August 29, 2021

The Radicality of Care Part One - Capitalism and the Social Fabric

“In fact it could be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine, designed first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures.” — David Graeber1

The crises the world is currently facing can be described as manifestations of an ideology of radical individualism and de-solidarization. Amidst a world-wide pandemic, a considerable number of people refuse to wear masks because to them their feeling of comfort is more important than the protection of others. Others who got their first vaccination in spring and early summer demanded to have their appointment for the second jab rescheduled on the grounds that the planned date was interfering with their vacation plans. Apparently their motive to get vaccinated was that they thought their lives would continue normally because for them personally the pandemic would be over. In the face of the collapse of the global ecosphere there are still lots and lots of people who refuse to make substantial changes to their lives for the sake of future generations. In the light of calls for a decarbonization of the German economy, the Christian-Democrat candidate in the federal elections said that it would be unjust towards low-income families if a flight to Mallorca were to cost more than sixty Euros.

Those are only some of the few examples that show the wide-spread loss of the ability to place one’s actions in a larger context that goes beyond the satisfaction of hedonic desires. The pandemic is not seen as a world-wide problem that causes death, harm, and suffering of millions, it is seen as an obstacle in the way of one’s plans, comparable perhaps to a traffic jam or an overbooked flight. Consequently, the vaccine is not seen as a possibility to mitigate said death, harm, and suffering, it is seen as a device to remove said obstacle. What is lacking is a sense for how one’s own decisions and actions are relevant to others.

This lack is a symptom of a phenomenon that both enables capitalism as well as capitalism seeks to bring it about: the dissolution of the complex network of social relations in which humans are caught up. Graeber points out that the predominant mode of organizing the flow of goods among peoples outside the sphere of western capitalism (and, in fact even within its sphere as long as its influence was not yet as total as it is now) is what he calls “human economy”. A human economy is characterized by acts of mutual aid between relatives, friends, neighbors, and so on. Those are usually money-free and take the shape of gifts that are returned. If you find yourself in need of milk, you might ask your neighbor who gives you a jar. A couple of weeks later they might come over and ask for a dozen of eggs which you happily hand over to them, and so on.2 This is contrasted with modes of organizing that are mediated through debt. The crucial difference is that in human economies the exact quantity of what is owed can never be specified. If your neighbor gives you a jar of milk, clearly you owe them a favor in return. But what kind of favor exactly? Is a dozen of eggs equivalent to a jar of milk? What if you only have eleven? Would that suffice to settle the debt?

The important point of human economies is that these questions are unanswerable and the debts cannot be settled. In fact, they should not, because that would eliminate the relation between you and your neighbor. This was exactly one of my charges against legalism as a theoretical framework: that if morality is conceived in terms of obligations and debt, the potential to see it as one of the modes for the proliferation of meaningful human relationships is lost because when each party has done their part, their relation is reset to the initial morally neutral start. Graeber tells the story of the Tiv people who are constantly passing around little presents among one another, being careful always to give back a little less or a little more than originally received. In doing so, they continually recreate the complex fabric of relations of interdependence that is the hallmark of a human life among other humans. But, as Graeber repeatedly insists, practices like this can be found everywhere around the world. To be a human among humans is to live in this network of relations that is brought about, maintained, and manifests itself in ongoing interchanges of mutual aid.

Once it is possible to attribute an exact number to these manifestations of humanity itself, it becomes possible to dissolve the network in which these manifestations take place and replace it with a perverted version of it. This is what happened with the advent of debt and money. Once the human economy was pushed aside by a debt economy, the fabric of mutual aid was pushed aside by relations between debtors and creditors. This required a tremendous amount of violence. Not necessarily physical violence, although more often than not it takes that shape, but in any case social violence, that is ripping humans from the network in which they are embedded.

This is not the place to retell how Graeber traces the ties between debt, money, and violence throughout human history (instead I encourage everyone to read the book). The takeaway for the purpose of this text is this: insofar as capitalism is contingent on and has an interest in the proliferation of debt, it has an interest in people seeing every aspect of life in terms of debt and claim. Insofar as the notion of debt has built into it the idea of becoming even with someone, capitalism encourages people to see every interaction under the questions “What do I get out of this?” and “Do I get what I am owed out of this?” Insofar as becoming even interrupts the continuous re-creation of the social fabric, the capitalist perspective leads to the destruction of meaningful human relationships.

We can see how this ultimately plays out in the de-solidarization I described above. Wearing a mask to protect others is hard to describe as the fulfillment of one’s part in an interaction, especially if there is no immediate and equivalent action from another part. The same holds for being vaccinated to create herd immunity or cutting down carbon emissions for the sake of future generations. Instead of seeing these acts as one’s contribution to network of meaningful relationships that always already exists and will continue to exist because of these contributions, capitalism leads people to believe that they are owed all sorts of things: a comfortable shopping experience which is incompatible with wearing a mask indoors, a vacation at any time it fits which requires the re-scheduling of vaccination appointments, the comfort of the bourgeois lifestyle that is opened up by fossil-fuel driven consumerism which requires abandoning ambitious environmental politics.

So far, so devastating. We can see how this dynamics line up with the creation of a machinery of hopelessness. What is needed, then, is a resistance that allows to retrieve the sense for possible alternatives. In the next part, I will try to show how caring can open up the possibility to create meaningful relationships and therefore be this exact kind of resistance.