March 25, 2024

connecting a few more dots (more notes on social murder and Williams)

I said in my last post that I might try to connect the new-to-me ideas from Raymond Williams that I’m excited about with the social murder analysis I’ve been thinking about for a while. I thought I’d give that a try. To briefly restate the terms, for Williams there are dominant cultures and ideologies (I’m going to use the terms as synonyms here, not something I mean to make too much of, merely saving myself some time typing), with those dominant ideologies consisting as much or more in a range of conflicts as they do in shared agreement. The dominant relates to two other kinds of ideologies, old ones that have persisted, which he calls residual, and new ones recently created, which he calls emergent. Residual and emergent ideologies can relate to the dominant as either alternatives which relatively peacefully coexist with the dominant, or as oppositional. Those positions aren’t stable - the oppositional can get sidelined into merely alternative, and the alternative can become oppositional. A key aspect underlying all this is that each of these terms is something people are doing actively, with the terms indicating relationships among those activities and the people doing them.

One thought I had today is that these terms resonate with a thing I wrote a while back on what EP Thompson called moral economies. Briefly, he argued that we tend to find in history patterns where, first, people together understand their current situation as fair and deserved, and, second, patterns of erosion of people’s current living standards, conditions, actually lived relationships with their social superiors, etc. The former sorts of understanding serve to limit conflict when people’s living standards and so on are relatively stable, but when the erosion I mentioned occurs then that shared understanding means the erosion strikes people as unfair and undeserved in a way that they can act on publicly and collectively, in opposition to the erosion. The norms involved help make the erosion of conditions into an outrage and that outrage in turn helps people to authorize themselves to take relatively militant collective action in defense of their conditions. I wrote about this at some length in a chapter in the Elgar Research Handbook on Law and Marxism, taking the protests in Madison Wisconsin in 2011 as a concretizing example. This is an example of how the dominant ideology isn’t stable. The old dominant gets embattled as capitalists and the state respond to the pressures generated by the instabilities inherent to capitalism, responding in ways that intensify those pressures and instabilities as they manifest in working class people’s lives. Elements of that old dominant ideology then become resources for opposing the emergence of a new dominant ideology, and if that new ideology becomes the norms then the remnant of the old become resources for a residual ideology in opposition to the new dominant. This also brings out that not all opposition is equal in its oppositional character: demanding a return to the good old days or defending a current good arrangement from attack is different than fighting for a new socialist future.

I want to stress here that while the terms ideology and culture can sound like I’m talking about relatively free-floating ideas, I think all of this is closely bound up with institutions like unions and state agencies and so on - when I said moral economy struggles are conflicts between an old dominant ideology and an emerging new one I really mean there are fights over living conditions and organizations and institutions with stakes like whether or not people get a living wage, how much control and dignity people have at work, etc.

I want to stress as well that these terms aren’t synonyms for political orientations like left and right - in any given context the emergent culture can be progressive or reactionary or be a mix of positives and negatives - nor do they map cleanly onto ‘top down vs bottom up’ - the example of Madison in 2011 and of moral economy struggles more generally shows how sometimes the old residual culture is what ordinary people grab onto as part of their collective action against the new emergent politics from above. (As an aside, I have opinions on how this relates to various forms of guitar-centered music from the seventies through the nineties, where there was both a fight in those about relative political orientation and also a fight in the larger culture wherein those musics played a conservatizing role - even as more progressive positions inside those musics were winning out - against electronic music and hip hop.)

What does any of this have to do with social murder though? Well for one thing the erosion of living standards that provokes fights like Thompson wrote about (he developed the category of moral economy in analyses of bread riots in 18th century England) and in Madison in 2011 is a form that social murder takes: worsening living standards can kill, especially when we look holistically and think about life expectancy. So a lot moral economy struggles - like the struggles of hungry people rioting that Thompson wrote about - are often conflicts waged by working class people against the ways that the tendency to social murder shows up in their lives.

I think in general it’d be possible to make a simple typology of types of conflicts arising in response to the tendency to social murder using Williams’s terms. An important element in the subtext here is that it is false to say, as I’ve heard too many people on the left say over the years, either that people only fight when their backs are against the wall - a view too pessimistic - or that when people find themselves with their backs against the wall then they will fight - a view too optimistic. Instead, understanding when people fight or not requires more fine-grained analysis and socialists trying to be part of the working class’s struggles need to bear in mind that those struggles and their enabling conditions can’t be taken for granted but rather must be built. Anyway, the simple typology: people can resist social murder via older values - residual in William’s terms - or via new ones - emergent in Williams’s terms, and, whichever of those informs it, that resistance can take relatively more conflictual and militant forms - oppositional in Williams’s terms - or less so, like mutual aid projects and so on - alternative in Williams’s terms. That’s all over simplified in two ways, first in that what’s new and old isn’t always a bright clear line and, even when there is a real distinction there, the two often exist in the world such that they’re mixed together, and second in that the position’s aren’t stable - the new can become old, the old can give rise to the new, the peacefully co-existing alternative can become a more combative social force, and the opposition can get sidelined into a peacefully co-existing alternative. The terms here are at most a jumping off point for concrete analyses of what’s actually going, they don’t replace or stand in for that analysis.

The tendency to social murder is an important element of life in capitalist society, closely bound up with some of the ways the dominant ideology tends to shift over time as well as bound up with localized alternative and oppositional cultures as people respond to the presence of social murder as it manifests concretely in their lives. And to reiterate what I said above those responses are not necessarily progressive, far from it. Rather, what happens is that life in capitalism is instability-prone and as people experience that instability they respond and those responses can go any which way - the history of capitalism is a process of interaction of some perennial and some new political conflicts (in the broadest sense of political) and power relationships that continue to arise relatively unpredictably.

 One element in the present pandemic nightmare seems to be an intensified public presence of eugenic ideas tied to the discarding of everyone especially harmed by covid and the justification of that discarding. That seems to be an conservative emergent ideology, in conflict with the more progressive elements emerging. This is closely tied, I think, to the presence early on of a significantly solidaristic response to the pandemic and state efforts to walk that back. That response too was a mix of relatively old and new elements of culture - by old I have in mind various ways in which oppressed people’s responses to capitalism’s violence have created various resources (writings, slogans, sensibilities, practices of protest, etc.) and by new I mean the products of people newly politicized by these experiences in various ways.

 

This is all pretty abstract and as such unsatisfying but I figure it helps me to get my head around these different categories of analysis, which really exist to inform more concrete accounts. Part of the point is that when the tendency to social murder manifests in people’s lives, people are standing in particular times and places with various time and place specific resources to hand (or unavailable!) and they confront enemies and frenemies like state actors and other forces who are also possessed (or not) of time and place specific resources. There are of course also structural power relations that persist and play important roles (Mau’s book Mute Compulsion and Smith’s book Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism are clarifying on those ongoing structural factors), and the presence of those in people’s loves are mediated through the particular I’ve just mentioned. In my last post talking about the red state/blue state divide in the US (I mean that as a shorthand for the state-political culture or coordinates we’re in broadly right now and were pre-pandemic) I was trying to sketch some of the dominant/residual/emergent elements that were in play when the pandemic began and have been a factor as it’s continued.

 

Coming at this from a slightly different angle, I’m working on a thing at the moment (I mentioned it back in the fall) dealing with outtakes from my book and some longstanding preoccupations of mine in relation to the new-to-me analysis of social murder. Briefly, I’m looking physicians employed by big companies in the early 20^th century US to medically surveil and, to a limited extent, provide medical care to the employees of those companies. (Those doctors are the subject of the last chapter of my book, I’m coming at them from a different angle here. Well, trying to. Oh by the way, I finished that first piece of writing I was whining about the other week and turned it in. This doctor thing is the second piece I was whining about. Having them both stack up like this and at such an unfavorable part of my semester was poor planning on my part but whatever, it is what it is.) In this piece I’m arguing that the way these doctors did medicine was nontrivially shaped by the need to promote a degree of comfortable ignorance on management’s part (I’m trying to use medical forms as a point of entry to make this argument, we’ll see it works, I’m stressed about but, again, whatever, it is what it is.)

 

The bigger point here for me is that I think part of the tendency to social murder is that there’s an ongoing presence of resources for the production of comfortable or useful ignorance on the part of the powerful. In the current draft I say the doctors create what I call facilitative bloodlessness, meaning that if people killed and harmed are represented by or to those responsible in a morally distant way, like through statistics, it’s easier on the people responsible. (This is related to what I talked about in my book in terms of lack of recognition and the violence of abstraction.)

Part of what I’m trying to get at is that there’s a politics of (lack of) knowledge about and (non)representation of the harms of social murder. What I’m currently calling facilitative bloodlessness is one example of a pro-social murder politics of knowledge but not the only one. (I suspect there might be some fruitful crossovers here with the Goran Therborn book on ideology that Abby Cartus and I have written about.)

Again, too abstract. What I mean to say is the system kills, harms, disables, always in time and place specific forms and in addition to that being a huge problem for the people immediately affected, those harms and the responses of those most affected create problems for institutionally powerful actors ad their lackeys. Those actors and lackeys tend to opt to defend themselves from consequences in ways that reinforce the tendency to social murder and they conduct that defense with various resources they have available and over time they develop new ones. (Again, the emergent is not always progressive.)

A related issue is that with social murder and capitalism’s recurrent unpredictability, its violent dynamism, everyone tends to start off wrongfooted and fighting the last war because facing terrible novel circumstances and so needing to develop new resources appropriate to those circumstance. In  this post - https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/enforced-meaninglessness-plus-more-on-the-first/ - which I think could be understood here as at least in part a process of (or condition resulting from the) preventing people from developing or drawing on the cultural resources necessary for or adequate to the pandemic. Biden and similar bad actors around the world and their various lackeys can’t get everyone to be okay with and onboard with mass death as much as they would prefer in order to avoid consequences. To a significant degree the best they can do is slow the emergence of an emancipatory oppositional culture around the pandemic - they’re succeeding more at disorganizing us and imposing a delay, a kind of record skipping repetition so to speak, in the forward motion of culture (and in all these references to culture I mean the term to include the term “politics” in various meanings). Part of the challenge for them is that the pandemic continues which is to say that kinds of experiences of social murder keep happening which will tend to work to destabilize some elements of the dominant culture (while stabilizing others). Their bet here is something like that of fossil fuel companies, short term benefits at the cost of long term harms they try to avoid thinking about and, as I said, prevent the rest of us from thinking about.

A related pair of things, I think, is that, one, the revolutionary anticapitalist left has not been in general up to the tasks of the moment. That is a longstanding problem. Now, the left is just people living through the terrible novelties of capitalism’s violent dynamism, starting off behind like everyone else does (though we on the left have an important degree of access to intellectual resources via our traditions). As such, the history of the left is in part a history of trying to shift from fighting the last war to fighting the current one and otherwise playing catch up. The intellectual wings of the left tend to either run far out ahead to the point of relative detachment, and so to struggle to make their analyses make contact with the rest of the world in any practical sense (a condition which is lonely and can intensify some bad tendencies - some leftists become condescending saviors though with little saving going on), or to run walk far behind the sectors of the working class that are at the leading - and, in the case of social murder, bleeding - edge of historical experience. Typically the left as a whole only catches up with those sectors through complicated processes of those sectors’ ideas and experience coming to be shared across the rest of the class, in the sense that solidarity always involves a kind of partial sharing of experiences. Ideally the role of the left is to aid that sharing across the class though again the left is not up to its tasks, and I don’t only mean the content of people’s views - though I do think a lot of individual leftists will eventually end up embarrassed by things they’ve thought and said here and the slowness of their catching up with the historical process - so much as I mean a lack of organization and infrastructure that forms the resources through which the left could meaningfully play its roles and better itself.

And two, the other thing going on, I think is that a lot of people most directly experiencing the harms of the pandemic, the people at the leading and bleeding edge, are doing so starting in flawed political perspectives, the kind that are ready to hand across our society. That’s in part to say a lot of those people are newly politicizing. The left’s not yet being sufficiently caught up and not having the infrastructure in place to best respond to emancipatory emergent oppositional perspectives (respond by aiding and enriching them, I talked about this a little in slightly different terms in the beginning of my essay on Marta Russell that is the second item in this post https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/the-hits-dont-start-volume-1-me-in-lpe/) means people are doing so with a more limited range of political resources than they would have if an adequate left were here doing its tasks. (There are pockets to be sure, I’d point to the Death Panel crew as a vital one, but those pockets while desperately important are exceptional rather than exemplary of the left right now, unfortunately.) I’m thinking here of some people’s explanations for relative lack of masking, which I talked a little about in this post: https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/nonmasking-derives-from-context-not-beliefs-ps/   I think those explanations are understandable mistakes, artifacts of people doing their best while politicizing in new ways and enduring truly brutal shit. Those mistaken accounts reflect a starting point and not a stopping point, so to speak, and the unpleasant reality is that there has to be some conflict among good people over these issues as part of the collective clarification of the situation we’re in and finding a way out.

 

As usual with my posts here and with my writing in general I feel like I’ve taken a small step forward in my thinking by having written this and I’m also pretty unsatisfied (the steps are always so small and the distance ahead so long), and that’s intensified by the awfulness of the continuing hellscape. One thing I’ve been thinking about lately on that is a line from the Communist Manifesto and a related sensibility. The Manifesto says “Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement" and of the working class in general. We represent the future. It can sound arrogant especially if we think of communists as apart from the class, but we’re not, we’re just fellow social nobodies living through the same historical processes, despite being in some respects atypical nobodies. Anyway, I really do think we represent a future humane consensus. We’re marginalized now, and so were the people calling for the end of plantation slavery and the people calling for civic equality for women, gay people, and people of color. The hard reality is that the span of time until that future consensus becomes the consensus of the then-present is very long and every day of it excruciating and blood soaked. I think it’s hard but important to maintain both of those thoughts, that we will win and that every day until we do is a total outrage.