Capitalism shifts blame between individuals and structure to deflect accountability

Evidence

For this reason, it is a mistake to rush to impose the individual ethical responsibility that the corporate structure deflects. This is the temptation of the ethical which, as Žižek has argued, the capitalist system is using in order to protect itself in the wake of the credit crisis – the blame will be put on supposedly pathological individuals, those ‘abusing the system’, rather than on the system itself. But the evasion is actually a two step procedure – since structure will often be invoked (either implicitly or openly) precisely at the point when there is the possibility of individuals who belong to the corporate structure being punished. At this point, suddenly, the causes of abuse or atrocity are so systemic, so diffuse, that no individual can be held responsible. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 145

Categorization

• XREF: The two-step blame evasion (individual-demonization vs. systemic-diffusion) echoes governance and atrocity-exculpation patterns found across the Frankfurt School literature on fascism and the manipulative personality. — connects to: Internalized capitalist values make American workers blame themselves for precarity. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 63; Individual-responsibility climate appeals let impersonal structure escape accountability — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 139; Diffusion of blame across many actors erases individual accountability for collective harm — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1556 (+8 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: are there documented institutional cases where the SAME event was explained once via ‘bad apple’ and again via ‘systemic complexity’ depending on who was accused?
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that blame-shifting is a two-step procedure rather than either-or is dense: accountability rhetoric oscillates between individualism and structuralism strategically, exposing a genuine gap in how liberal ethics conceives responsibility.

Related

• Blame-shifting alternates between individual scapegoats and diffuse structure to shield capital (similarity 0.93)
• Capital as cause-that-is-not-a-subject escapes all accountability structures (similarity 0.82)
• Blame on individual bankers and government deflects from capitalism’s systemic causes (similarity 0.82)
• Corporate vices are engendered by structure, not by individuals (similarity 0.81)
• Ethical appeals to individual responsibility let impersonal structures evade accountability (similarity 0.80)
• Corporations resist ethical chastisement because they are not human individuals (similarity 0.80)
• Individualistic ethical models cannot grasp how corporations and Capital act (similarity 0.79)
• Diffusion of blame across many actors erases individual accountability for collective harm (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Blame-shifting alternates between individual scapegoats and diffuse structure to shield capital #corroborates (0.95) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 145
• Blame on individual bankers and government deflects from capitalism’s systemic causes #exemplifies (0.90) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 130
• Diffusion of blame across many actors erases individual accountability for collective harm #corroborates (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1556
• Capitalism abstracts in order to extract and distances harm to dodge accountability #corroborates (0.80) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 111
• Ethical appeals to individual responsibility let impersonal structures evade accountability #corroborates (0.80) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 139
• Corporate wrongdoing stems from diffused responsibility rather than individual guilt #corroborates (0.75) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 377
• The bad-apples framing deflects blame from systemic causes #corroborates (0.75)
• Structural diffusion of responsibility in corporations shields executives and strips morality from harm #corroborates (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1605