Experts in the common good
Capitalism generates catastrophes and conflicts, and often those work to sustain rather than undermine the system. (Theodor Adorno says somewhere that capitalism “does not simply survive despite conflict, but because of it.”) All this hostile instability creates problems in the lives of people and institutions, and some of the time those problems get temporarily solved - not in the sense of ‘resolved’ but more like ‘deferred’ really. Those solutions are accompanied by - or, to a significant degree, consist of - conflicts over what a solution even means. Again my go-to example is workers’ comp laws, which ‘solved’ the problem of employee injury in a political and economic sense, while leaving injury rates very high: they made the catastrophes of workers’ injuries ignorable again.
My hunch is that whenever there’s a ‘solution’ like this, it involves the creation of a new institution or mechanism - such as a state department, or adding a bureau to an existing department, or creating forms of organization like tripartite commissions. (It’s my impression there was a tendency in the US prior to the New Deal for the creation of commissions where there’d be some number of labor movement officials and some equal number of businessmen, with some number of people reserved for representatives of the general public, those representatives often being lawyers. These could be public commissions at whatever level of government or organized by non-state actors like the National Civic Federation.) My impression is those commissions become less frequently resorted to over time and instead there’s growing recourse to expertise. (Arguably the commissions were sites of developing expertise, and recognizing a kind of expertise implied in being a business owner or union leader.)
This is all to say that I suspect that as capitalism’s tendencies to crisis and conflict express themselves in time and place specific concrete ways, there tend to also develop specialists with knowhow and institutional positioning (authority, resources, etc) for managing those specific expressions - labor lawyers, welfare economists, industrial relations arbitrators, public health experts... I further suspect that these experts, by virtue of being the solutions-people for specific concrete problems, tend to be at least initially imbued with some kind of higher values that aren’t subjectively reducible to capitalist values narrowly construed, and they tend to also believe in their ability, if correctly supported by various actors and constituencies, to iron out the short term concrete problems of the sort they’re relevant to. (I think this belief can wear out individually, as individuals burn out, and collectively, as fields lose their sense of purpose, argue internally with themselves about their limitations and capacities, and also just stop being as effective as problems continue to be generated in novel forms.)
This was on my mind because I looked at Graham Taylor’s book State Regulation and the Politics of Public Service tonight. It’s based on his dissertation - https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/34642/ - which is very, very good. Taylor’s a former student of Simon Clarke and lays out a sophisticated account of Marxist theory of capitalism and the capitalist state, an account that proceeds both historically and theoretically, with an empirical focus on water policy and the water industry in the UK from some time in the 19th century to the late 20th century. He uses that as a case study to examine the rise, transformation, and fall of a state ideology of public service. I think it may be some use for thinking about the pandemic, hence mentioning it here. (I looked at it because Abby (buttondown.email/abbycartus/) suggested I look at this book - https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/history/history-medicine/public-health-and-social-justice-age-chadwick-britain-18001854?format=HB - which looks great but there aren’t any used copies in my price range. I put a request in for it at the library and will look at it later. Glancing at it on googlebooks made me remember the Taylor. One other thought: it’s interesting to me that factory inspection seems to be conceptually separated from public health and public utilities. I’m interested in the history of occupational health and safety broadly and have tended to just assume it’s fully, seamlessly part of public health, but maybe not? Related, I realized the other day that I know basically nothing at all about public health! Hmm.)
Taylor argues at one point that government provision of water in the UK was initially above all a response to fairly large scale harms to the working class, harms that threatened to undermine the availability of labor power as a commodity. Partly in response to working class struggle, that became a problem that had to be dealt with in the short term and (compressing to the point of distortion) public provision of water, at the municipal level, resulted. That provision had an accompanying ideology of public service, as a form of the common good that wasn’t provided for via capitalist enterprises (because not profitable) but which was still compatible with and, really, a benefit to the reproduction of capitalist social relations in general. It seems obvious to me that this kind of ‘we provide for the common good, we’re not of the business world!’ sensibility is important in the world for good reasons but it’s also a matter of (or imagines, expresses desire for) a relatively stable position in a relatively stable capitalist order (and those don’t really exist, at least over the long term). I think this makes those representatives of the (relatively capitalism-compatible) common good potentially good at interfacing with social movements and channeling them in relatively less conflictual directions and probably more importantly I think those representatives tend to work on small fractions of human need, institutionalized in kind of niche institutional contexts, which sort of breaks up the relatively unified tapestry of bullshit people live under in capitalism into small disconnected parcels. And they tend to individualize - MY problem with MY landlord, say, rather than a collective experience and struggle of tenants, or of people whose basic human needs are only met through commodified means. (Mental note for me to look in the Holloway or Holloway/Picciotto pieces in the The State Debate collection, which IIRC have a remark somewhat to this effect somewhere.)
One last thought for now: in trying to think about any of this, rabbit holes abound, it’s all very interesting and very intimidating - too much to read, topics articulate with other topics, each feels too big individually, let alone taken together. I think it’s good to want to learn more and to be curious but I have to reign in that impulse as it really is too much and also what’s much more important is to emphasize collaboration and collective thinking. The idea of the individual who reads everything is a bad, demoralizing myths for individuals and also orients in the wrong direction, toward being one person with an unrealistically large library in their head (unrealistic certainly in my case given my limitations and other obligations!) rather than toward forms of collective thinking where not everyone has the same reading lists of longer works. (I do think developing a set of key references for Covid Zero Zealot Marxism (CZ2M) is a good idea, a short list to have touchstones in common, with we individual zealots using the short list plus our own idiosyncratic reference points and experiences to roll the rock further along.)
By the way, I noticed the formatting was all fucked up in this post - https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/facilitative-bloodlessnesslaundering-violence/. I write these offline and I think maybe the, I dunno, computer sorcery in my writing app is recording indentations and whatnot in a way that is being read by the Buttondown, uh, gnomes as instructions to go wild with the formatting. I’ll try to avoid that in the future but I am a tech ignoramus and also pretty lazy, so no promises.