Not a super fun or funny or engaging post, but what follows is the second part (of three) of my notes for Socialism conference. The ideas of moral economy and moral economy struggles I have found super generative in thinking about COVID. Maybe you will too! A few more things are coming this week, including (I hope) the last part of these notes, some more fun stuff, and a (fun! Of course! Always fun!) explainer about public health and what it actually is.
To start, from a chapter Nate wrote called “The Reproduction of Moral Economies in Capitalism: Reading Thompson Structurally”:
The Marxist historian and polemicist EP Thompson is often remembered today for having offered an analysis of what he termed the ‘moral economy’ in a series of writings from 1963 to 1971. For Thompson, a moral economy was a food market in which each commodity is bought and sold at a ‘fair price’ instead of a ‘free price’ determined purely by the market. In this way, the ‘moral economy’ subordinates profit-making to the need to avoid hunger and ultimately starvation. Thompson’s offered his analysis of the ‘moral economy’ in the context of a broader examination of popular riots in eighteenth-century England. He referred to these riots as a ‘pattern of social protest’ consisting of specific ‘forms of [collective] action’ which‘ depended upon a particular set of social relations’. ‘Moral economy’ was his term for that‘ particular set of social relations’, and in his view it offered ordinary people ideological resources for transgressing prevailing social norms and engaging in acts of collective resistance. For Thompson, a ‘moral economy’ existed, and it facilitated collective action, when it was generally believed that food prices should be regulated to ensure subsistence, when legal authorities were widely believed to enforce this norm, and when certain food vendors violated the expectations the norm generated by pricing bread and other food too high. Under these conditions, the popular classes could step in to punish seller for departing from general norms relating to bread pricing, thus enforcing the ‘moral economy’ as the background normative condition for food markets.
COVID is important not necessarily for what it reveals about COVID, but for what it reveals about health, disease, the body, etc. in this particular configuration of capitalism that we are living in.
The “caloric deprivation theory of collective action” (as Nate puts it) – when people get hungry enough, collective action will follow – vs. the concept of outrage at the perception of injustice. A moral economy struggle is one resulting from this outrage at (perceived or real)perturbation of previously-existing moral economy. Thompson’s example is of bread riots; how do we apply this to collective action construed as a “health behavior”? People are not abstractly but rather concretely motivated in response to specific forms of and perceptions of injustice related to violation of these norms of moral economy. This of course depends on specific social relations. COLLECTIVE ACTION is what we are really trying to get at. People (including me) have wondered about this – why was there not more organizing of XYZ kind among XYZ people around COVID? When we say this, we’re expressing that on paper it would make a lot of sense for collective action to take place – a variant of the caloric-deprivation theory (the viral load theory?) of collective action. I think many of the struggles around COVID have in fact been moral economy struggles, revealing a deep need on the left to politicize not just COVID but also sickness and health in particular ways that is not being fulfilled currently except by a few people (us and our friends). Nate: “Moral economy struggles are not forces of disorder so much as they are forces of order.”
Moral economy struggles as a recurring phenomenon in capitalism, similar to social murder itself. Market dependence for capital accumulation; market participation is compulsory for everyone, including for capitalists and the state. This is (I think) a key point for theorizing the COVID response at the federal/macro level.
Institutional regimes in any capitalist society are temporary; capitalism (and the struggle and instability inherent therein) wears out old regimes and gives rise to new ones. Important moment in the pandemic right now, I think, of “moral economy struggles” giving rise to new institutional regimes. What are they? Are we working to understand them? As I see it, the left has basically tapped out and recused itself from the pandemic which is actually going to be (already is) a mighty force for reorganizing the particular institutionalized forms of class domination that we are currently living with. New forms of limitation or regulation of capitalists will produce new forms of capitalist production!
We can conceive (as Nate does) of moral economy as an ideological institution that promotes social order. Moral economy struggles take existing ideology as the basis for collective action; they are more akin to what we would call “reformist reforms” than challenges to or crises of the general social form of capitalism or specific forms of authority within capitalism. “Indeed, the heart of a moral economy conflict is precisely the demand for a return to a prior normal.” HELLO!!! Expert COVID discourse can be construed as a moral economy struggle par excellence. Trust science, doll! Nate goes on to describe moral economy struggles thus: everything is “good, right, and fair, as long as market practices ensure that most people continue to enjoy a certain standard of living.” That most people enjoy a certain standard of living. With COVID, “most people” was defined in explicitly eugenic ways (“most people” does not include people on chemo, people with immunocompromising or high-risk conditions). I also think some interrogation of “a certain standard of living” and how the pandemic has seemed to bring this down across the board would be worthwhile… for another time.
Per Nate, we can expect moral economy struggles to break out when the following conditions are present: 1) forms of regulation limiting the authority of powerful market actors (see perhaps the “state of exception” that COVID ushered in?); 2) an ideology that treats the economy resulting from these limits as good, right, just; 3)challenges by some capitalists or state personnel to those forms of regulation, and 4) no other enforcement of the limits upon those powerful market actors. I want to start thinking a lot more about how the state is stepping in to mediate and reorganize social murder in response to moral economy struggles (or other struggles that don’t fit this framework) and I think these four questions (the four questions of the COVID pandemic; why is this virus different from all other viruses?) are a good way to organize the inquiry.
A general, important question along similar lines that I have been thinking about, or more accurately, thinking about how to think about: is labor organizing a moral economy struggle? Did COVID strengthen or weaken “labor” overall? Has there been any state-mediated reconfiguration or redistribution of social murder as a result of labor struggles? The law channels moral economy struggles in specific directions and encourages social conflict to “express itself within the contours of existing moral economies.” To end, the idea that I think is so valuable in all of this: moral economy “can help us think in a way that bridges structure and agency” in thinking about the pandemic. I think this is so crucial. It is much too easy to get tripped up ascribing agency only to the state or only to each other. Instead, we need ways of thinking about and understanding our own agency as it is constrained by the state, by law, by ideology, by the healthcare system, by moral economies.