Placid capitalist contradictions

Sunday, October 18, 2026. Sant Gervasi, Barcelona. Half past four in the afternoon. Since it has been raining all morning, I go out for my customary walk at an unusual time for me. I cross paths with a couple around thirty-five or forty years old. He is wearing a t-shirt with the face of a young Lula da Silva (I see they have become fashionable) even though there is a bit of a chill. In one hand he holds an iPhone, in the other a paper cup. She is carrying an identical cup, and with her other hand she is pulling the leash of two enormous dogs. I thank them mentally: they have just contributed to the introduction of this article, which I intended to dedicate to discussing a book that was published just 50 years ago, a round enough figure to commemorate anything.

Daniel Bell (1919-2011) published The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (there is a translation in Spanish, but not in Catalan) in 1976. To summarize greatly, he argued that modern capitalism suffers from a profound internal fracture because its three main realms—the techno-economic structure, the political sphere, and mass culture—are governed by opposing principles. Although the system was born marked by the Puritan ethic and the culture of effort, mass consumption and industrial capitalism promoted, in the 20th century, and more specifically after the Second World War, hedonism and instant gratification, thus destroying the original moral foundation of that productive structure. Patient and meticulous family savings, moderation in consumption, and getting up at six in the morning to have the shop shutters raised before eight were left in parentheses. They continued to dominate the scene, without a doubt, but in a different way. Schizophrenically divided between the requirement to be a disciplined worker at the job and a voracious and anarchic consumer in their free time, the citizen lives—not just sees—a cultural crisis and chronic instability that has ended up affecting the majority of liberal democracies. It is true that what Bell described half a century ago happened very early in the United States but much later in other places, including our own home. It is also true that, despite being applicable, the scheme fits more problematically in some Asian countries that experienced spectacular growth based on a mentality very different from the Western one. Et cetera.

Bell defines the culture of modernity through the art and literature of so-called "modernism," understood more or less as the spirit of the avant-gardes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which is characterized by the break with tradition and the moral limits of the past. Starting, above all, from the 1960s, happiness and extreme individualism began to be experienced as almost synonymous concepts. The exaltation of subjectivity, originality (totally imaginary), and experimentation for the sake of experimentation, without any concrete purpose, became part of a mental algebra that in its beginnings was based, at least in the case of the middle class, on accumulation derived from work and savings and on a life that, without being at all monastic, was indeed austere. But—alas!—when the transgressive spirit derived indirectly from the triumph of the avant-gardes, which was previously minority and proper to four eccentric intellectuals, becomes democratized and mass-produced in the mid-20th century through consumer society, Western societies enter into inertias that seem to have no solution. Bell believes that two modernities coexist that erode each other: the economic one, based on instrumental rationality, bureaucracy, effort, restraint, etc.; and the cultural one in a broad sense, that is, that of exacerbated individualism, anti-rationalism, and perpetual consumerism (as of October 18, many Christmas lights have already been installed, even though they have not yet been turned on).

Bell's diagnosis is half a century old, but it does not seem to have expired: the transgressive Lula t-shirt that I saw this afternoon in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Catalonia can be purchased for a pittance on the most representative e-commerce platforms of ultra-savage capitalism. A guy who was born thousands of kilometers from here will bring it to your house: he surely has worse working conditions than those of the workers of the Industrial Revolution, and unfortunately I believe I am not exaggerating. In fact, it is entirely probable that the two giant dogs of the rebel without a cause that I crossed paths with a couple of hours ago are surrounded by more comforts than those of someone who scrapes by delivering packages by bicycle in the open air of history.