A mosaic of sorts - liberal egalitarianism, politics of association, etc
As ever I know I’ve said some of this before, ah well. (And you know it too, since obviously real readers of Open Mode make sure to read every word in every post, so most of you already know this. There may be some newbies and fakers among you but that’s not to whom I wrote, dear reader, I do it only for you. By the way, you’re looking nice today, and you should put some tape over the camera on your device.)
We live in a pyramid shaped society, a few on top, more somewhere in the middle, and most on the bottom. Shit rolls down hill, rewards and freedoms float and accumulate upward. The people up top seem relatively able to live with where and what they are and what they do. It seems to me that logically this means they are not aware of the actual social architecture of the world and/or of the moral value of we their many subordinates. They misunderstand the world or don’t think we’re their moral equals, or both.
What I just said is correct and I stand by it but it’s expressed in to static a way, a fixed, frozen condition. The reality is different in that it’s much more dynamic. For one thing, the people up top change - the staffing of the top, so to speak, is an ongoing process because, for one, occasionally some of them die, retire, return to the hell wherein they spawned, whatever, while new ones of them are grown in vats then trained to simulate human mannerisms (that’s not a very good joke, I admit, but it’s also less ugly than the reality which is that the people up top are human beings dehumanized in their socialization into dehumanizaing others), and periodically there are shakeups via changes in political institutions, economic crises, wars, etc, which also prompts change ups. That means the socialization of people at the top is recurring and can involve gaps - people who aren’t fully formed into the needs or demands of their social position. They also live in the same society as the rest of us (I mean, sort of, to an important degree they really do not!) and we are likely at a relative high point in human history in terms of degree of shared consensus on human equality, which creates problems of cognitive dissonance for people in objectively anti-egalitarian social positions, often compelled via those positions to pursue actively anti-egalitarian agendas. That’s all to say, it’s not like the lack of social and moral perception of elites is one and done, it’s an ongoing process that a) has to be renewed individually and collectively, b) has gaps and holes in it which have to be patched up and is subject to pressures that have to be dealt with, and c) occasionally permits conflict sensibilities, experiences, etc which include more accurate social and moral perception to leak through via those gaps and holes and I suspect also a general cultural osmosis, and those have to be dealt with. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for the rest of us, they’re well stocked with resources to meet needs a), b), and c) and with a kind of ideological/cultural productive capacity to create new such resources as well.
Related: empathy hurts sometimes. (Over the past year or so as the genocide in Gaza has unfolded I’ve found myself thinking again and again of Brecht saying he lives in dark times where someone who laughs hasn’t seen the news yet, I think of this often when doing genuinely joyful things with my wonderful children - my mind flashes from how much of my heart my kids compose to how heart rending it is for me to know the atrocities inflicted on children in Gaza and then to the infinitely greater heart rending that people in Gaza must be enduring.) I suspect this is part of how individual elites know they need to plug some holes etc, or that some of their fellows do, because of the distress they feel or express occasionally. I suspect they end up selectively cauterizing their capacity for empathy and living with it via selective and safe practices of empathy like charitable giving and volunteering and so on. If memory serves, often a very dubious if in my case, this is part of what Werner Bonefeld refers to as social coldness in his recent book that Rob Hunter and I reviewed for Spectre.
This has been on my mind off and on for a long time and it was on again this week as I watched Life and Death in the Warehouse, a shortish made for TV film about warehouse workers and management. It’s well done and very sad and bleak. It’d pair very well with Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake and even more so with his Sorry We Missed You. All three are in part depictions of instances of social murder playing out in real time, Life and Death in the Warehouse focusing specifically on this happening in work time.
One of the more arresting and disturbing elements of the film is the depiction of the managers, especially a newly hired trainee manager who is arguably the film’s main character and so is I think sort of an anti-hero. This character is repeatedly pulled between normal solidaristic and empathetic feelings and actions, on the one hand, and her role as conduit for the demands of capital on the labor process and the workers doing the work. Over and over again she’s confronted with moral dilemmas that boil down to employee health and dignity vs the company’s managerial culture and more fundamentally the imperatives that culture expresses and exists to navigate. As the film goes on, she increasingly resolves those dilemmas in worse and worse ways, morally speaking (which are also better and better ways for management and capital).
Watching it I thought of the many people I know who have worked jobs similar to those managed by this character, about my parents insistence that I should go to college to get a better job, and about my aspirations for my kids (to be as free and as happy as possible in the station they afforded, and not to fuck anyone over). I don’t think I got a lot of that until relatively recently in my life. I’ll add that I find the disconnects around class in my academic life (academics are generally harvested from further up the food chain) exhausting and isolating. Taking my life as a totality, especially given my kids, I’d love the same way over again, but I do sometimes thing graduate school was a mistake. (There’s a great Stewart Lee bit where he says something like ’due to more and more of you coming to see me over the years I now move exclusively in middle class circles where I do not belong, so thanks for that. Thanks!’ Be careful what you wish for, I guess.) Anyway, what I was gonna say is that it’s a hard thing to contemplate that most everyone you love will be subjected to the indignities of life in a pyramid-shaped society (though better stepped on than to step on, and I mean that). I wonder if this sometimes drives a loosely mirror image lack of accurate social and moral perception among the social nobodies of the world - an urge to look away from the monstrous social machinery that’s waiting to chew up you and your loved ones, and an urge to believe the people benefitting from that machinery give a shit about you sufficiently to pull you out when you’re pulled in. (Our mistakes are pro-social. Is this vulgar workerism? If you have to ask, well... fuck you.)
Part of how the management-track character lives with her own choices is through various rhetorical gestures and thought-stopping cliches offered by her fellow management plus a kind of ritual of celebration - they start the day with cheers about what a cool company they work for and so on, which partly serves to reduce people’s occupation of a reflective headspace. What I’m trying to get at here is that the anti-social dehumanizing position people like that are involves tensions and creates needs which have to be actively dealt with, and they are, through various means which are produced to meet that need. This is, I suppose, a kind of moral work producing moral use values, to salve and to shrink elites’ consciences as part of their living out the tendency to become ghouls over time.
A related matter that’s been on my mind is tied to Tony Smith’s excellent book Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism. The book does two things I care a lot about. One, it provides a fantastic overview of Marx’s account of capitalist society. Two, it shows how the very best most well-intentioned progressives simply can’t get very far in terms of accurate accounts of the world when they lack a concept of capital as a process that dominates society. It’s a wonderful book and if you’ve not done so, well, get your act together and rectify that flaw ASAP!
Something I’ve thought repeatedly about since reading the book is what liberal egalitarianism looks like when enacted in the world, so to speak. The book reads to me like a comparison of social theories, marxist and non-marxist, showing the superiority of the former. That’s valuable and as I said the overview it provides of the former is fantastic. That said, liberal egalitarianism as a doctrine or set of ideas is different from liberal egalitarians as actors in the world (especially non-academic ones who aren’t theorizing anything but rather are doing various jobs turning or oiling or repairing or guarding different gears of the death machine) and is also different from liberal egalitarianism as a sensibility inhabited in an enacted and at most only partially theorized way by those actors. What I mean by that last bit is that not everyone always theorizes their actions or lives self-reflexively: we do a thing that implies a concept but that doesn’t mean we actively think that concept, and sometimes we try to deny that concept because knowing what we’re actually doing in the world can be uncomfortable if that thing we’re doing is morally questionable. (This too relates to Bonefeld’s discussion of social coldness: if one felt every outrage of the world in full one might never stop screaming. Being callous is a terrible way to live but so is being all exposed raw nerves, most people find a place in the middle between the two and at most only partially by choice.)
It seems to me that liberal egalitarians, lacking a concept of capital, when living and working in the world outside universities are likely to either pursue quixotic projects - like, say, fixing poverty through micro-finance - or end up cutting corners on their egalitarianism. That is, either their social or moral imagination has to end up boxed in, sanded down, over time. Furthermore, while the most rarefied academic versions of liberal egalitarianism are, I assume, relatively siloed off in academic-only publications and conferences and so on, versions of that work filter out or get presented in more vernacular forms to serve as the conscience palliating-and-deadening devices that the elites of the world crave. That is: liberal egalitarians in the world outside universities - people who aren’t liberal egalitarian theorists but rather adherents to a version of liberal egalitarianism - likely trend toward ideologists for the deeply anti-egalitarian force of capital and the other forces it fosters (absent relatively uncommon circumstances like being embedded in networks and organizations of struggle, where the lack of a concept of capital may end up being a liability or may be supplemented by the people in struggle finding some way to understand capital; ie, a liberal egalitarian lawyer or statistician or whatever employed in the labor movement may be able to remain a liberal egalitarian without becoming a ghoul-serving ideologist. I’m unsure but it seems possible anyway.)
Related: there is, I think, a class dimension to actually existing liberal egalitarianism in that it tends to serve people farther up the food chain better than people lower down the food chain and also serves people differently based on their social position. That is, the cognitive dissonance and distress from empathy that, say, a Warren Democrat will experience differs when the person is independently wealthy vs in political office vs in upper management vs in lower management vs as a union organizer vs as a union member vs as an impoverished warehouse worker, and that dissonance and distress is dealt with somewhat differently based on position as well.
I have two related thoughts here. One is that while I do like the scholarship I’ve done as far as it goes, I think its emphasis on people as abject victims of capitalism has limitations, and that goes for the films I’ve just mentioned as well. Not that all depictions of working class life need to be heroic, far from it, just that I think it’s sort of established - at least in the circles I’m in, I think - that capitalism unchecked grinds workers up pretty fast. Of course, things fork from there, between ‘so build efforts to check capitalism’ and ‘build efforts to end capitalism.’ Ideally the former happen in a way that contributes to the latter and vice versa.
Two reservations I have about the depiction of abject workers: a) what’s it conveying to whom and what will they do with it? The information alone can’t check the grinding: we’re not in a condition where democratic public/government institutions exist to meaningfully stop capital from killing. That is to say, I don’t think there’s going to be a thing like this one heroic account that morally moves state personnel to action, or morally moves voters or other respectable subjects of capitalist institutions such that they then communicate to state personnel that they have to act. I think we’re in a time period, generally speaking, where state action against the more egregious depredations of capital are mostly only going to result from the state getting a pretty big whack from collective action outside existing institutional channels. So the writing has especially big limits absent the existence of those forces. And, b), I suspect that here too there’s a class dimension or a social position dimension in that abject workers as victims are a more palatable story to influential institutional actors than workers on the march themselves collectively.
That brings me to the second related thought. I recently went down a rabbit hole in the warren of rabbit holes that is the far left in the UK in the mid-twentieth century. Open Mode readers will of course remember I’ve gone on at tedious length here before about the specific tendency in that period’s IK far left called socialist humanism. (After all, as everyone knows real Open Mode heads - I like to call them ‘Swifties’ - make sure to read every word in every post, not like the fakers and phonies you see on MySpace and Friendster going on about how ‘oh yes I read Open Mode, anyone who is someone reads Open Mode, personally I especially enjoy the openness, though the modality is good too’ yet if pressed they can’t quote a single line from memory. Pathetic!) I continue to be captivated by that particular rabbit warren and the specific rabbit hole I went down was digging around looking for information about Michael Barratt Brown (MBB), an activist intellectual in that milieu, which then led to looking up things about Robin Murray. Murray, like MBB, was an economist who ended up assisting with the Greater London Council in the early 80s as part of an attempt at municipal socialism.
Reading about Murray, in turn, led to a wealth of material. The guy simply got around everywhere. There’s a book collecting some of his writings now and a web site full of moving tributes and archiving some of his writing, INCLUDING - all caps used here to indicate my excitement - INCLUDING - repetition here used to express that my excitement here in fact EXCEEDS mere use of ALL CAPS and thus REQUIRES an additional device, the aforementioned and (brace yourselves, this might be too much excitement for someone at your age) forthcoming repetition - INCLUDING being a core member, perhaps THE core member of the BRIGHTON LABOUR PROCESS GROUP, who were a local group (in Brighton... keep up!) within the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE). The CSE produced Simon Clarke among others and is still going today, they publish the journal Capital and Class. Anyway, looking for stuff on Murray led me to some correspondence with the historian Stephen Yeo who has written some work fleshing out an analysis that Murray and the Brighton group developed (I’m not entirely sure but I think Yeo was part of the Brighton group along with some other fascinating people) of there being three basic meanings to or versions of socialism historically: collectivism, statism, and associationalism.
Of those three, the first is the least clear to me. It’s something about the rational organization of production, I think. There’s a bit in Jon Levy’s book Freaks of Fortune about a U.S. Steel official, George Perkins maybe, who said that the risk sharing and rationalized production involved in large monopoly corporations with some degree of welfare policies internally constituted a kind of socialism. I think collectivism is something like that but I’m not sure. Statism is clearer and is what a lot of people tend to think defines socialism. (There’s a meme about this, it’s Marx’s head and the phrase ‘socialism is when the government does stuff, and the more stuff it does, the more socialister is it is.’) Associationalism is basically a vision of non-state socialism, where society governs itself through - you guessed it! - associations of people, institutions of popular power without a single sole location like the state monopolizing social coordination. Now, I happen to like this vision, it corresponds most to my own politics, but also, Yeo argues that this was the primary vision of socialism that predominated among the working class members of the left at least prior to the Russian Revolution, and that the growth in the other two visions - which, if memory serves, Yeo argues have tended to overlap significantly - had a very different class base and outlook. And in those countries that were (and in a few remaining pockets still are) so-called actually existing socialism, that outlook was very much wedded to a ruling class that governed over the existing working class, ie, actually existing socialisms remained class societies. (This is in a couple three articles of Yeo’s in edited volumes. He tells me this is discussed in more detail in his recently completely three volume history of the British left and working class called The Usable Past. I’ve not read it yet but I plan to as soon as time and other obligations permit as what I’ve read by him so far is really ace.)
Looping back to what I was saying, I suspect that an image of working class abjection has some non-trivial relationship to those other modes of socialism that are not associationalism, or at the least, associationalism and those other two modes would ‘do’ representations of working class abjection differently. And I think this has a nontrivial relationship to actually existing liberal egalitarianism, which I suspect in practice tends to be collectivism and/or statism, though to be fair associationalism as a distinct political vision seems to have never really recovered from the losses it suffered in the early twentieth century. Having said that, Yeo suggests though not in some many words that there is a kind vernacular or implicit associationalism that persists long after explicit version lose out, the former being present in the various forms of voluntary democratic association that working class people have often engaged in (including leisure and sport as well as churches, neighborhood associations, lodges/fraternal societies, etc). Put very simply, having bosses at work, disliking being bossed, and craving various things, people have often formed relatively boss-less associations for meeting the needs expressed by those cravings. That sort of association as ordinary sociality is important for lots of reasons but it’s at most a sort of substrate from which politics can emerge, rather than being a sufficient political practice as-is.
Anyhow like I say, I suspect that a nonstate socialism/associationalist politics - a politics of working class self activity - has a different relationship to depictions of working class abjection than a politics of acting on behalf of the working class. This shows up to some extent in the films I mentioned, where people’s coworkers and/or neighbors are pretty crucial to staying afloat despite the murder machine’s ongoing grinding, with those relationships being potential bases for resistance and more. My own stuff is generally less good on this, being far more abjection-focused though I’ll say my stuff also simply presumes that stuff since that is pretty core to my political outlook and the activist experiences I’ve had related to this have been deeply formative.
Alright, this is too long already and I’ve dug out of the ground the main thoughts I wanted to find, so over and out. Keep on trucking, fellow travelers!