Bigger aspirations than system-compatible politics?
I assume everybody reading this thing already reads Abby Cartus’s newsletter. She’s got a great new post now about social murder and Søren Mau's book Mute Compulsion, here: https://buttondown.email/abbycartus/archive/social-murder-and-social-meaning/ If you’ve not read that post, go do so now.
No I mean like literally now.
RIGHT NOW. Open that link and stop reading this.
Alright I’ll assume anyone left is already hip to the Cartus. So at the end of her post she makes a mention of how we should not treat capitalism as fixable via legislation and “vague gestures at 'organizing’.” I had a thought or two on this that I didn’t want to forget. The point about policy is similar to Tony Smith, whose Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism I very highly recommended: left liberals tend to believe, Smith argues, that capitalism does have tendencies to injustice and social pathology, like Marxists believe, but for left liberals these tendencies operate when there’s insufficient counteracting state action, and they think sufficient counteracting state action is genuinely possible. (As far as I can tell, other liberals on the other hand tend to emphasize resignation - this is as good as it feasibly gets, so lower your standards. I suspect that all liberals have a mix of ‘we can fix THAT problem’ combined with a ‘look, you gotta live in the real world’ resignation about stuff they think can’t be fixed or won’t work on fixing, with the resignation helping guide problem choice.)
Abby’s point about gestures toward organizing is interesting to me for adding that one doesn’t have to believe the state is the sources of the stable countertendency that fixes capitalism’s drives toward worsening injustice and harm. One can also believe in, say, a sufficiently robust labor movement as the source of the countertendency. If I recall correctly, Eric Hobsbawm refers somewhere to “collective bargaining by riot.” As a long time leftist and a nerd for labor history, I’m into that at some level. Still, a labor movement that restricts its political imagination to just bargaining as an interest group within capitalism is one that leaves a lot of injustice and harm already off the table and is likely to eventually have to act as a constraint on working class people themselves, helping people settle for some version of what’s feasible in this world. (Simon Clarke somewhere refers to something like institutions that serve to force the working class to fit its aspirations into what capitalism will permit, and he talks about industrial relations as an especially important example.) To put it another way, the idea of a permanent social movement counterweight checking the worst tendencies of capitalism is of course very attractive, and right now it feels especially urgent, but to stop merely a check to the worst is to also become resigned to a lot that is terrible. And while there’s a lot of good to imagining state functions done by movements instead, if the function is largely the same (and the potentially transformative effects on people of performing those functions are forced to remain below the ceiling of what’s possible in capitalism) then the supplanting of the state by a movement is also to an important degree that movement becoming basically a novel wing of the capitalist state, meaning that the movement comes to do some of the things we object to the state doing.
This is part of what I've previously fumbled to lay out on here in what I've written about my admittedly against-the-grain reading of EP Thompson's notion of moral economies. Basically a moral economy is when there's collective capacity to get outraged over excesses of the system and to act on that outrage to curb those excesses via collective action. It's a good thing, but when it exists it's a system-compatible good thing with an at best complicated and highly mediated relationship to anticapitalism and more robust desires for a society of human flourishing. So what I'd now say is that Smith, at least as I recall his argument, emphasizes left-liberals (liberal egalitarians, in his terms) relying on the state to curb the system's excesses, but there can also be a movement-centered version of that perspective as well, and one that can be linked to fairly militant collective action as the vehicle for that curbing of excesses. There are some genuine reasons to prefer this version of left liberalism (the labor left or summit protest forms of left liberalism, so to speak) over more state-centered and technocratic left liberalism, including that it's more democratic and egalitarian, and even more importantly, that it can help lay some experiential basis and collective capacity basis for more ambitious radicalism (or at least nourish those ambitions over the long term - the labor movement has kept a lot of socialist dreams alive, and that's a good thing). Still, being better than technocratic left liberalism isn't really all that good.
I don’t mean to diminish the importance of activist projects and social movements and their hard-won victories and heart-breaking losses which can often be literally life and death. My point is that those conflicts and victories are pretty significantly different if we imagine them as at best part of periodic counterbalancing efforts that sand off some of the currently known rough edges of capitalism vs. if we imagine them as, ideally, locations where people radicalize, generate novel insights into the flaws of this society and new aspirations to overcome those flaws, and gain individual and especially collective capacities to push against this society and to lay further groundwork for a revolutionary social transformation. Abby’s post lays out how Mau’s book helps explain why capitalism is a murderous society, with a lot to say about the pandemic in particular. That kind of critical analysis is pretty important for politicking inside movements so they don’t collapse into (at very least, not without the collapse being contested) seeing themselves as just preventing the worst - that collapse of political imagination means at least implicitly encouraging people to give up on aspirations to a fundamentally different and better society and like I said probably means eventually coming to work to discipline working class people into responding to their social fate in this society with system-compatible responses. As ever, I'm painfully aware of how abstract this all is so I want to underline that we're talking here about people literally fucking dying - like the last Teamster contract that a lot of the labor left praised when some drivers had been killed by heat exposure just recently, driving trucks that the contract left in the fleet, which (especially given the likely short term summer temperatures coming as the climate gets worse and worse) means locking a certain amount of death into the collective bargaining agreement, unrecognized. The hard reality is that even the best capitalism will keep killing, even the best pandemic response in capitalist society is still going to be a terrible nightmare, so it's important to simultaneously insist on the best possible outcomes in capitalism and also insist that we deserve better than capitalism.
Final thing - one last reminder, I’ll be speaking briefly via Zoom on Saturday the 16th about my chapter in the marxist state theory, my chapter’s about social murder and the capitalist state. If my little blog thing interests you then you’ll also like the stuff that the other authors in the book are doing. Details and free registration at this link: https://marxedproject.org/event/marxism-and-the-capitalist-state/ Hope to see some of you there.