Can the concept of capital fit in their overalls? Practical consciousness and different kinds of liberal egalitarians
Okay well none of us expected me to be back again so soon but here I am again darkening your screen, because apparently the Mode is Open temporally too (what the fu- ahem) because I had another couple three thoughts. So here goes. Some of this may be circling back through things I’ve said before but whatever.
As the Open Modest (that you, the collective name for you, it’s stupid cuz I made it up, but do I know I appreciate your openness and modesty!) all know, I’m a big fan of Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism, a wonderful book by the Marxist philosopher Tony Smith. One point the book makes - paraphrasing from memory, any defects are mine, it’s truly a fantastic book - is that we really do live in a capitalist society, meaning a society subordinated to the imperatives of the capital relation, meaning there’s a kind of overriding pressure for social life to not be an impediment to, and better yet, to actively serve, the making of money into more money, forever. That’s just true. Since that’s true, people who don’t have a concept of capital just miss an important part of the reality we live in. It’s a bit like, I don’t know, being on a sailboat for the long term but not knowing what wind is, or ocean currents or something. This doesn’t mean everyone else but Marxists is bad, it means people without Marxist concepts (or, at most, ones that do similar work/can account for the same realities, if such concepts exist, which I doubt!) people understand their social world less. That’s point one. Call it a truncated map. People with truncated maps who really do mean well, sincerely, in terms of politics - they care about equality in a real way - just have important limits. Smith calls them liberal egalitarians.
The book focuses on people with accounts of society, liberal egalitarian big thinkers, so to speak. There’s a Bill Haywood quote (him of the might Industrial Workers of the World, and, for a time, the editorial board of International Socialist Review and the executive board of the Socialist Party), that the IWW was socialism with its work overalls on. Something like that. It was a bit of a diss on the socialist party for not being as practically active as the IWW (I don’t know if that’s fair or not and it’s irrelevant here) and partly indicated that in his view the day to day work of the IWW - being part of workers concrete efforts to fight their actual bosses - was tied to a vision of ending capitalism and at least a nominal plan. I’m going to use this as a metaphor in a sec that could, only in the hands of a villain!, be used to dunk on the IWW, so I just want to say explicitly, that I will have no truck with villainy! Anyway, I think there are liberal egalitarian big thinkers, and there are liberal egalitarians with their work overalls on, so to speak. I’ll call them decent pragmatists just a shorthand, with no judgment whatsoever intended in that choice of terms other than that I really do mean the ‘decent’ part - folks really do mean well, or at least I’ll assume so here for the sake of this thinking.That’s point two.
Liberal egalitarians of two types then, big thinkers and decent pragmatists, neither with any concept of capital. The latter are located in public and collective life in various ways, doing stuff like staffing NGOs and the state and whatnot, and genuinely trying - and genuinely succeeding - at doing some real good in the world. There’s also a hybrid type, big thinkers in overalls, call them resistance commentators just for a name (with some genuinely mixed feelings expressed in that name but mostly just using it as a name). By this I mean mostly public intellectuals, people who are helping think about immediate events of common concern - writers of various kinds mostly, but some media figures on TV and youtube and whatnot, and some academics as well. I forget the exact line but there’s a cliche something like ‘journalists write the first draft of history.’ I have mixed feelings about that as it sounds a bit like historians being smug and dismissive of the importance of journalism, but setting aside the journalists and historians for a second I think it’s true that events get processed over time in collective thought and that process is valuable in all of its phases, the first sifting, the later sifting, etc, each iteration has a contribution (or certainly can do so, the iterating is valid and often valuable). Resistance commentators too lack a concept of capital. That’s point three.
Now, again, all these types - loosely distinguished, undertheorized etc etc, but I’m right (and if you take only one thing from Open Mode, it should be that I’m hilarious, but if you take two, it should be that I’m right. [A close third is that the Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides people with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defense of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.] See that’s me being hilarious AND right, this is what is known as dianetics, I believe.) in broad strokes here that there are different types of intellectuals and intellectual labors/institutional technicians in the world humming away, a great many of whom are liberal egalitarians, meaning they mean well and their capacity to make that meaning well be, well, meaningful in the world practically, that capacity is abridged by their having no concept of capital - truncated maps. But what I really want to get to is that I think the ramifications of having a truncated map and what it would mean to have a less truncated map is nontrivially different for these different kinds of liberal egalitarians. For the big thinkers, they might conceivably take onboard the concept of capital within their social accounts and writings, with some scrambling of their maps occurred -- the de-truncation of the map, meaning, adding a concept of capital to their outlook, is, I think an intellectual event something like an earthquake or major overhaul of a city’s downtown: some stuff gets knocked down as the new stuff gets put in place. That’s point four. (Why am I numbering these? Fuck if I know. I said I was right, not smart. Leave me alone.)
I think it’s different for the decent pragmatists and resistance commentators, because their ‘map’ serves a different role in their activities. It’s often more implicit and while their workaday overall-wearing intellectual lives need that ‘map’ in important ways, it serves a different role for them than it does for the big thinkers. A little more to the point: where would they put the concept of capital if they took it onboard? What I mean to say is, I suspect their ‘maps’ are simultaneously more vague, less consistent and more contradictory, and more stable, not least because their activity is less directly ‘map’-centered and dependent. I don’t quite know how to put this (as opposed to the rest, which I clearly know how to put so well, right? Ugh! Fuck!) but I’m inclined to say something like the following: the decent pragmatists and resistance commentators live in a kind of practical consciousness rather than a reflective, refined, consciously built theoretical consciousness, and it’s easier to add the concept of capital to the latter than the former. Again, where would they put it?
I mean, shit, take me for an example (I know you all already take me as an object lesson and I find some comfort in knowing that perhaps my self-inflicted suffering might help warn others off this path, you’re welcome). I teach for a living. Do I teach differently because I’m a marxist? Not really. I mean, I do think I teach a little atypically, students often tell me I’m very flexible, but if anything that’s a reflection of a set of values I have, tied to a set of experiences I’ve had (more on experience in a moment), which are also part of why I’m a marxist. And certainly nothing about my specifically having the concept of capital changes how I teach. That’s how I’d put it - I try and teach in egalitarian fashion, and I don’t think my being a Marxist causes that. The concept of capital is incredibly important, but not to me specifically in doing the tasks I do in doing my job as instructor, even when I’m trying my best to do so in egalitarian fashion. Again, where to put the concept of capital? It just doesn’t fit into any of the pockets in my work overalls, so to speak, so I leave at home and just do my job. This metaphor is going awry. What I mean to say is that I think there’s a practical headspace, the stuff that’s on our minds when we’re doing our jobs, the knowledges and information and theories and so on with which we do our jobs, and the concept of capital doesn’t enter into those specifically. It enters into a great deal else that matters a great deal, and will do so even more once we (or as we) build the kind of revolutionary left we need, but that’s substantially not going to consist of intellectuals doing their jobs. It’s going to a massively, uh, extra-curricular affair. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that the active doing of the work of being a liberal egalitarian in work overalls creates contexts where Marxist accounts of capitalism are harder to articulate and take up. I think that works in tandem with the ideological effects of liberal egalitarian big thinkers. (It occurs to me again now that my friend Chad Pearson’s book Capital’s Terrorists might be on point here, he has a discussion of ideologists and propagandists who ran cover for the Klan, I forget if he called them narrative makers or narrative shapers, but either way, good point in a great book, check it out.) That’s point five, if anyone’s keeping score.
In addition, as I feel like I’m constantly going on about, there’s this incredibly ugly thing where awful violent shit is done to people very very often, and an attendant incredibly ugly thing where that awful violent shit is ideologically process to be less of a big deal, or maybe isn’t even really perceived in the first place by some people, including some and only some liberal egalitarians, maybe. I’m genuinely unsure on that part. The important point for me here thought is that some of it is perceived by at least some liberal egalitarians but, and this is really important, it’s misinterpreted, misunderstood, decontextualized, etc, precisely because of the lack of the truncated map. This hellscape is absolutely lousy with gross violations of human dignity and the concept of capital is not sufficient to understand them - because to really understand them is to take them onboard morally, ethically, solidaristically, whatever to call it - but the concept of capital is absolutely necessary to understand them, because, well, it’s just fucking true that capitalism is indignity-generative, so to speak. (That’s a very mild way to put the social murder analysis.) That’s point six, I guess.
So critical concepts may have a hard time getting through the shell of practical consciousness, and certain experiences may as well. Now, to be clear, liberal egalitarians can take up the concept of capital. My example of me as instructor was not intended to say instructors can’t understand the concept of capital, it was to say that the concept isn’t operationalizable to me while instructing generally speaking, and to say that insofar as I’m in the instructing headspace then it’s harder to take up that concept: inhabiting practical consciousness as I’m using the term here makes it harder take in that concept, but no one lives in that consciousnes 24/7 - or at least many people don’t anyway. Furthermore, the processing of the experiences of the indignities of the hellscape is significantly impoverished by the lack of the concept of capital. (I’ll make another plug here for EP Thompson’s Poverty of Theory, a much maligned and misunderstood book, which was partly Thompson’s fault. EPT has a great discussion of experience in two senses, immediate happenings and their meanings in the instant, and reflective processing of those happenings over time individually and culturally. He talks about this in terms of the acting of social being - how we live over all, understood holistically - upon social consciousness - how we think and feel and believe and make meaning, over all, understood holistically.)
Part of Marx’s analysis is that capitalism is a society that understands itself poorly and is lousy with concepts which are useful in the immediate doing of our workaday lives but which, if expanded into larger theoretical accounts of how the world works, are really quite bad in terms of actual accuracy and explanatory power, but perhaps very useful for helping keep this society on its current trajectories. I think the stuff I’m on about here is one element of that. High doctrinal thought of the kind created by liberal egalitarians big thinkers, as well as practical consciousness and vernacular ideologies - the hodgepodge of beliefs and stories and impulses and fragments of (often third hand and vulgarized) high doctrine that we all tend to walk around with - all tend to work to reduce dynamic responses in social consciousness to social being. That’s part of how super fucked up shit happens and only some of us go ‘oh damn, time to storm the castle, you get the torches, I’ll get the pitchforks’, to put it too simply. (I’ll stress that this is an oversimplification as there’s also an absolutely massive problem of organization: who will hand out the torches? where will we get that many? where even is the fucking castle? [This is dramatized beautifully and poignantly in the ‘who do I shoot?’ section of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, if you’ve not read it that bit can be read on its own and is really pretty clarifying about a lot, in my opinion, or at least offers good shorthand abbreviations of complex theoretical accounts of how capitalist society works.]) That’s point potato, the numbers are useless, it turns out.
Final bit: I think this means in part that there’s need for a sort of, I don’t know, full spectrum political effort within culture/intellectual life, to make experiences of capitalism’s ills and workers’ collective action visible, to make it meaningful in morally appropriate/dignifying/humane/singularity-respecting/solidaristic/whatever-to-call-it ways, to root that in a Marxist-and-empirical account of how capitalism actually operates historically and in the present theoretically, and for all of this to be tied to Marxist critical social theory. That’s probly obvious, idk, and I already thought it before I wrote this but maybe now I think it better? I dunno. Personally, I’m inclined to say that one worthwhile line of this inquiry in the shortish term would be in particular to engage more with the resistance commentators in their first-drafting of the cultural/ideological processing of the world in ways that fit with capital’s imperatives, though I’m massively biased (that shit just interests me, really, and wrongly assuming one’s interests are relevant is an occupational hazard for college professors) and I also really wouldn’t want to overstate the importance of that relative to urgent immediately practice activities of organizing and activism and whatnot.
Anyhow, again, as ever, stay eastbound and down: we gonna do what they say can't be done, we've got a long way to go and a short time to get there...
Cheers!