A letter on epistemological breaks, morality, and the current conjuncture
Dear comrades and fellow travelers,
I wrote this to clarify my own thinking by the writing, and with the hope that it might spark a little conversation which is further clarifying. I imagine it as addressed to various marxists I know. I also intend some of it in a spirit of comradely provocation, in the sense that I think we Marxists in the far left have some things that bear talking about it. I’m aware that this is very US-focused letter. To my friends outside the US, I’m sorry about that, but I do live in the US and the matters I raise are important to me. At the same time I would be very, very interested in hearing from people elsewhere about how much these remarks do or do not apply outside the US currently.
It’s my impression that right now in the United States much of the population is acting as if it believes borders and their enforcement are largely illegitimate. I suspect this subset of the population breaks down loosely into people who aren’t totally sure what they think but are doing what strikes them as right in the moment, people who consciously hold that view in a durable way, and people who consciously hold that view right now but less durably. (‘Durable’ is vague, I mean something like ‘some people have additional beliefs and analyses and/or are in contexts that will reinforce their view of the border, and other people do not.’) And, some people are in what is for them a new outlook while for others it’s longer term. Furthermore, this sensibility seems to be spreading. Figuring out why is important but beyond me just now.
The world hangs together to an important degree - it’s an ensemble, a totality - such that social phenomena are only limitedly isolable. That’s wonkily phrased. What I mean to say is that if people’s beliefs about one specific thing changes, that change at least potentially has an impact on other things, at least when the belief involves lived forms of practice like the opposition to ICE that’s underway in the US. That is to say, people who act on the belief or to act as if they believe that the border and its enforcement are illegitimate will quickly run up against other aspects of society - not least, armed agents of the state! - that act in disciplinary/repressive fashion and also pose new political problems, like, are the latter also illegitimate?, and what kinds of action are and are not authorized (not to mention well- or ill-advised) in response to illegitimate institutions? I say this in part in a spirit of wanting to appreciate the absolutely massive though usually implicit collective and individual intelligence involved in the events unfolding right now, and how dynamic that intelligence is. I think that matters generally in part simply because it’s true but also matters specifically in the present because there is a common bit of the dominant ideology that holds that people are generally both stupid and fixed as they are. I also say this because I think it’s a matter of political responsibility for us on the left to engage these processes of collective thinking - to attempt to speak to and respond and participate in those collective intellectual processes - while their often implicit character can make that political responsibility harder to act on or to even notice.
I’m unsure if I’ve been clear so to reiterate: a large part of the US population currently thinks or is willing to entertain the view that the border and its enforcement is illegitimate, at least insofar as those institutions manifest in their immediate life - in their neighborhood, their workplace, their family, etc. That view entails a degree of illegitimacy to the state’s repressive force as well. What degree is unclear, and not in a ‘how do we know what people think?’ kind of unclear but rather in a ‘people are thinking this through in practice in real time right now, what they conclude is open-ended, and people will disagree with each other.’ If I’m right, and I think I am, I think this is highly politically significant. Without meaning to trespass against the commandment to change the world rather than just interpret it various ways, these events demand analysis. In my view Don Hamerquist provides some valuable concepts for that analysis, as I will lay out. (If people aren’t familiar with him, well, get familiar! Briefly, Hamerquist was an important figure in the Sojourner Truth Organization, the history of which is well covered in Mike Staudenmaier’s book and the writings of which remain worth reading as well. Hamerquist has remained an active left intellectual since STO’s dissolution and some of his more recent writing has been collected in the book A Brilliant Red Thread.)
Hamerquist uses the term ‘epistemological break’ to illuminating effect. Readers familiar with the Marxological use of the term via the philosopher Louis Althusser will likely hear associations in the term that don’t really apply; such readers are encouraged to try to bracket those associations. The editors of Hamerquist’s recent book summarize his usage of the term as follows:
“Hamerquist uses the term ‘epistemological break’ to denote a dramatic and often sudden shift in consciousness. Such shifts, in Hamerquist’s perspective, are not gradual evolutions nor the product of quiet reflection, but rather the result of participating in mass action and engagement with historical events as they unfold. Elsewhere he has described epistemological breaks to be “where social actors emerge from passivity and assume political roles that would have been unthinkable “yesterday”’.” (359.)
Closely related, quoting the editors again, Hamerquist emphasizes “the ways that constraints and limitations on what’s possible may change quickly and dramatically, and to argue that revolutionaries must always be prepared to change their approach to respond to surprising and expansive possibilities.” (360.)
I would put it this way: people go along thinking and acting normally, in line with the dismal, bloody social order that is generally normalized, until they don’t. Why they don’t - how such changes come about - is very complicated and worth a great deal of attention. When they don’t, they become newly oppositional, with that oppositional character as much or more a cause as an effect of the break. These kinds of breaks recur, though their timing and rhythm is only minimally predictable - we can be sure such developments will happen sometimes, but not exactly when and where. That’s to say, these are uncommon kinds of periods such that it’s hard work to understand and respond to them, and they occur frequently enough that understanding them is a significant political task (both morally - we have political responsibilities - and practically - understanding these dynamics is an important element of the work required if anything we really want to see happen is going to actually happen).
When such a break happens a large number of people undertake “generating and diffusing ‘repeatable gestures’ and ‘ungovernable moments’” (87) which challenge the current order to an important degree and have a variety of other important effects (these experiences can be deeply life changing). There is a kind of opening, or at least a potential for an opening. Openings close, absent revolution, and, pardon the mixed metaphor, the terrain is often different after the closure. As Hamerquist writes, “every cycle of crisis and the explosion of political possibility that accompanies it leads to an adaptive response” by capitalists and the state. (77)
Those responses are complicated and have multiple effects. Overall they work to restore governability - to return to or set up a new “political routine” that facilitates the continued reproduction of capitalist social relations. That restoration works to either undo or marginalize the epistemological break that occurred, and to make further breaks or expansion of the current break less likely in the short term future. One result is that the “break with established politics recedes into nostalgic memories,” encouraging “an increasing fraction of the momentarily-radicalized lapse into cynicism or accommodations to some variant of reformist politics—which itself is often only a stepping stone to cynicism and passivity.” (78. Hannah Proctor’s book Burnout can be read as about this dynamic)
Hamerquist elaborates on these dynamics as follows. While some people “see the working class as passive potential for an external leadership” the class in fact tends to “develop its own forms of struggle and its own organic leaderships,” in ways that do not fall neatly “into a few predictable, linear, reformist tracks.” Rather, these developments have “the potential to explode, creating new institutions and radically transforming popular consciousness.” (157) When these patterns play out - and to be clear, it is a matter of when, not if, even though the timing is quite uncertain - they begin as struggles “initiated by minorities before the bulk of their constituency is convinced that the struggle is needed, and certainly before it is generally realized that there is sufficient solidarity to make them productive.” This implies some tasks for the left already, in a way that many activists already find intuitive, namely to aid those immediate struggles, help expand the circles of who is convinced, and help foster the necessary solidarity. Those tasks amount to ‘help the work along’ and are very important.
At the same time, the work to be helped along is not simply fixed/given (often the degree to which it is so is actively a political problem, at least from the perspective of revolutionary politics). What I mean here is that those three tasks I mentioned are in important respects a matter of helping people involved in collective action to succeed at that action as they understand it. As I said, this is very important, but at the same time, it’s also very important to engage with - to politic within or in relation to - that understanding in order to take it further. This latter activity is significant because, as Hamerquist writes, “there is a qualitative difference between mass movements of resistance and negation that refuse capital’s command in a variety of ways, and a mass revolutionary challenge that presents and embodies a positive alternative to capital as a social order.” The former, mass movements of resistance, are generally “negative responses to features of capitalist oppression and exploitation that are usually contained within the framework of capital and that seldom raise challenges to its basic premises.” Moving beyond such containment and raising such fundamental challenges is a crucial historical task in the abolition of capitalism and replacing it with an emancipated, freely associated humanity. This is not at all to say that the left can, by sheer will, turn widespread resistance and epistemological break into revolution, but it is to say that the road to revolution has, as one necessary component, activity along these lines.
In addition, aside from though still related to the matter of the road to revolution, there is also the matter of successive political generations, or how current struggles lay groundwork (for better and worse) for future struggles. Hamerquist writes that generally in struggles we find that some participants “move beyond repetitive, episodic cycles of activity and passivity as they discover real social values in acts of collective resistance that are not strictly limited by their potential to achieve reform objectives.” (314.) In doing so, those participants in struggle begin to “experience some of the intangible benefits of collective resistance” and “elements of a counter-hegemonic cultural bloc will begin to develop.” That bloc is not “a given presupposed structure but a changing framework for political development in which social forces become increasingly self-conscious and individuals become active and creative organizers of the movements from which they emerge.” (160-161)
As Hamerquist notes, such people live through or practice epistemological breaks, which create “a new horizon of political and personal possibilities.” This occurs with only some participants in struggle, not least “because the development of a mass struggle always divides its base—often sharply—and only a part, a relatively small minority, experiences this new sense of possibilities—and even then, usually temporarily. This social layer will provide the basis for any revolutionary alternative to capital, and one major task of revolutionary organization is to develop a political/cultural home for such people.” (314.) That task is significantly a matter of transforming “the insurgent and counter-hegemonic elements of a working-class constituency into an organized culture of opposition, able to set its own objectives and resolve its own dilemmas” which “requires that working people develop an appreciation of their own collective strength and capability.” (158.)
All of this involves longstanding but often neglected problems of organization - that neglect is both cause and effect of the relative disconnection of the existing left and existing marxism from problems of strategy and tactics, incisively analyzed by Rob Knox here. These are issues I can’t really address here due to space constraints and my own limitations. For now, I will only note and underline two critical remarks of Hamerquist’s. One, that left organizations “tend to lag behind the radical possibilities of mass upsurges.” (87)
To be pointed, the organized electoral left is not only lagging behind but largely walking in the opposite direction from these possibilities and from matters with intense human stakes in the short term: to be more pointed, relatively speaking, the funds and time spent on Mamdani’s mayoral campaign would be/would have been better spent on opposition to ICE. Comrades will respond by asserting that we can do two things, and that’s not exactly wrong, but as the saying goes “show me your budget, and I'll show you your values.” (Next comes the response that surely time spent writing marxist blog posts is also wasted. Fair enough, I certainly wouldn’t assert any important to my own thoughts, but my guilt is not evidence of others’ innocence, so to speak.)
Hamerquist notes as well that many in the far left evade crucial issues that should be discussed and decided consciously, such as “the best mass organizational form, how to develop fully rounded participation in struggles, the relationship of passive majorities to active minorities” by assuming that people collectively will spontaneously figure out the best course of action. That assumption only makes sense if one mistakenly presumes that “some underlying dynamic will always push these issues ahead in the proper way.” The reality is that “the immense variety of levels and forms of struggle must contend with the absence of some necessarily unifying underlying dynamic which will group them together, making it as likely that they cancel each other out as that they combine in a more general and fundamental challenge to capital. This is particularly the case when we take into account the factor of ruling-class policy through the more or less conscious exercise of state power.” (160)
To be pointed again, this time to a politics to which I am far more sympathetic, for a while in the late 00s and early to mid 2010 there arose in Anglophone far left circles that sometimes call themselves/are sometimes called ‘the ultraleft’ a strongly spontaneist and often economistic sensibility. I’m probably showing my age here but I think of this as the Endnotes/communization milieu. The revolutionary maximalism of that milieu has a great deal to recommend it. I agree with the vision of social revolution as communization; this is laid out well in Jasper Bernes’s recent book which I heavily recommend. In my view this work helps meet a major political responsibility articulated by Simon Clarke, namely “to supplement the intellectual resources of” struggle in the present in order “to help to broaden its understanding and its horizons.” At the same time, spontaneism, via fostering neglect of (we might say, with Lenin, liquidation of) matters of political organization in a way that involves a partial evasion of political responsibility.
This is not at all to say that left politics can only be done well by specialists, it is simply to say that we have obligations to try to help the work along and engage frankly. In doing so, to quote Hamerquist again, “the main weight” of left efforts “has to involve a working-class orientation and constituency.” (158.) This point on orientation and constituency has two or three facets as well. For one thing, it means cultivating a working class base for the left and for another it means cultivating a relationship between the left and that working class base that is not matter of passive constituency led by and providing resources for active leadership that represent it but rather a creation of sites and practices of collective thought and action conduct by working people together. Elements of this are baked in to the lived reality of epistemological breaks as Hamerquist means the term and occurring right now in the resistance to ICE that we are seeing.
The third facet is the active, activist work of connecting the above to the rest of the working class, opening outward so to speak rather than being an inward-looking left subculture. This is a matter of some difficulty and real tensions because there are multiple pressing needs involved which are hard to harmonize - newly politicizing people need one thing, collective strategy setting by a movement is another thing, politicizing people who are not yet involved is yet another, etc. There is no magic formula or one neat trick to make all of this happen easily. It just has to be done in fallible ways that will often take the form of disputes within the left.
Thus far I’ve basically said, at what I hope is not overly tedious length, that there is an important set of processes under way - many people are acting and thinking in new and significant ways, that it is important to try to understand accurately, that I think the left has important responsibilities here that I think are not being sufficiently attended to, and that I think some of Don Hamerquist’s writing can help us understand both these processes and our tasks/responsibilities in relation to them.
I’m now going to shift gears, in the attempt to suggest a few further directions for discussion. I want to first discuss the importance of morality then raise some points about the present conjuncture in slightly more detail. In my experience the world morality tends to evoke negative responses from a lot of Marxists, in the form of either squeamishness or eyerolls. I’m not entirely sure why this is the case and I find it especially strange when Marx’s own writings seem to me full to the brim with moral outrage, an outrage he expects his intended audience to share. This is an old argument. The philosopher Hilary Putnam wrote about the obsolescence of the fact/value distinction over twenty years ago. Marxists were there first, if I can be permitted a little minor flag-waving. EP Thompson polemicized about these matters in the late 1950s. (Simon Clarke has argued that one of Thompson’s contributions was his emphasis on moral consciousness as an element of struggle, and that “the enforced separation of a morality that affirmed the human and liberating character of socialism from the working class movement in the 1950s” was a serious political defeat of the tendencies Thompson sought to ally with.) At very nearly the same time this was a matter of dispute involving Staughton Lynd and the Studies on the Left collective as well, as detailed by Andrew Hartman in his recent book Karl Marx in America.
Setting aside for now the status of morality within our - meaning Marxists’ - theory and analysis, it seems to me simply true that a great deal of actually existing working class mobilization has a moral element as an inextricable part of what it is as lived activity. Marx famously wrote that theory “becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.” Many members of the working class have their own moral standards which, combined with their understanding of how this society works, ‘grip’ them as part of how they go about authorizing themselves individually and collectively to take militant action and as part of deciding when, where, and why to do so. (The sociologists Linus Westheuser and Linda Beck have recently published an interesting article analyzing German workers’ critical outlooks on the world as it exists for them, which gets into detail on workers’ moral assessments of the world, and the limits thereof. They summarize their article at this blog post.)
To be clear, I do not think the working class needs moral philosophy in particular, far from it, but it is clear that many people in the working class consider individually and deliberate together about what they think is right and wrong, and what to do about the wrongs. Furthermore, the most advanced wings of a struggle, which have the potential to form what Hamerquist calls “a counter-hegemonic bloc” are usually actively making moral claims, as one part of their activity, and they do not do so mistakenly. To aid them or to wish their success - to desire a more robust counter-hegemony - includes waning their moral sensibility to spread to others as one facet of their counter-hegemony. Engaging that directly is part of left intellectual responsibility and also simply a matter of respecting our fellow proletarians enough to take their thought processes seriously. In my view Marxists’ eyerolling at talk of morality reflects a clumsiness on these matters and does us no favors. We are better served by understanding ourselves as working at least in part at - in Walter Benjamin’s words - “the task of making the world and its drives repugnant. Benjamin insisted that the working class's "hate" and "spirit of sacrifice" are among the class’s greatest sources of mobilizing energy. Benjamin wrote that both are nourished from "the picture of enslaved forebears" and not "the ideal of the emancipated heirs" but it applies with at least equal force to the present - neighbors being manhandled by ICE, children blown apart by bombs. All of that is clearly a matter of moral judgment and conviction, at least in part, and rightly so.
Turning back to the present conjuncture a little less abstractly, I’ll nod, somewhat apologetically, to two things I wrote recently. One is an essay which Spectre kindly published in early summer. In it I borrowed heavily from Rob Knox’s analysis of what I think it’s fair to call the legalism of the opposition to the Iraq War in the early 2000s and of the opposition to the Tories in the late 2010s. I cite to the Knox pieces in my essay and everyone should read them. In my view there is a similar legalism in much opposition to Trump, and that involves serious errors of both analysis and strategy as I tried to articulate in the essay. More recently I wrote a letter to the editor at the arts paper Little Village here in Iowa where I live, arguing that we should oppose deportation as such, not oppose only deportations conducted without due process. I suggest there that we should understand the border and its enforcement as analogous to enslavement and its legal enforcement. It is, in my view, clarifying to transpose claims about the border to claims about enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Doing so underscores how insistence that the problem is due process or is the application of the law to the wrong parties rather than to people properly subjected to it misses the forest for the trees.
In my view, the emphasis on legal process related to deportation, and the related emphasis on the risk that citizens might be deported, is another flavor of legalism. With regard to deportation, that’s a serious moral failing as it amounts to abandoning many people to the violence that is deportation. That many people are - as evidenced by current resistance to ICE - unwilling to countenance that abandonment and are willing to take serious risks to try to prevent it is a very significant development as I tried to suggest above in my discussion of Hamerquist’s writings on epistemological breaks. It helps indicate that issues of strategy and issues of principle are not always cleanly delineable, even if such delineation were desirable, and that part of an epistemological break in Hamerquist’s sense can be an expansion in people’s strongly felt action-motivating sense of solidarity, which is to say, there can be epistemological breaks in a moral sense.
The legalism I tried to write against in both of these short pieces of mine exists in part in the form of something like thought-stopping cliches, phrases which direct or restrict critical attention. We should encourage people to not fall for that, to see through it, to dismiss it as a rhetorical move made by their enemies. To quote Hamerquist again, part of what we on the far left want is the development of “an organized culture of opposition, able to set its own objectives.” Such a culture would decide for itself what its standards are and what state actions do and don’t violate those standards. To an important degree, within current opposition to ICE, there is already, at least in implicit form, such a set of standards and a judgment that the state’s actions are unacceptable and must be prevented from being allowed to continue. (This is present as well in closely related ways in the opposition to the ongoing massacres of Palestinians. On that, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, let me recommend Rob Knox’s work again, specifically his recent co-authored book, Resisting Erasure.) As I’ve tried to stress, this is incredibly important, an epistemological break or part thereof, in Hamerquist’s sense of the term. That implicit moral standard within the current forces has surpassed emphasis on matters of law. Questions like ‘is Trump violating or obeying the law? Has this deportation been properly conducted?’ have, for the most advanced forces, taken a back seat to ‘is this acceptable according to our standards?’ Returning to the law as the standard would be a step backward from here. We should take that as a warning, since history is full of steps backward, unfortunately.
Instead, we on the left should try, within our scope of influence such as it is, to help defend, elaborate, and enroll others into the sensibilities on display in the most advanced wings of resistance movements today. In doing so we would be attempting to help those wings constitute, again to quote Hamerquist, “a counter-hegemonic cultural bloc.” Such an attempt runs counter to other political forces of which legalism is a piece. On the one hand, legalism exists in the diffuse ways in which national mythology and system-serving common sense exists, as a matter of what everybody knows. (All obviousness, writes Althusser, is “an ideological effect.” Part of what ideology does, he adds, is to impose a sense of obviousness.) In addition to this diffuse existence, legalism is also actively advocated and mobilized by identifiable political and institutional actors. One only has to check any of a number of statements made by Democratic politicians to find examples. Those examples both reflect the dominant ideology and actively serve its propagation, as weapon against potential future epistemological breaks and against the people living out one in the moment.
This is in part to say that legalism, and law more broadly, is both generally speaking an obstacle to the kinds of positive political developments underway that I’ve discussed via Hamerquist and an obstacle of particular salience in the present right now. In my view (and I am here again echoing something I learned from Rob Knox) one of the best things that those of us with some degree of formal, officially credentialed expertise regarding the law is to help to calmly explain the law and its limits so as to dispel illusions about its utility to, attempting to erode many people’s misplaced confidence in the law and thus to shore up (or at least create more space for) confidence in the working class collectively.
I will end in just a moment. As the last thing before I do, I would underline a suggestion I made in my letter on deportations, namely that at least for us in the United States, slavery and abolition in the 1850s, specifically tensions over the law regarding fugitives seeking to escape slavery and efforts to apprehend them, is fruitful for thinking through the present. I’m very aware that it is a historian’s foible to always say ‘let’s think the present through the past!’ but my self-consciousness notwithstanding, that era is a good example to think with because of the loose parallels between then and now (there are only ever loose parallels between past and present, it seems to me). Specifically, that was a time of epistemological breaks, growing militancy, unproductive legalism by some political forces, and a growing spread of the moral sensibility of more radical forces, forces which in a sense furthered the epistemological break at the time, helping others to similarly break with the dominant consensus and become part of an oppositional, counter-hegemonic culture. (Those forces also had serious limits worth thinking about.) Furthermore, slavery is immediately available to the vast majority of Americans as a kind of moral bedrock, something inarguably unacceptable and demanding urgent, rapid action. That moral clarity helps facilitate analysis and strategy in way that are hard to spell out in detail but which seem to me undeniable. As I tried to suggest above, if we treat the border and its enforcement with similar moral clarity, a good deal else is clarified for present purposes.
Thank you for your time comrades. I’d love to hear any thoughts you have on this. This is about as far I’ve thought on these matters, and it doesn’t feel very far, so to speak. (“The powers were so limited. The goal / Lay far in the distance.”) I’d be delighted to borrow your insights.
Yours warmly,
Nate