Baudrillard on Volkswagen #dieselgate

Watergate Volkswagen #dieselgate is not a scandal, this is what must be said at all costs, because it is what everyone is busy concealing, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, of a moral panic as one approaches the primitive (mise en) scène of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality - that is what is scandalous, unacceptable to the system of moral and economic equivalence that is the axiom of leftist thought, from the theories of the Enlightenment up to Communism.

How can capitalist conduct possibly be a scandal? A scandal can not be a scandal when the subject matter works as it is supposed to work. The sudden oozing of morality left and right in the media. Fuck, something besmirched our economic religion, the neoliberal mantra, it somehow managed to seep out into the open. Something that everybody knew was concealed and as long as that was concealed, felt OK. The daily Fritzl.

One imputes this thinking to the contract of capital, but it doesn't give a damn - it is a monstrous unprincipled enterprise, nothing more. 

What the hell were you thinking? Oh you sucker for a benign economy, striving to be number one in the world in that only business you are good at, and how could it possibly be surprising, that one runs the risk of invoking Godwin's Law? You knew, at least you should, full well how unprincipled it works as it kicks you ordinary soul in the guts every day, but you chose to accommodate your qualms by imposing that undying principle, dished out to you ad nauseam, onto yourself as a religious hymn, your personal sukta. That sacred vedic chant of: JOBS. In front of that altar you commit any sacrifice because you are being told.

It is "enlightened" thought that seeks to control it by imposing rules on it. And all the recrimination that replaces revolutionary thought today comes back to incriminate capital for not following the rules of the game. "Power is unjust, its justice is a class justice, capital exploits us, etc." - as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules.

Rules were broken, power misused, your trust belied. 

No! You fell for it.

It is the Left that holds out the mirror of equivalence to capital hoping that it will comply, comply with this phantasmagoria of the social contract and fulfill its obligations to the whole of society (by the same token, no need for revolution: it suffices that capital accommodate itself to the rational formula of exchange).

Your disappointment longs for help, it questions your country's sovereignty as one sorry soul in a comment to a SPIEGEL article bemoaned. Young soul, rest assured, your country's sovereignty is fine and well. Were it not, the USA would send some committee over and they would confiscate those 18 billion buckeroos (or whatever the final tab will be) right away. Hope it makes you feel better.

Other folks from Zerohedge and such waste their time in comparing fines imposed on other car companies on home soil. Sorry, you did not understand the game, there is no equivalence to capital. Certainly none, when a ridiculous conglomerate of states continues to piss off US internet companies based solely on the ground that they have absolutely zippo capacity, intellect and guts to compete. 

Capital, in fact, was never linked by a contract to the society that it dominates. It is a sorcery of social relations, it is a challenge to society, and it must be responded to as such. It is not a scandal to be denounced according to moral or economic rationality, but a challenge to take up according to symbolic law. 

Nothing needs to be added here, but keep this in mind: Capital is a sorcery of social relations.

Watergate Volkswagen was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries - a simulation of scandal for regenerative ends.

The neoliberal show must go on and each will play his or her part. And you, treasured reader, will be a reliable part of it.

Jean Baudrillard in 'Simulacra and Simulations' (translated by Sheila Faria Glaser)