Capitalistic Ruins: A Case

In the past decade, Brazilian private schools have been interested in the possibility of sending students to study abroad, either to participate in summers or, more importantly, to attend college as undergraduates. These schools have dedicated SAT/TOEFL professors, college application tutors and connections with multiple universities across the world with the promise of sending their best students to these universities. In essence, they have produced a complete structure that is meant to undermine the limitations of the distance between student and international universities. Through the prospect of sending students abroad, these schools get funding from English-teaching schools and entrepreneurs who believe in the power of an “international education” as a way of changing our country for the better. Entrepreneurship is a key ideology to these schools: they believe that if their students are studying abroad, they must be doing something great — they are, as they hope, creating a new future for the entire nation. But Brazil itself is, in many ways, a capitalistic ruin — a place filled with inequality, racism, crimes and corruption, with a government that sees the free market as a master solution. What is being proposed by these schools, then, is another apparent solution: to send young bodies abroad so that they can bring home new ways of fixing our failed structures.

This faith in international students as saviors of Brazil is not only present in these schools: it is present everywhere. In Brazil, studying abroad guarantees social prestige. Let me share an unsettling and recurrent personal experience that exemplifies this discussion: when I visit my high school with friends who also studied there and are now enrolled in Brazilian universities, the focus of all conversations is always my experience, not theirs. Saying “eu estudo nos EUA” (I study in the U.S.) raises you above everyone else. In this sense, this “study abroad” project is built both structurally by these schools and culturally through a deep belief in the transformative (and necessarily capitalistic) power of those who have studied outside of Brazil (especially in the United States).

With this context in mind, I want to turn our attention to the students from these schools. These adolescents are not living under strictly disciplinary systems, the kind that tells us precisely what and how to go about our lives. Rather, as the German philosopher Byung-Chan Han argues, they are part of a ‘performance society’ (Han, 2010). To Han, this society idealizes individuals who see themselves as personal entrepreneurial projects, independent and always capable of achieving more. Han’s argument resonates with Anna Tsing’s definition of alienation and commodification, from her book The Mushroom at the End of the World: students must be self-contained — so that they can control their own fate — and scalable — so that they can cause immense impact in other lives after college. This alienates students into commodities. As personal projects of themselves, they do not need disciplinary structures to force them nor relations with others to progress; they believe themselves to be makers of their own (capitalistic) future. It is only through this path that they can achieve the “best thing” they could do in their lives: “changing the world”.

As an international student, I am an alienated project, a commodity. According to Tsing, alienation avoids any forms of contamination; this translates here as extreme individualism. Through the ruins of Brazilian capitalism, a new world is generated to some adolescents that is itself a different kind of ruin: an unfulfilling life with lacking human encounters for the sake of producing for an ideological system of performance — precarity here is not of money or resources, but of meaning. We engage with thoughtlessness through our choices in order to generate what is sold as ‘positive transformation.’ Further, as Tsing would likely argue, through this alienation we fail to imagine and create our own history.

As expected, this alienation is quite hideous in practice. Students are young and susceptible to fall for the hype surrounding the ideology of progress. Yet, they do not learn to think critically about the isolation and emptiness that they subsequently experience. Then, a great question to ask is: can we escape this alienation? Matsutake mushrooms might show us a way out. By thriving in environments that capitalism has worked hard to destroy, and not allowing themselves to be produced in laboratories and farms, they disobey the positivistic standards of scalability and self-enclosure, denying the reigning ideology, bringing forth exceptional ways of living. The question transforms: how can we learn from Matsutake mushrooms and apply their alienation-fighting knowledge in practice?

This leads us to an unexpected encounter between Anna Tsing and the philosopher Hannah Arendt, which can clarify how to learn from mushrooms and their unwillingness to be controlled. Arendt in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem argues that we, humans, can engage with structures without questioning our own personal actions — that is, we can live in a state of thoughtlessness. Arendt is arguing that, unlike mushrooms, we can be fully controlled, given enough reifying forces that not only force us to do specific things, but that also makes us forget to think for ourselves. In such cases, there might not be any disturbance that pulls us out of thoughtlessness, depending on how entrenched we are with the prevailing ideology of progress. Mushrooms, on the other hand, are always out of capitalistic control, and require much more work to be translated to commodities. They grow in chaos and disappear in order; they give pickers meaning in their lives, beyond the money they receive; they enrich japanese food with more than just protein for their bodies to work; they connect animals and humans beyond the predatory level; Tsing’s book is itself a collection of reasons for us to look up to Matsutake mushrooms as beings who deny to give up their battle against capitalistic control.

I believe that I am entrenched in a thoughtlessness system that ‘motivates’ me to have a life of progress, believing that doing so will take me ‘where I want to be.’ We are taught to minimize disturbances and, naturally, ‘design our future.’ Matsutake mushrooms, as well as other forms of unexpected lives and designs, show us how we are not designers of our own future in the world of progress. Yet, they also show us paths to collaboratively remake our worlds. We ought to listen to their wisdom, especially if we aim to survive the capitalistic ruins that we have made ourselves. 

This work, although focused on my personal experience as an international student, is a critical account of capitalism in its entirety. All capitalistic ways of life are necessarily exposed and submitted to its intrinsic ideology of progress. The reality behind international students from Brazil is but one example of alienation and commodification in practice.

Written by Lucas Eras Paiva