal project punctured this ethical exterior and expanded the reach of the non-ethical centre; capitalist pursuit of growth, efficiency and productivity reflect a market mechanism driven by pure libidinal energy and not made to the measure of humanity.