character masks and whatnot
Marx nerd post, sorry gang! This was on my mind as I took a walk today, typing it out here to turn quarter thoughts into half thoughts.
Marx writes in various places about people as inhabiting roles defined by, or being creatures of, capitalism as a social system. He uses terms like ‘dramatis personae,’ people as ‘personifications’ or ‘bearers’ or social relations, and ‘character-mask’ (think of old timey dramas and comedia del arte (sp?) where the actors wear masks to indicate the parts they play, or think more generally about costumes that help define characters in film and theater). These were on my mind today and I ventured down a rabbit hole of looking up differences in the English translations and the German in Marx (my German’s just good enough that this is interesting and possible - barely - but bad enough that it’s time consuming and the inquiry has a low ceiling). The terms can be read in two basic ways, one looking inward at the text - helping us read Marx’s work in an informed way - and the other looking outward at the world - a category for understanding capitalist social relations as they actually exist. That distinction shouldn’t be made too much of, insofar as Marx’s work is about understanding capitalism, but it also shouldn’t be made too little of, insofar as the manner in which Marx investigates capitalism involves positing what he at some point, if memory serves, calls capitalism at its ideal average. That is to say, Marx at least some of the time presents a theoretical capitalism stripped of incidentals - historical accidents and variations - in order to draw out core elements (the systemic logic) that all actually existing capitalisms will tend to have in common. That’s very valuable in my view but it’s not the same as investigating actually existing capitalism, where there are some degree of historical contingencies, though importantly those contingencies are bound up with (partly caused/produced/reproduced by) the system’s logic as it plays out over time.
Marx writes that “the economic character of capitalist becomes firmly fixed to a man only if his money constantly functions as capital” (that’s page 711 in the Penguin edition of Capital volume 1) and it’s my impression from poking around in the German edition online that ‘the economic character of capitalist’ was in the German something like ‘the character-mask of capitalist’. What I like in this line is that the fixing of the role to the person here is condition - “only if.” People are pushed into acting out their (our!) parts in the system, but that pushing and that acting out can get messy, contested, and play out in surprising ways. That is to say, we can’t move neatly and cleanly from Marx’s ideal average capitalism to actually existing capitalism or individuals in the actual world, we have to still investigate what’s actually happening - that investigating should be informed by and interpreted through Marx’s work, but Marx hasn’t done the investigation for us already. With regard to this particular quote - the capitalist is a capitalist only if his money continues to be capital in the form of money. That’s what every capitalist wants to some extent, to spend money as profitable investment, and keep doing so, but the system doesn’t provide that to every capitalist. A certain number of actually existing capitalists get pushed out of that social position regularly, as part of the system’s dynamism, which manifests in the lives of denizens of the system as instability. (The system is stable while our lives in it are unstable, and the instability of our lives is both effect of the system and force for promoting the system’s stability - the periodic destabilizing of our lives makes it harder for us to oppose the system.) Obviously the instability manifests differently in different times and places and social positions, but the point is that capitalists aren’t generally guaranteed they’ll remain capitalists. They act under significant threat of losing the position as capitalist.
Part of what I’m fumbling for here is that capitalism is a system of patterned disorder, or of periodically self-interrupting and conflicted order, and as an element of that the roles in the system are themselves dynamic insofar as the marching orders people get related to their social roles - their scripts as dramatis personae - are tied to specific contexts which shift over time underneath them. A capitalist in a flush time, investing successfully, will play that role one way, while that same capitalist in a busted time, scrambling to not go under, will play that role another way. Furthermore, the system’s subjects rarely are entirely happy with the positions they’re (we’re!) assigned to. In important respects, every capitalist wants out of the system, though the exit they imagine is not always (to put it mildly) an emancipatory, egalitarian one, because the system’s subjects are constrained by the system in a way that involves significant frictions.
This relates to a bit of Tony Smith’s book Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism. He writes there that capitalist social relations are significantly open-ended (he says ‘indeterminate’), meaning that there’s a wide range of ways to ‘do’ capitalism and what particular ways will prevail in specific conditions is genuinely not predetermined. Future history remains unwritten. At the same time, capitalist society is, by virtue (vice!) of its capitalist character, significantly closed-ended or determined, meaning that the wide range of practices is only so wide. The indeterminacy is bounded. Future history remains unwritten but insofar as society remains capitalism (itself an open political question), we know some of the broad strokes (and nothing more than that) of what it will involve.
The degree to which we mean to emphasize the continuities and the pathologies we know will, generally speaking, be present in some form in any capitalist society, is the degree to which we can treat various actors as just examples of social roles - character-mask-wearers, bearers of social relations. The degree to which we mean to attend to what actually happens over time that we didn’t see coming (even if it retroactively makes sense after we examine it), is the degree to which we can’t just treat people that way. There isn’t a better or a worse here, these are just different purposes and each is valid in some contexts. That said, I do want to stress what I think is something of a difficulty for the former position (stressing continuity, which is my own inclination by the way), which is this. We can reasonably assume that people will act in the ways they are compelled to by the system and in making sense of what’s happened in the world it’s often reasonable to have ‘they played their systemic role’ as one of the assessments or assumptions we have. On the other hand, people playing those roles do so conditionally and as a result of real processes the success of which in each individual instance is not guaranteed and that it’s better to account for. To put it another way, Raymond Williams and EP Thompson have both written about how the system exerts pressures and sets limits on people (this is their preferred meaning for the term ‘determine’). Those pressures and limits play out dynamically, messily, in time and place specific ways and in conflicted manner, so that while for one set of purposes the results can all be assumed/taken as given - say, if one is surveying a hundred year span and looking at what happened and how to make sense of it - and yet at the same time the social process rattles and clunks and is subject to corrosive frictions in important ways that aren’t accounted for by just taking everything as a given. Here too I think this isn’t so much a matter of which perspective is right so much as it’s a matter of what the purpose at hand is, and remembering that when we work at one degree of analytical abstraction we’re conceptualizing things one way and another degree of analytical abstraction which conceptualizes things in ways that are nontrivially different remains possible for other purposes.
Two final thoughts: one, the system is a set of relationships among subjects and those subjects are constituted by the system (the characters are composed by the script as much or more than the reverse), and so in moving from the system to its component parts we have to be careful. On the one hand, the component parts are animated by the same logic, pressures, limits, etc, as the system as a whole, but on other hand the logic is contradictory and conflictual and the component parts and subjects of the system at most only partially exemplify (or personify or are character-masks of) the system as a whole.
Two, this relates to some degree to Smith’s pushing back on parts of the capitalist state book, which I responded to at tedious length here: https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/my-correct-views-on-a-couple-things-a-response-to/ The future’s partially unwritten and part of that open-endedness arises from the contested character of capitalist society - conflicts abound, both between classes and among people who are members of the same class. As I tried, perhaps unsuccessfully, to stress in my response to Smith, not all conflicts have a better future as their stakes - we really can say ‘I don’t have a horse in that race’ sometimes, and not all better futures are specifically anti-capitalist better futures, sometimes the stakes of a struggle are entirely a matter of this vs that version of capitalism. The differences between different ways of doing capitalism should absolutely be taken seriously - they can be literally life or death for a lot of people - but that simply doesn’t mean they all are openings toward or contribute to the historical process of ending capitalism and creating a better society. In the response to Smith I tried to tease out some of those differences at more (excessive) length, as I think a lot hangs on this politically (despite how abstruse and irrelevant my own particular approach to these matters is here).