further thoughts on recent rants
I was ranting on here the other day using Don Hamerquist’s discussion of ‘epistemological breaks’ as he uses the term (basically, people who inhabit forms of common sense that derive from and support the hellscape as it’s currently organized sometimes suddenly break out of that common sense in contexts of social conflict), that I think one such break is underway right now for a lot of people regarding immigration laws and their enforcement. This is in some tension with another rant on here related to stuff I’ve written borrowing from EP Thompson’s writing on what he calls a ‘moral economy.’
Briefly, for Thompson, a moral economy is a name for when there is some degree of subordination of production and markets to the meeting of human need as currently understood. When that starts to give way under pressure from capitalists and the state, people resist and specifically do so to preserve the old deal and by taking elements of the old deal as authorization for militancy. One reason this is significant, I’ve argued, is that order-conserving ideas can, when that order is destabilized from above, become resources people draw on to foster struggle against that order’s destabilization. The protests against legislative attacks on public sector unions in Wisconsin in 2011 are my go-to example for this. Another reason this is significant is that such struggles have a tendency to be self-limiting, or, they have less potential to spread and foster a more wide-ranging advance for the working class than their militancy might suggest, because they’re about holding onto an embattled current/past arrangement and involve a pretty clear set of criteria for demobilization (‘stop the attack and we’ll go home!’ kinda thing).
These are in some degree of tension because the latter, the category of moral economy struggle as I’ve used it, is to a significant degree about stressing the limitations of relatively spontaneous/self-organized action, while the former, epistemological breaks, is about the potentials involved in such action. There’s also an important resonance between the two related to organization, which I’ll come back to.
One way to resolve the tension is interpretive: epistemological break is a break from the normal arising from below, a moral economy struggle is a response from below to a break from the normal arising from above, but in a way that difference is just two perspectives on the same thing. That doesn’t fully resolve it though because of the directions the two concepts point, i.e., toward a stress on LIMITED potential in a given moment (moral economy struggle) vs toward an emphasis on limited POTENTIAL - that people in motion have massive potential despite limitations (epistemological breaks in Hamerquist’s sense).
I’m inclined to say these are both analytically useful terms and that in any given context there might be tendencies pointing in either direction (using ‘it’s complicated!’ partly to weasel my way out of the matter), but also to say that there is a real difference here: some people in some times are doing on vs the other and that’s a real thing in the world.
I’m also inclined to say that this implies a real need to correct some of my impulses/intellectual intuitions regarding what I’ve called moral economy struggles, in that those struggles with their limits really can sometimes be sources of breaks, of real novelty (meaning real departures from the normal common sense and the ordinary course of social life). I’ve not been as open to that as I should have been. On the flip side, I’d say - leaning on the phrase of Antonio Gramsci’s which is a cliche in some circles, pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will - that while we should generally try to be open to new developments arising, we should also assume limited outcomes and so on: breaks will be rare. We shouldn’t neglect them, far from it, but we shouldn’t take them for granted either.
With regard to migration in particular, I do think that opposition to deportation is to a significant degree a moral economy struggle in that it’s militancy against the new spectacularized terrorizing of migrants via border cops and that militance is significantly demanding a return to the prior organization of repression around the border. On the other hand, much of these struggles also reflect what is for some people a longstanding rejection of the legitimacy of the border and its enforcement and what is for some other people a rapidly incubated version of that rejection, and this all involves a break from treating the repressive forces of the state as legitimate. That involves some real departures too. So I think there are elements of moral economy struggle and elements of epistemological break here. It’d be a mistake to overemphasis either dimension - ie, it’s an error to just go ‘ah this is all just a defensive fight that will dissipate once the border cops are put back on their leash’ and it’s also an error to go ‘this is a huge break with massive revolutionary potentials!’ The former error is more important, however - we’d be better off being too optimistic here than too pessimistic. I may also be putting too much focus on slotting the present moment into a specific place on a bingo card (‘does this go in the moral economy square or the epistemological break square?’) when instead the real point of these categories, and the real goal in general, is to try to carry out, in Lenin’s words, concrete analysis of a concrete situation. And the current concrete situation is significantly fluid, dynamic, including a lot of people radicalizing in important ways.
As I said, the resonance between these concepts is the way both point to organization. To lean on the Gramsci bit again, it’s important that pessimism of the intellect be paired specifically with optimism of the will. (That distinction shouldn’t be made too much of either, because the ‘will’ side involves a lot of intellect too: to act collectively in a context implies conceptions of that context, and to decide how to act involves working through some analyses etc.) Part of Hamerquist’s point is that an epistemological break is a kind of really existing sequence of events in the world toward which radical has responsibilities to act in an organized way. For him, at least in part, the category points to the need to intervene to make the most of the developments under way, in two senses of ‘make the most of’ - first, to help the unfolding break go as far as possible before subsiding, and two, to maximize the contribution of that break and its aftermath once it subsides to the process of producing a communist revolution. My point regarding moral economy struggles is actually very similar, in that I think it’s an error to, so to speak, leave the politics to the spontaneously unfolding developments. Radicals should try to help moral economy struggles go as far as they can, pushing against what are in my view tendencies to self-limitation involved, and try to make the most of the aftermath of those struggles as some people find themselves newly transformed/radicalized (whether that’s temporary or long term is partly dependent on elements of the context that the left can influence: if radicals are living up to their responsibilities this all goes better than if they’re not. I think something like that is implied in Hamerquist’s work as well.)
A related matter is, for lack of a better term, proactive or programmatic activist projects, like demands for various progressive policies. I’m inclined to say that no policy outcome makes socialism in a robust sense of the term any closer. If there’s an effort, say, to triple the minimum wage, the passage or failure of that effort as policy simply has no relation to whether we get further from or closer to an emancipated society. (I will stress that I’m very, very aware of the human stakes. Survival, relative improvement of quality of life or staving off further worsening of quality of life within the hellscape, those are all intrinsically valuable and to be pursued as such, I just don’t think it’s true that either relative improvement or not moves an emancipated society closer.) The relationship between struggles for a better life under capitalism and the replacement of capitalism with an emancipated society is less a matter of this or that victory of loss in the sense of achieving limited end goal, and is far, far more a matter of the process. It’s not so much what is arrived at as it’s how we got there, so to speak. More concretely, the most important elements are if the conduct of a struggle is relatively democratic in spirit, in the sense of democratizing (people getting more say than usual, developing capacities for collective self governance, learning how to make trouble, deepening solidaristic commitments like internationalism and feminism and antiracism, deepening distaste for subordination, concretely stepping outside existing institutional forms and constituting alternative venues/forums etc) and spreading radical analyses of the hellscape. We can’t have a ‘how’ of a struggle without a ‘what’ of what is struggled for/against, though, and I do suspect that some things fought for/against lend themselves more toward democratization than others.
I need to get onto other things but the final thing I’ll say for now, to not lose this thought, is that very generally I think part of the task of the far left is to try to help serve the production of emancipated futures, to try to amplify the degrees to which present struggles are kernels of those futures. What that looks like in concrete practice varies a good deal, whether it means just doing logistical nuts and bolts (’no one else in the room thought to collect phone numbers so I got out a sheet of paper’ kind of thing), or arguing over issues of principle in the formation of a political line (‘the problem isn’t that the police did this to a citizen, it’s that the cops shouldn’t be allowed to beat ANYONE’) or over matters of course of action (‘lobbying our senator is not a good use of our time here, instead let’s...’) or deepening analysis. There are other tasks too I’m sure. I just mean to say that ‘serve the future’ isn’t just one concrete action regardless of context, it’s a matter of judgment calls made in context, informed by past experience and analysis. That’s another role for the far left, to try to document experiences and conduct or foster analysis - for collective learning against collective forgetting, for the making and maintaining of a collective subject against the various flavors of atomization. Some of this has been on my mind as I make my way very very slowly through this Negt and Kluge book on public spheres.
Final-final thing, I recently rewatched this talk by the mighty Rob Knox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CtlnO1pvhk It’s very good, check it out. Toward the end, and I forget if this if in the Q+A or his prepared remarks, he gets into matters of tasks of the left somewhat along the lines of what I said, and if I recall correctly stresses (rightly so) that this is all fundamentally a matter of organization.
Alright, I’ve unspooled the string of these thoughts as far as it’ll go right now and I have to get onto some errands and whatnot anyway. Hang in there gang.