If maximizing utility leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, as utilitarianism has always proposed, then why is it that as many of us currently maximize our utility--by working endlessly, undertaking further education and training, relentlessly marketing and selling ourselves--we are met with the steady worsening of collective social and economic conditions? In Futilitarianism, social and political theorist Neil Vallelly eloquently tells the story of how neoliberalism transformed the relationship between utility maximization and the common good. Neil Vallelly’s superb new book Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness is a polemic against the emptiness of the neoliberal era. It examines both its ideological roots, history, and political culture. Where classical Marxists once believed in the inexorable historical arrival of a better tomorrow, one of the most alienating features of neoliberalism is how it naturalizes history out of existence. Since there is “no alternative” to the world as it is, aesthetics becomes the endless recycling of cultural images and symbols from the past, a pastiche of postmodern nostalgia for a time where people could actually make a difference. Even language becomes increasingly incapable of bearing the gravitas of meaning we need it to, as communication is flattened by digital discourse and the rich texture of the world becomes liquidated into two hundred eighty digestible characters. Politics Against Futility

Utilitarianism and its implications, however, were not, in Bentham’s view, strictly limited to moral philosophy or conceptual analysis in a more abstract sense. Rather, Bentham wanted governments to adopt utilitarianism as a guiding principle of governance that might motivate politicians to strive toward the pursuit of collective wellbeing for the wider public. Though Bentham’s intended scope for the actualisation of his theory did not fully transpire in his own life, utilitarianism would go on to indirectly influence politics in complex, profound and material ways, not least in its outsized influence as a foundational cornerstone of neoclassical economics. As a result, utilitarianism has penetrated deep into the shape of our capitalist world we live in today, with the logic of utility and, specifically, its salient normativity, infusing aspects of work practices and shaping the dynamics of social interactions. Despite the appeal of this synthesis of utilitarianism and capitalism, it was never uncontroversial. In the twentieth century, Vallelly observes, there was a climatic struggle between socially minded utilitarians, mostly inspired by J. M. Keynes, and the increasingly strident neoliberal economists. For a while, the socially minded utilitarians were successful, and largely justified the creation of extensive welfare states on the grounds that a more even distribution of goods and services would make people happier and prevent needless suffering. ROAR is published by the Foundation for Autonomous Media and Research, an independent non-profit organization registered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. All editors and board members are volunteers. This allows us to spend all income from our Patreon account on sustaining and expanding our publishing project. Once we have paid for basic running costs like web hosting, the remaining proceeds will be invested in high-quality content and illustrations for future issues.Wendy Brown, author of In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West

Drawing on a vast array of contemporary examples, from self-help literature and marketing jargon to political speeches and governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vallelly coins several terms--including "the futilitarian condition," "homo futilitus," and "semio-futility"--to demonstrate that in the neoliberal decades, the practice of utility maximization traps us in useless and repetitive behaviors that foreclose the possibility of collective happiness. What Vallelly achieves here is a remarkable new theoretical insight into why… utilitarianism under neoliberal capitalism must mutate into futilitarianism. A thoroughly welcome, timely and profound intervention.” Futilitarianism is instead a form of entrapment in the pursuit of meaningfulness, where we are forced to repeat a series of daily behaviors that ensnare us deeper into the pure logic of competition and individualism that negates any development of common bonds and collective welfare. Neoliberal capitalism feeds on our futility, and at the same time, as a normative governing reason — in the Foucauldian sense of “the conduct of conduct” — neoliberalism pushes us to behave as if our individual acts of utility maximization will secure our well-being, and even at times affect substantive social change. By always translating the social through the lens of the individual, neoliberalism reduces questions of social justice and transformation to little more than forms of marketization and consumer choice. Neoliberal reason manifests itself in a series of futile social and political endeavors, from self-marketing to ethical consumerism, which often see themselves as radical alternatives to the status quo but in practice only reinforce it. Futilitarianism is not Nihilism But utility is not something that naturally exists; it is not a neutral or objective concept. Utility is always an effect of social relationships, constructed politically, and deeply enmeshed in the power structures of a society. The question, then, is not so much “what is useful?” Rather, it is “how does something become defined as useful and who gets to judge it as such?” Money and Utility

Account

A proposal for countering the futility of neoliberal existence to build an egalitarian, sustainable, and hopeful future. Futilitarianism is one of those strong books which excels in outlining a birds-eye view of society and the world we inhabit. Rather than analysing neoliberalism from one limited vantage point, Vallelly draws together perspectives from different disciplines – sociological, political-economic, psychological and philosophical – to contribute a holistic account to the canon on neoliberalism. Vallelly concludes that the way to overcome futility is through a ‘becoming-common of the futilitariat’ (173). If we recognize that we are all subject to futility, though to unequal degrees, then we can begin to imagine a world in which utility is reclaimed by the people and for the common good. Without imagining a world aiming towards the common good, we will hitherto be trapped in the futilitarian condition. The genesis of the futilitarian condition emerged precisely at the point where utility became sanctified under capitalism, because at that moment, the possibility of futilitarianism also came into existence. Under the conditions of capitalism, the greatest happiness principle cannot be realized, or, at least, only a perverted version of it can exist. The working class have always carried the burden of the labor of utility maximization — of producing the things that are useful and, ultimately, the money associated with utility. For this reason, utility can never be conceived exclusively as an economic or philosophical concept. Instead, utility is always representative of a certain understanding of political economy, of the relationships between forms of production, labor and trade and the mechanisms of government, power and, ultimately, capitalism. This fact is most evident in the work of Jeremy Bentham, a late 18th- and early 19th-century philosopher and social reformer. Bentham was the founder of modern utilitarianism and he could find only one credible measure for utility: money. In an essay titled “The Philosophy of Economic Science,” he wrote: “The Thermometer is the instrument for measuring the heat of the weather, the Barometer the instrument for measuring the pressure of the Air…. Money is the instrument for measuring the quantity of pain and pleasure.”

The university knows that this intellectual precariat has little choice but to maximize utility, so it can exploit their acts by paying less and less for the labor of teaching, while still maintaining the influx of students and fees. It is clear, therefore, that the practice of utility maximization on the part of this intellectual precariat might on a few occasions lead to individual well-being in the form of a permanent position, but it also entrenches the conditions that make the well-being of the vast majority of the precariat impossible. Neoliberalism Needs Futility

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MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. To Vallely, capitalism has always been undergirded by the idea of utility maximization as an intellectual crutch. By linking endless capital accumulation with the purported attainment of utility, the historical and ongoing injustices of colonialism have been justified on the basis of the supposed longterm interest of the colonized people. Similarly, ever-widening inequality is justified as part and parcel of ‘human progress’, a view well-lodged in the writings of establishment thinkers like Harvard’s Steven Pinker. But whereas Keynesian capitalism advocated a more ‘majoritarian’ variant of utility, the Hayekian push towards neoliberalism put the onus on the individual, thus leading to the current futilitarian condition. What was left of utilitarianism was a belief that “individual choice and flexibility” were integral features of the market economy. Moreover, linked to this reconsideration of utility was a reconceptualization of freedom as nothing more than these kinds of consumer choices and flexible capitalist conditions. Neoliberals felt that by encasing the market from democratic pressures and disciplining the population by gutting agency-enhancing social programs, the narrow freedoms remaining to individuals — to compete and consume in the market — would lead them to become immeasurably more productive, often by necessity in a sink or swim world. My recent book Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness, which is published as part of the Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) Series with Goldsmiths Press, is an attempt to articulate a particular form of existential entrapment within contemporary capitalism. I call this entrapment “the futilitarian condition,” which emerges when individuals are forced to maximise utility—which, under neoliberalism, effectively requires enhancing the myriad conditions to accumulate human capital—but in doing so, this leads to the worsening of our collective social and economic conditions. Through developing the concept “futilitarianism,” I aim to lay the theoretical foundations to both understand this entrapment and to imagine ways of thinking and organising that can help us overcome the futilitarian condition.

We constantly publish web content and release thematic issues several times per year. The exact amount depends on how much support we receive from our readers. The more people sign up as patrons, the more resources we will have to commission content and pay a copy-editor to prepare everything for publication. It is certainly true, however, that many people do not care about whether utilitarianism has flipped into futilitarianism, or whether their acts of utility maximization are exploited by neoliberalism to dismantle common bonds and mutual interest. In fact, in the Global North, lots of people are relatively secure and settled, especially if they are white, middle-aged to elderly, and have citizenship, a house — or several — a regular income or pension and access to decent — increasingly private — health care. They might not care that the income gap between the Global North and the Global South has nearly quadrupled since the 1960s, or that economic and social inequalities have sharply risen since the 1980s, because everyone on their street seems to be doing fine. And even some of those who are not secure are rarely directly angry with capitalism, but rather with urban elites, immigrants, or benefit-cheats. Countering Futilitarianism This original and compelling tour de force is essential reading for anyone who thinks that there must be more to life than this.”The example of the contemporary university can help contextualize the concept of the futilitarian condition. The university is now dependent on a vast army of casual and adjunct teaching staff, mostly postgraduate students or post-PhD gig workers, without whom the university would collapse. Yet these staff are routinely treated with contempt by university hierarchies, and exploited on short-term contracts that rarely cover the entirety of the hours they actually work.