Capitalism and Catastrophe/Emergency/Crisis
Covid’s a catastrophe and the policy response is a clusterfuck, one that serves as feedback loop through which catastrophe intensifies itself. Catastrophe compounded. I want here to briefly sketch a little how to connect those realities to the account - accounts really - in and around the Marxist tradition of capitalism as a society that periodically creates crises, without getting bogged down in the details. I’m going from memory here as the idea’s to do some further thinking by writing, I can look up the specifics later and if I figure out I was wrong I’ll say so then.
I. Catastrophes recur
In my view a core element of the account of capitalism as a society that tends to create crises is that capitalism makes it rational for capitalists to act in ways that are anti-social even relative to other capitalists, makes it locally and short term rational to do stuff that adds up to very irrational action at the level of society more broadly. This means capitalism is a very hard society to steer, a society of structurally uncoordinated actors. I want to be clear that this applies not only to relatively more marketized - neoliberal and classically liberal, say - kinds of capitalism but also to so-called state managed capitalism. Capitalist social relations frustrate steering and coordinating efforts of whoever is seeking to steer and coordinate social activity; all versions of capitalism are beset by crises, even if those crises may take different forms.
Simon Clarke says that in capitalism social life is permanently unstable (that’s in his book Marx’s Theory of Crisis; Mau quotes it in Mute Compulsion, which has a good chapter on crises, though if memory serves - and I’m not sure it does - Mau emphasizes economic crises. I have big reservations but I think there’s a lot to the account of crisis in Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi’s co-authored Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory, in that they describe capitalism generating economic, political, social and ideological, and ecological crises - I’d stress that crises generally tend to be more than one of those at once. Anyhow...). Clarke’s point is important and it’s also important to get it right: social life in capitalism is very stable in one sense and permanently unstable in another sense - there is a stably existing form of society that systematically inflicts instability on its denizens. I think of it like earthquakes (which, to be fair, I don’t actually understand the science of). The earth’s tectonic plates periodically violently shake up life for the people living on top of them, which is incredibly consequential for people, but the system of tectonic plates is itself relatively stable - that it produces instability for people doesn’t mean it’s going to shake itself apart. Ditto for capitalism, and arguably more so, because people in the middle of one of the social earthquakes of capitalism’s crises are less likely to oppose the system mid-crisis. So capitalism is, so to speak, stable by virtue of instability - the system is stabilized by the instability if inflicts on its denizens.
My over all point here is that capitalism is a catastrophe-generating society, and those catastrophes are the form its reproduction over time takes. Another analogy: imagine we’re small mites living on a snake that molts periodically. That molting shakes up our living conditions, yet is to the snake a very different process than it is for us. (These metaphors have the limitation of framing capitalism as apart from us when really capitalism is nothing but us, a mode of human activity, a process we’re all enacting and which we can’t get out of for the time being.) Anyhow this is all just to say capitalism creates catastrophes, always, forever - for some people, every day life in capitalism is a catastrophe. Social murder is a form of localized catastrophe (though in the pandemic the locality of social murder is nearly everywhere in one sense). If a catastrophe isn’t apparent in some immediate social location, the odds are very good that one is fermenting in the system, and will arrive at some later date.
II. When is a catastrophe ignored vs. an emergency vs. a crisis -
I feel like the above is largely repeating things I’ve said before (after all, catastrophe and social murder are nearly synonyms... I put a bunch of links to my stuff at the bottom of this post the other day - https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/unpicking-a-mistake-about-social-and-moral/) but I thought I'd write that first bit up as a bit of runway to help me get to what I actually want to get into here, which is important differences in kinds of social and political response to catastrophe. (I’ve also switched from saying ‘crisis’ to ‘catastrophe.’ That’s because I want to think about some ideas by the philosopher Brian Milstein, who uses ‘crisis’ in a way that differs conceptually from the meanings of the term more commonly used by Marxists. I think this is really a terminological difference and the Milstein is edifying, I’m not wedded to the terms but am here going to say ‘catastrophe’ as the larger umbrella term that ‘crisis’ in the more traditional Marxist usage falls under, and am going to restrict ‘crisis’ to Milstein’s usage. To some degree I wish Milstein had used different terms, as his technical and consistent usage being slightly at odds with other technical and consistent usages and at odds with less technical and less consistent uses sort of invites confusion, but he didn’t consult me so it’s too late for this wise point of mine to make a difference. Story of my life...!)
To put it really simply, when is a catastrophe a crisis, what makes a catastrophe a crisis, and if it's not a crisis, what is it? Of course, these questions presume a meaning already to those terms that I haven't laid out yet, so let me get to that. This feels above my paygrade; I’ll try it in baby steps and see if that helps. (Mixed the metaphor badly - needed a runway, ended up walking in baby steps. Story of my life! [Repeating a cliched phrase... story of my life! {Pretending self-indulgent digression is a sense of humor... story of my life!}])
In a catastrophe, people need help and often make demands to that effect. Sometimes they fail, they’re siloed, walled off, it’s treated as their catastrophe, privatized in a social sense - ‘they’re problem, not ours!’ For lack of a better term I’m going to call this a politically ignored catastrophe. Sometimes people succeed in their demands, and existing institutions have resources and mechanisms in place to respond relatively adequately. Other times people succeed but existing institutions are shown up as inadequate such that extra-institutional action is required - steps outside existing scrips and channels, so to speak - and/or it becomes clear we need the creation of new institutions to handle the issue. This is me summarizing a bit of an argument made by Milstein in his essay “Thinking politically about crisis: A pragmatist perspective,” which Fraser and Jaeggi engage with as well (that’s where I heard of Milstein). I should say, I’m leaving out a lot, which is interesting and again kind of above my paygrade. (For instance, Milstein points out that the concept of crisis cuts across subjective and objective, and the distinctions between facts and judgments. Think about someone running out of a building and shouting “fire!” It’s not a mere report of the fact that there is a fire - the person is not saying they’re cooking something on a gas stove or whatever - there’s judgments and requests or advice for action clearly implied: call the fire department, run for it, etc. Milstein says, if I recall correctly, that declaring ‘it’s a crisis!’ does similar; again I’m leaving out a lot and don’t want to misrepresent the piece.) So, when a catastrophe happens - and capitalism is always, always, always cooking up catastrophes of one kind or another - that catastrophe could end up an ignored catastrophe, an emergency, or a crisis. Which happens is an open-ended, underdetermined outcome.
Now, above I said things like ‘an emergency is when existing institutions can respond adequately’ and ‘crisis is when institutions are shown to be inadequate.’ Those are judgment calls, as is ‘catastrophe’ itself. That is to say, this is a matter of claims in contention and it’s not a process of rational contention, it’s political and ideological conflicts, sometimes literally bloody ones. What I’m trying to say is that when a catastrophe breaks out and people engage in political contention over it, that political contention is multifaceted, involving fights over questions including: is it a catastrophe and why and for whom, and what does the catastrophe consist in, which is closely bound up with questions of will there be any help for the afflicted, and what does help consist in (for example, I talk in my book about how in the early twentieth century US a massive number of people were being killed and injured in workplace accidents, and the eventual policy solution was to have employers give people some money when that happened, a solution that took for granted that there would continue to be for a long time a massive number of people being killed and injured), as well as questions about whether the catastrophe should have ramifications for existing institutions, and if so what? In short, responses to catastrophe point toward politicizing at least some parts of social life - thawing some of the social relationships and patterns that exist at the time so that they can be rearranged to some degree - and counter-responses point toward preventing that politicizing if possible, and toward shaping what sorts of rearrangements will or won’t happen if some thawing does occur. This is rooted in the basic pattern of capitalism having an ostensibly apolitical market and an ostensibly political state, and at a less abstract and more historically/empirically detailed level of analysis the practice of depoliticization as statecraft is pretty closely related too.
Conflicts over all of this are a matter of power and struggle, with an important role for ideology, and an important role for different kinds of shared normative perspectives being in contention: briefly and schematically some people think things like injured people are morally compelling such that they need to be helped, others, well, don’t. The concrete realities of this are of course more complicated and nuanced than that, at least on the side of those of us who aren’t ghouls.
As I pointed out, I shifted my terms from talking about crisis then to talking about catastrophe. That’s because in Milstein’s terms as I understand them, capitalism doesn’t produce crises so much as it produces situations that are potential crises and in those situations there’s conflicts which determine if the situation becomes a crisis, an emergency, or gets swept under the rug - an ignored catastrophe as I called it. I’ve been saying catastrophe because I think it’s important to note that a ‘non-emergency’ or ‘non-crisis’ situation is not necessarily any less bloody and atrocious than an emergency or crisis. Whether a catastrophe is ignored or is an emergency or is a crisis is decided by political conflict - in the expansive sense of political, meaning social movements and class struggle, not in the sense of state politics. Generally the state works to prevent catastrophes being made crises, and I think there are pressures to erode state capacity to manage catastrophes as emergencies. (State capacity for managing emergency is itself to a significant degree the result of past struggles. I mean that conflict over a given catastrophe may lead to the state developing new capacities for action in the future. I’d stress that this development is to a significant degree a response to social movements working to tame them - the new state capacity for emergency management is not only something won by social movements posing demands, it’s also political process that recomposes the terms and capacity for social movements to pose those sorts of demands. Reforms are both victories and also counterattacks, all at once.) Am I just translating ‘people fight for stuff and other people fight against them and that’s all political’ into a wonkier vocabulary? Maybe! But I think there’s something to it, in terms of who the ‘we’ of all these processes is.
III. Politicizing catastrophe Catastrophes happen, the survivors and their allies make demands, political processes unfold further, and as I’ve said I think the state exerts a kind of downgrading pressure - in the terms I’ve used here, the state works to dial down crisis claims to emergency claims, and works to dial down emergency claims to be ignorable. Its success is not guaranteed in this, of course, and how all of this plays out concretely can be messy and complex.
Implied in what I’ve said here is that when people respond to catastrophe politically they do so with some exertion of a group that says ‘we’ and I’ve implied it runs up against someone else who isn’t in that group and responds by saying ‘you people’, and my language of struggle can make it sound like this always eventuates in an us against them conflict. That certainly can happen, but often there’s politcking over who the ‘we’ is and if there’s even a ‘them’ and an ‘us’ available as positions or subjects in contention. I mean in part that some of the time anyway, going ‘I too am in the we, and we don’t have enemies, we have no they!’ can work to defuse a group or misdirect it.
I think state channels for dealing with catastrophes encourage this in two or maybe three ways: one, they process catastrophe responses in ways that make the ‘we’ smaller (often much smaller, becoming just lots of disconnected - serialized, I think is the term? - individuals) and, related, less solidaristic. Two, they minimize awareness of domination and hierarchy and tend to depoliticize and to naturalize the sources of catastrophe. Three, by making themselves part of the ‘we’, state personnel and their proxies help reinforce a sense that someone else is on the case, that the ‘we’ that includes some of the state is looking out for all of ‘us’. We expect that help will be on the way and more automatically, less politically, with less requirement for conflict to get any support and resources and to have the awfulness be mitigated. I suppose what I’m suggesting is that by saying the state is in the ‘we’, state personnel and institutions encourage people to rely on existing mechanisms and discourage more conflictual and collectively self-managed efforts. Again, very abstract, but I think this has played out in the pandemic: a lot of us thought that public health authorities and similar figures were part of the same ‘we’ as us, and assumed they’d act and would look out for us, and I think that may have delayed (what we now know are) necessary kinds of conflictual responses to the pandemic and government management of it - no need for ‘us’ to fight with others of ‘us’. Sadly in turns out that a lot of us are actually a ‘you people’ (as in, ‘you people need to shut the fuck up and get in the wood chipper’) for a lot of public health and other institutional authorities.
That’s this line of thought followed as far as I can do at the moment, but two quick (I have to stop lying to myself like this!) last thoughts for now. One, a catastrophe ignored is depoliticized in important ways. A catastrophe made into an emergency and one made into a crisis are on the one hand less depoliticized/more politicized and on the other hand still depoliticized in important respects - insofar as the ongoing relatively legitimized existence of capitalist social relations as expressed in concrete institutions are always a matter of the division of society into ostensibly apolitical economy and ostensibly political state. More briefly: an emergency is a catastrophe at least partially depoliticized. Two, I think it could be interesting and illuminating to try to trace when the pandemic has been a crisis, an emergency, or ignored and how so. To some extent this is just me saying ‘we should have a full history of the pandemic,’ and we should, I just think these statuses of the pandemic or facets of it as stuff existing institutions are or are-not-but-could-be adequate to vs ‘pandemic? is that even a word?’ kinds of ignoring of catastrophe might be illuminating to some extent.
Trying to sum up or maybe this is a jumping off point for later -
if a catastrophe is ignored vs. an emergency vs. a crisis is a matter of how much the state and the specific forms of expressing (or just ‘doing’) capitalist social relations will or will not get re-organized. That’s high stakes for a lot of important people, so they tend to try to avoid the re-organizations, unless they’re ones they instigated for their own purposes (and those purposes can arise from powerful actors needing to respond capitalism’s crisis tendencies as well). Here’s a thought: maybe the liberal ‘omg stop panicking! no need to panic!’ refrain and similar garbage is liberal glimpsing through a glass darkly the potential for social conflict in response to capitalism-inflicted maladies to force so institutional re-organizations, re-organizations they’re afraid of and want to prevent.
A catastrophe being ignored or an emergency or a crisis are political situations, efforts to render a catastrophe ignored or an emergency or a crisis are political efforts to bring about those different political situations. The social condition of the catastrophe at the outset of those political efforts at most underdetermines what political situation will result - it’s a real, open-ended struggle. Furthermore, waging that struggle requires various capacities and relationships, including organization, shared political culture, repertoires of action, etc. I think it may be the case that a lot of us early in the pandemic expected the state to just take care of matters either out of assumptions of its benevolence or of our being politically consequential or not realizing the underdetermined character of the relationship between catastrophe and its politicization as ignored/emergency/crisis, and I also think that a lot of us also assumed greater capacity to do that politicization on our part than it turns out we had (and related, a lot of us have found our sense of ‘we’ scrambled in hard ways).
Finally, mental notes for me to a) read more of Milstein's stuff. I remember seeing he had more things on his web site that I hadn't read yet, b) find my old-ish draft on this stuff in an an academic paper and to see if it’s worth dusting off, and c) think more about ’non-reformist reforms’ (I’m skeptical of the very idea, and yet this shit is literally life or death rn so far be it from me to dismiss the importance of any reforms) in general and specifically in relation to the pandemic.
ps- My experience has been that there’s a Marxist written tradition and a Marxist vernacular tradition and the two relate but don’t at all correspond one to one. Spending a while in vernacular Marxist circles related to being in and around the socialist left, I absorbed a sense from somewhere that crises were times when capitalism is imperiled. I don’t have a clear grasp of how much this is articulated in the written Marxist tradition. I think there’s an argument to this effect in some of Paul Mattick Sr.’s writing, and in the Jaeggi and Fraser book I mentioned. That’s totally wrong in my humble opinion. The tendency to crisis is on the list of reasons to hate capitalist society but capitalism’s endogenously generated crises aren’t periods of greater short term potential for human emancipation from capitalism. I suspect they’re periods of reductions in such potential. In a crisis people feel the bite of capitalism more, and are more rather than less likely to act in pro-systemic ways (even if they’re, so to speak, alt-systemic, meaning fighting like hell for a different capitalism). I was pleased to read Soren Mau make a similar point in his book Mute Compulsion, which I recommend very much. (I reviewed it over at Legal Form along with two other great books, if that’s of any interest - https://legalform.blog/2023/01/30/review-essay-economic-power-liberalism-and-crisis-nate-holdren/) Of course, revolutionary activity that is relatively successful is a kind of crisis for capitalists and the capitalist state, but those kinds ‘crisis’ emerge from different processes and logics - ones that we have to build almost entirely, as a matter of creating what, if memory serves, Anton Pannekoek called proletarian virtue: solidarity, commitment to mutual freedom and flourishing, hatred of domination, plus the various skills and capacities required to make those virtues efficacious in practice.