depoliticization
I’ve slowed down on my little blog because my semester’s gotten in full swing so I’ve less time and attention and am also just more tired, and nightmarish world events have intensified that. I did want to toss up some notes on something I read recently, and that led me circuitously to something related.
I wrote something at Bill of Health at one point about how the Biden administration was using depoliticization as an approach to governing, I borrowed from something by Peter Burnham for that. Shortly afterward I read Jack Copley’s banger of a book Governing Financialization and wished I’d read it sooner, as it’s great on this stuff. Burnham and Copley are in the lineage of Open Marxism that I mentioned the other day, people in that tradition who do some theorizing yet mostly do theoretically informed (and, arguably, theory-testing and theory-generating) qualitative social science research into economy and policy. An important element of that part of the tradition is attention to depoliticization. I read around a lot in the depoliticization literature and underlined a lot in the PDFs but have yet to get around to writing up my notes. One of these months. Anyway, I was back to reading more of that stuff the other day and remembered an essay by Steve Kettell and Peter Kerr on the covid pandemic which looks explicitly from a depoliticization perspective. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13691481211054957) For now, some maybe impressionistic notes.
On the one hand, they say, some depoliticization writers talk about depoliticization as a broad social condition in a time period, like neoliberalism - less deliberation, participation, etc. My impression is this is less the emphasis of the Open Marxists. On the other hand, depoliticization is an approach to governing, with emphasis often placed on statecraft in particular. This refers to a kind of making politics less public, in the sense of less accountable, subject to deliberation, something politicians are less responsible for or at least less able to be held responsible for or subject to consequences for - depoliticized politics is still political, with that political character denied. This takes three main forms. One is institutional - shifting ostensible authority to bodies more removed from the public, like supranational bodies such as the WTO, or to bodies like the Federal Reserve, expert-run bodies, etc. A related type, or maybe a subtype of this type, mentioned in an article co-written by Jack Copley and Maria Giraudo (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2399654418786249) is shifting the scale of government authority up or down, like a state governor deferring to a city government or kicking a problem up to the feds. Another form is rules-based, where government ties its own hands, through rules, targets, procedures, etc. This often takes the form of limiting future governments as well, like the US debt ceiling. Open Marxists have tended to emphasize these two forms as far as I can tell, though Kettell and Kerr’s article works with a third form, sometimes called preference-shaping depoliticization - basically use of rhetoric, narrative, etc to try to shape what people want, perceptions of what government can and can’t do, etc. This is eminently compatible with Therborn, it seems to me.
I want to mention some larger or more general points. One is that capitalism per se involves an ostensibly politicized domain tied to parts of the state and an ostensibly apolitical economic domain, as I’ve mentioned before. Tony Smith’s good on this, he calls it ‘the bifurcation of the political’, I’m going to say ‘social bifurcation’ just to have a shorter phrase. Social bifurcation persists but it isn’t exactly a static condition - the line between what’s political and isn’t is a line of tension and conflict, so to speak, and indicates ways that different sorts of conflict arise and are handled. (Depoliticization can be thought of as a moving something back across the line from political to economic but for reasons I’m not entirely clear on, I suspect that’s misleading, and it’s better to think of depoliticization as a technique through which the state operates, though I also think there’s some benefits to thinking about employers as engaging in similar activities, so I’m of two minds here.) Social bifurcation, though not in so many words, is something Open Marxists tend to presume if not foreground (there’s variation in emphasis among different writers in the tradition) - the state isn’t externally related to the economy, state and economy are both elements of capitalism as a social system.
The ostensibly apolitical character of the economy is important for thinking about the pandemic insofar as social murder arises at least in part from ostensibly apolitical elements of capitalist society, and when it’s concentrated on the right (or wrong) social nobodies and/or takes a slow or dispersed enough form, social murder remains ostensibly apolitical as well - it remains a catastrophe for its victims but not an emergency or a crisis as I mentioned the other day in a post about Brian Milstein’s article. (Flu, for instance, kills many people each year and pre-pandemic I was like ‘well that’s just the way the world works!’ whereas I now think that those flu deaths are to a significant degree a policy choice. For a lot of people, on the other hand, those deaths remain inevitable and there’s an ideological effort to make covid like flu in that way.) This makes me think that forms of politicizing social murder merits further attention. Anyway, for now, for Milstein an emergency is a political matter but one that can be processed through existing channels while a crisis, in Milstein’s terms, is one that can’t be so processed and so challenges current institutions, raises calls for accountability, institutional re-organization, creating new institutions, etc.
There’s also capitalism’s tendency to crisis and dynamism. This too is a key part of Open Marxism’s conceptual backdrop and for many writers in the tradition it’s a central focus of their immediate work. Depoliticization is an important category in how states respond to capitalism’s violent dynamism. Capitalism’s tendencies force hard choices onto state actors, so to speak, with those choices tending to pass consequences downward - shit rolls downhill - and with depoliticization being a way to defend, justify, get away with, etc, those choices and in doing so to also defend the underlying social relations.
I also want to add that depoliticizing is more like a move made in a specific context in response to capitalism’s tendencies and to social unrest, rather than being an accomplished state of affairs. Those moves will often leave sediments, so to speak, in the form of institutions and organizations, but those tend to get scrambled or face pressures later due to capitalism’s tendencies.
These different kinds of depoliticization can be mutually reinforcing: a government can cede its ostensible authority to another body (institutional depoliticization), tie its hands with policy (rule-based depoliticization) derived from the authority it ceded authority to, and it and the authority it ceded to can engage in preference-shaping rhetoric in the mean-time.
I want to stress that all of this is a matter of how politics is done, depoliticization is not actually non political, it’s a way of politicking. As Kettell and Kerr note, it tends to involve or have a close relationship with politicizing, either directly politicizing some things as part of depoliticizing others - think of the Biden administration blaming new variants’ transmissibility at some points in the pandemic in order to suggest it couldn’t do anything, while also politicizing vaccine uptake early on: those who were slow to get vaccinated were letting everyone else down antisolidaristically (and that population in turn served as another scapegoat for the administration to depoliticize its own actions). Likewise these actions tends to shape the framework or terrain for politicking by others. Pinar Dönmez has written about this regarding Turkey - if I recall correctly the argument is that depoliticization associated with neoliberals has tended to foster politicization by right wing populists, leading to the right politicizing some areas of social life without much of a contending explicit politics against them, with them contending instead with a depoliticized politics. I think this applies to vaccines and masking in the pandemic - opposition to both is political and there’s not much of a corresponding solidaristic politics contesting those at this point. (The shift from somewhat solidaristic ‘I mask to protect you, you mask to protect me’ messaging to the present seems to me worth further examination, and that examination should also be contextualized in a framework that notes that government emphasis on population behavior also served to depoliticize policy choices that could have - and still could! - do more to reduce infections and resulting harms, as well as providing more resources to the harmed.)
I still need to summarize Kettell and Kerr’s actual findings in the empirical part of their article but I have to get on to other stuff in a moment, and I have one more thought I wanted to try to have more fully (it’s a proto-thought just now). There’s something about depoliticization and agnotology. At some point, I think, information about the pandemic seemed to start to carry a political charge - if the rates are rising, there’s an implication for the government, etc. There seems to have been a significant effort to prevent knowledge of those rates, sometimes in the form of making that information harder to find and sometimes in the form of stopping collecting the data in the first place. There’s also a thing where some people trust the government and assume that since the government isn’t telling them they’re in danger and isn’t taking danger-control actions, then they’re not in a lot of danger. The CDC talked about this in MMWR last November somewhat, saying that people tend to take steps and want steps to mitigate exposure when they think covid risk is high, and people also tend to wildly underestimate covid risk. That underestimation is itself politically produced and an element in depoliticizing covid.