mediation, fetishism, and social murder (more Marxish nerdery)
Lately I get backaches if I don’t walk enough. (I say ‘lately’ in the hope it’s a temporary phase I’m passing through and not a permanent phase I’m aging into.) When walking I often have thoughts, or I sort of catch glimpses of what might be thoughts and then I get home I consider whether or not I’m willing to spend the time typing to make them a little more solid. Not to say these are solidified thoughts, just to say they are - for better and for worse - less ghostly than the apparitions of potential thoughts that haunt my walks. So today’s thought is partly on mediation and fetishism, two marx-nerd words I’m a little intimidated by and try to avoid, so I’m going to give myself a bit of self-indulgent scenic route to them as a kind of warm up.
I may have said this before on here, I don’t recall, but I think being a marxist in the present is a bit like being whatever the people were who built the Tower of Babel after God knocked it over and scrambled human speech. We don’t have a worked out language for politics and critical analysis so much as we have fragments thereof. (There’s a famous collection called Beyond The Fragments published in the late 70s or early 80s. We didn’t go beyond though, unfortunately. Or we did, built the tower again, and as we approached heaven, God knocked it back down once more.) I’m pretty sure I have talked about this before on here: I like to think of this in relation to a boat image used by the philosopher Otto Neurath. He said something like ‘we are like sailors at sea, wishing we could dock and overhaul our ship top to bottom while safely in a port, but we can’t. We can only repair and refit the boat we’re on with the materials aboard and comprising the boat and the detritus in the sea around us.’ I took some liberties with the paraphrase but that’s the gist. That seems to me the reality of the left, and furthermore we’re not all in the same boat and some of the time the bits of one boat the some of us want to cannibalize for spare parts are the bits others of us are standing on right now, and no one wants to get wet.
One result of this condition is that we fight over terms and their meanings too much but also too little - too much in that we all know there are more important things to do and yet too little because the fights are necessary for clarification and coordination and we rarely get there sufficiently. As part of this, sometimes we fight somewhat needlessly because we have the same concept in mind but different words, and sometimes we don’t fight when we ought to because we have the same words but do not have the same concepts in mind. (And sometimes both the words and the concepts are both confused and also that confusion rests atop substantive differences of position. In my view marxists are often in this condition when it comes to the terms humanism, moralism, and morality, but those are rants for another day.)
This is my long run up to mediation and fetishism, remember... [takes deep breath, breaks out in a sweat, takes a second deep breath, mutters to self “I c-can DO this come on”, third deep breath] So mediation is a term that I think is tied to the philosopher GWF Hegel (who I’ve read some of long ago, I’m unsure I understood it and suspect I forgot most of it, and) who was an important influence on Marx at a young age, though what that influence amounted to and how long it lasted is all subject to nerdy contention that I can’t do justice to here (and which I’m both captivated by and impatient with). The term as I (mis)understand it refers to how something serves as vehicle or expression of a relationship in, uh, relation to something else. That’s wonky, I know, but an example: to check my email I have to use two factor authentication, which works badly on my old flip phone because the normative user has a space phone and some app whereas I have to reset the two factor authentication settings over and over again so it will let me re-input them and then recognize my janky flip phone before it will let me in to my email. As a result, I check my email less, which has some advantages.
Anyway: my stupid phone and the ‘click here to reset your authentication settings’ page when I try to check my email mediate my relationship to my job and my employer: my relationship to a lot of my work and to my bosses happens through the phone, and that page, and for that matter, my inbox. This may be a bad example (here I stand I can do no other!). My job is not to do two factor authentication, it’s to do a variety of office work type tasks, some teaching, some meetings and conference calls, and a little research and writing, but many of those things require me to use my stupid old phone in this way, so my relationship to those tasks occurs - is lived, practiced, plays out - in part through my phone. So the phone mediates those relationships. Likewise I only have this job because I and my family need money and health insurance: the job mediates my and my family’s access to those important things. And by the same token, my family’s access to the money and insurance they need is mediated through me: if I quit my job, they’re in trouble! I love them very much, so I don’t quit my job even in the worst moments. That reflects how in important respects they mediate my relationship to my job as well: I relate to my job in part through my family, in the sense that I stay in the job in the worst moments to a significant degree for them and to avoid consequences befalling them. (I can’t remember the last time I ragequit a job. Deep sigh. I was less free then but I wasn’t *just* less free, I was also more free, though more of the former than the latter. Anyway.)
This was on my mind because I vaguely remembered some writing by Leopoldina Fortunati which I’m not sure I fully remember and which I significantly disagree with, though also admire. Fortunati was a marxist feminist in a milieu in Italy in the 70s, if memory serves, where to be taken seriously a point had to be posed in dense Marx-speak, so she wrote a book in dense Marx-speak about traditionally feminized unwaged labors like housework. One very important point the book makes is that different positions in a family, like parent and child and spouse and so on, are also positions in people’s mediated relationship to capital. Like I said, I mediate my kids’ access to money and health insurance, which is in part to say that my kids’ relationship to capital - my kids’ status as market-dependent - occurs to a significant degree through me and by the same token my relationship to capital - my status as market-dependent and specifically a seller of my labor power - occurs to a significant degree through my kids: I’ll stick it out through a lot worse than I would if I were single and childless, and a lot of what I buy is for them, at least in part.
Tony Smith uses a term somewhere in his great book Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism, the term being ‘dissociated sociality.’ The ‘sociality’ part refers to how we are related to each other and live out lives together in this society. The ‘dissociated’ part refers to how production occurs in capitalism through private units that not only don’t have to coordinate together in advance but face serious obstacles to doing so. Instead, a great deal of social coordination in capitalism takes chaotic and conflictual form because it happens via market exchange. Put simply: make some shit, then find out if enough people will buy it to justify the making. That condition of private non-coordination is ‘dissociation’ for Smith, and the interactions people have in that condition is dissociated sociality. I suspect that dissociated sociality involves a particular kind of mediation where things are unclear, uncertain, and coercive.
Okay so fetishism. Fetishism is a word I’d be happy to see marxists abandon entirely as I think usage of it is often very unclear and also often significantly divergent among different marxists, and it’s not clear to me the differences are always noted: I suspect sometimes people nod their heads at that word and think they’re agreeing with each other but actually have different things in mind. That said, I think there’s a baby in the bathwater, in that people going on about fetishism are often talking about something real. I’m not sure I can give a worthwhile definition of the term here or that it’s worth doing (so why bring it up, you might ask, a fair question but one that indicates you don’t really read this blog, which is obviously little more than a series of missteps and dead-ends as I wander wishing for better thoughts!) but I suspect that there’s some significant relationship between fetishism and the kind of mediation that exists in social relationships in the context of dissociated sociality: specific things stand in for general processes and relationships. I get mad at my phone when really I’m mad at my job. Etc.
I typed out the above, ran out of steam and confidence, and closed the laptop. Later I came back and typed out much of what follows, after doing a bit of reading.
In his study guide to the three volumes of Capital (https://web.archive.org/web/20231116101505/http://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/mst/Capital.doc), Simon Clarke has this to say about fetishism:
“in a commodity producing society the social relationships among the producers, the fact that they are all members of a society in which they produce for other members of that society, take on the form of [what Marx calls] a ‘social relation between the products of labour.’” As part of this, the fact that an exchange of products is a relationship between producers can fall out of view, seeming, Clarke writes, “to be a relation that exists between the commodities themselves.”
Clarke continues: “The fetishism of commodities arises from the fact that commodity producing labour is not directly social. Commodities are produced by individuals working independently of one another. Although the total of these individual labours is the total social labour devoted to producing the total social product, these producers do not come into contact with one another until they exchange their products. Hence the social character of their labour only appears in exchange, and they exchange their labour for that of others only by exchanging products (...) (Note that Marx is not saying that the appearance is simply an illusion: the appearance is perfectly real, it really is only through the exchange of commodities that the social relation between producers exists [This is Clarke’s parenthetical remark, not mine.]). Because of this fetishism the producer does not consciously exchange his labour against that of others, he or she does so without realising it by selling his or her products as commodities. (...) Thus the exchange of commodities is simply one social form of the division of labour, one way of relating individual labours to one another in society but a way that is mystified. (...) Marx does not see exchange relations simply as the quantitative market relations between commodities (although the first three sections [of the first chapter of Capital] could be read in this way). Marx sees exchange relations as the particular social form through which the labour of producers who work independently of one another without reference to social needs can be brought into relation with one another and so with the needs of society. Thus for Marx exchange relations are a form of the social relations of production: the market regulates the interdependence of producers who appear to be working independently of one another. (...) exchange is a particular system of social relationships and not simply an institution through which prices are mechanically derived from labour-times. Thus for Marx, unlike the classical political economists, value is a characteristic only of a particular kind of society, a society in which the relations between producers as members of society are regulated through the market.
In a chapter in the book The Labour Debate (https://libcom.org/article/class-struggle-and-working-class-problem-commodity-fetishism-simon-clarke), Clarke discussed commodity fetishism further (as part of what struck me as an overly cantankerous reply to John Holloway). He wrote that "the theory of commodity fetishism is applicable in a capitalist society to the relations between capitalist commodity producers, but the working class does not participate in capitalist society as a commodity producer, so that the theory of commodity fetishism has no immediate application to the capitalist class relation. Second, Marx is not describing all social relations or social relations in general, or social relations in a commodity-producing society, but only the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest. Third, the social relation to which Marx refers is not the relation between the individuals exchanging those things.”
Clarke goes on, elaborating that what Marx examines is “the relation connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest, it is not the relation between two private individuals, but between one individual and society as a whole. (...) the fetishism of the commodity is a special case of a more general theory of fetishism, according to which the social qualities acquired by things are attributed to their physical characteristics – the ‘fetishism peculiar to bourgeois Political Economy, the fetishism which metamorphoses the social, economic character impressed on things in the process of social production into a natural character stemming from the material nature of those things’ (Capital, II: 303). In the case of the fetishism of the commodity, it really is the case that social relations between people are constituted by relations between things. The fetishism consists in believing that this power is inherent in the things themselves, rather than being impressed on those things by the character of the social relations of production. (...) there are two dimensions to Marx’s theory of fetishism. On the one hand, Marx’s theory of the social form of commodity production in which social relations between people in the ‘social division of labour’ only exist in the form of relations between things, so that social production is dominated by forces beyond human control. On the other hand, the more general theory of fetishism, according to which social relations are misperceived and social powers attributed to things. The first aspect is a theory of social forms, the second is a theory about the perception of social forms. (...) The theory of commodity fetishism is a theory of the form of existence of the social relations of the capitalist production of commodities. The fact that social relations have this form is quite independent of our apprehension of those relations.”
Having typed (well, copied and pasted) that it now occurs to me that this can be thought of in relation to EP Thompson’s emphasis on social being - social life in general, how people live over all - explains social consciousness rather than vice versa. Beliefs and ideas are certainly part of social life, but they’re embedded in that social life, being as much or more effects than causes, and over all to understand them requires serious attention to social context. So a society of dissociated productive units relating to each other by exchanging products after production is one where those products mediate a) the relationships between those units and the people inhabiting them and, more in line with Clarke’s remarks here, b) the relationships between those units and society as a whole. It’s tempting to say that society as a whole is itself a kind of abstraction but when one productive unit and another relate to each other in exchange they do so in the context of their many other relationships, real and imagined, in the past, present and future, and that ensemble helps press everyone (or keep everyone pressed) into the mold of capitalist social relations.
I’m unsure here but it seems to me that one could say that fetishism is in part a name for dissociated sociality as a type of social being - a condition wherein “social production is dominated by forces beyond human control” despite those forces consisting of nothing but humans and our actions, products, and relationships - and also a name for a type of social consciousness insofar as living that way makes certain kinds of perception and thought likely or at least plausible. In both cases, I think, maybe, we could say that mediation gets away from us, objectively at the level of social being (insofar as social life gets out of control in various ways and society becomes genuinely subjected to social products like money and so on, where those products - which are mediating elements of social relations - become the instruments or vehicles for coercion. And mediation can also get away from us subjectively (though subjectivity can have a kind of social objectivity), at the level of social consciousness, if and when we misperceive the patterns, architecture, dynamics, etc that characterize capitalist society and so fail to understand and analyze them.
I’m unsure but I have a sense that this relates to a thing I’ve been saying for a while now, that the state and other authoritative social institutions and their personnel become accomplices to social murder. People in important respects show up in a patterned social world that defines the roles people play and really, makes people who they are, including through the processes of mediation and fetishism I’ve been rambling on about. More specifically, people mediate each others’ relationships to capital and so to access to the means of life, and this isn’t optional and it’s not even coerced in a narrow sense of the term, it’s just something that we find as a kind of pre-given that was there before we were: we were raised into contexts that pre-existed us, we live lives enmeshed with other lives whether we notice it or not, and that enmeshing (which takes an importantly dissociated form in capitalism as I talked about above) shapes who we are and how we interact.
Part of where I’m fumbling to try to get to with this is that social murder as I use the term is a name for shit we’re subject to without direct immediate agents. That is, the social murder analysis as I understand it is not an analysis predicated on any specific murderer, so to speak, though the analysis does emphasize the role of accomplices and so on. So it’s not a matter of bad actors, it’s a structural analysis and so a matter of bad characters inextricably written into the social script. It seems to me though that this is also implicitly an analysis of agents and actors too, insofar as the social world as currently organized tends to give rise to certain individuals who will tend act in certain ways: accomplices to social murder who are in effect conscripted into that role to some extent.
I’d really like a verb here that means ‘to be a henchman.’ It seems to me that in capitalism there is a pervasive general risk of exposure and deprivation and social murder is term for the lethal effects thereof, and also in capitalism there is a social process of generating individuals who act as accomplices to/defenders of exposure and deprivation, whether or not they see themselves that way. (I think there’s a lot of psychic pressure bearing down on some of those people and they go through incredible contortions to navigate that - I don’t say that with any sympathy to them but rather I mean to underline how much the inhumanity of some people isn’t subject to being overcome by a heart-to-heart.) So capitalism creates a) predispositions to be a henchman, via the tendencies to encourage instrumentalization, hierarchy, and indifference as baseline ways for some people to relate to each other (Bonefeld: social coldness), b) abstract forms of perceiving each other or not perceiving each other (in important respects capitalism is a society that produces kinds of useful ignorance; some of what I was ranting about on here a while back regarding further research I did on industrial physicians building on the chapter in my book is about this; if the article I wrote on it comes out I’ll post a link here), and some degree of violent dynamism, uncertainty, and pressure in the social context via capitalism’s tendencies to competition and crises.
Again, I’m fumbling here and the thing I’m trying to get at is that I tend to talk about social murder as something that is to a significant degree agentless on the front end, so to speak (working for minimum wage for years probably just means one gets wrecked sometimes even if there’s no identifiable individual who does the wrecking). I think I’m committed to that view but idk for sure. That said, at the same time, I think there are also, uhhhhh mediated agents of social murder: the accomplices. A full spectrum account of social murder (or, a richly contextualized account of any specific instance of social murder) would include both. The agents tend, I think, to enact intensifying feedback loops, or defend the immediate processes giving rise to the immediate harms in any instance of social murder. So it’s not really an agentless process but rather 1) a process where the agents play specific roles that are secondary to but still important to the structural processes and 2) the concept of social murder, or the analysis the concept is interwoven with, includes an explanation of why the agents are/do/act such as they are/do/act - to use Marx’s ‘character mask’ term, people get yoked into being actors in the system’s scripts as a result of what Soren Mau calls mute compulsion.
Ideological factors - aspects of social consciousness? - matter here but secondarily: mute compulsion organizes ideology as a social process to a significant degree, as well as sort of offgassing or exuding ideology (in the basic sense in which social being conditions social consciousness - and thus the former explains the latter - more than vice versa). Analogous: class isn’t reducible to bosses’ actions in union busting and so on, class isn’t a chess match between conscious actors - or rather it’s not *just* that - but rather is a set of social processes with conscious and unconscious elements and the conscious elements are significantly determined - in Thompson and Williams’s sense, ie, subject to pressure from and limits set by - capitalist social relations in the concrete form in which they exist in that time and place.
And now this thinking, such as it is (“it's not a lot, but it's what I got") judders shakily to a stop, like the old Chrysler I drive and which recently cost a fucking grand in repairs (“This isn't what we want. This isn't what we need. This is what we can afford.”) Consolation in allusions, and a momentary reveling in - a shot in the arm via - limitation shouted loud momentarily takes on first the appearance then, when we’re lucky, the real lived conviction of embracing who, what, where one is, given the available (lack of) alternatives.
(I’m trying to get less embarrassed about the importance of song lyrics in my thinking and emotional life - after all, it makes sense that in a society structurally indifferent to human need stuff that most stridently addresses human dignity won’t tend to matter socially, being ‘low’ culture a lot of the time - and on the other hand that embarrassment feels so central to who I am that I hesitate to be rid of it, a bit like how my brief attempt at contact lenses as a teenager left me thinking ‘I miss my glasses, they’re part of my face.’ Plus who would want to be proud to participate in the hellscape…? Anywho. Keep on trucking, friends. Over and out.)