Moral economy struggles once again
Hey gang, I hope you’re hanging in. Apparently the US is bombing Iran now. Add another atrocity to the long list I guess. Fuck. I was in a bad mood before that, then ended up in a deeper or maybe just different bad mood. Then I listened to some more music.
Quick note on that. The singer for this band lives two blocks down the street from us and is a super cool person, and it’s a great tune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTHbFy1KuGY And another Des Moines artist (who recently moved into our neighborhood!) put this out very recently with a cool animated video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GwHZUw_dQk Candles against the darkness/counting blessings kinda thing I guess. Anyway, they’re young local artists with day jobs and I’ve met and like them personally, and they’ve been kind to my kids, so I’ll ask you as a favor to check out their music. Thanks for considering that.
I’ve also been listening to this Kowloon Walled City record over and over and over again - it’s angry and tense and bleak, feels appropriate: https://kowloonwalledcity.bandcamp.com/album/piecework. Mid-bad-mood I read an interview with the band where they quoted the singer-songwriter (mistyped that at first as singer-songer which is a good one, if I do say so myself) Jason Isbell as saying “my job is to write, not to like what I’m writing. That’s why we edit, and nobody gets editor’s block.” I like that, might put it on a piece of paper on my office wall. That made me decide to dust off a post I started a day or two ago and abandoned under the weight of the mood (the mood hasn’t lifted so much as I think I’ve improved my posture in shouldering it, if you will).
This is largely or maybe entirely just me restating things I’ve said before, I had a mind to try to go somewhere else with it but ran out of steam. I might try to pick up that thread on another day (in the spirit of that Jason Isbell quote, not my job to like what I write, just to write it).
I’d say “don’t let the bastards grind you down” but, I mean, we at most only partly control if we get ground down, so just keep on keeping on, friends. Abandoned post follows below.
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As Open Mode completionists will know, for a while I was writing stuff for a while taking what is maybe an idiosyncratic gloss on EP Thompson’s concept of a moral economy. For the non-completionists out there here’s an overview on the concept offered with my usual uncomplaining magnanimity. (I kid! I kid! I’m absolutely complaining about you people. Sit down at the table and eat your posts.)
Thompson argued in his justly famous moral economy article that hunger is not an explanation for food riots. Rather, the real explanation is outrage. ‘The real explanation’ is poorly posed on my part, the better way to put it is that Thompson said that to understand riots, take collective outrage as object of inquiry. Hunger is not a collective-action-motivating outrage in some contexts and it is in others, so understanding food riots requires looking into the difference between those two sorts of contexts. (In my view Thompson also assumed, but didn’t make as clear as I wish he did, some knowhow as to how to struggle effectively as an important difference between such contexts. Were some to have said that to him, Thompson would, I think, have replied that while true that phrasing is potentially misleeading insofar as it could be read as suggesting the knowhow is found rather than made: people who don’t know how to do something can figure out how to do that something.)
So, what’s the difference between the two sorts of contexts? Thompson framed it something like this. With regard to food, there was an older sensibility according to which people deserve enough necessities to live a life of some degree of dignity: perhaps not quite flourishing but not undergoing dangerous and undignified deprivation. Furthermore, the people making and selling such necessities are obligated to price those necessities in such a way as to let buyers have that relatively dignified life. This sensibility was at least nominally agreed upon among elites as well as the larger population - the economy was to be regulated in accord with and to an important degree by that moral sensibility, with people who violated that sensibility being out of line and subject to being forced back in line. Over time, a second sensibility arose, according to which sellers should be free to price goods as they see fit, end of story. This second sensibility was clearly opposed to the first, and over time enforcement of the first from above declined. Hence food riots, understood by Thompson as people taking the older prevailing consensus into their own hands to maintain access to food and in doing so to preserve the older sensibility.
I no longer remember if Thompson used the term “moral economy struggles” or if I made it up or someone else did, but even if I made it up it’s a sympathetic paraphrase. Food riots are the species, moral economy struggles are the genus, so to speak. Anyway, I’ve argued that the moral economy struggles Thompsons wrote about (and subsequent ones) should be understood as arising out of transformations within capitalist societies. (I tried to apply this to the protests in 2011 against evil monster Governor Scott Walker’s evil monstrous budget bill attacking public sector unions, that’s in a chapter in a book called the Elgar Research Handbook on Law and Marxism, my chapter is called something like ‘Reading Thompson Structurally.’ I assume the book is available in all the best book pirating sites.) I’ve now read a little more Thompson a little more closely and a little more of Thompson’s long time interlocutor Raymond Williams and the larger left milieu they were part of (an intellectual current that called itself socialist humanism during the early new left in the UK in the 1950s. I think that current is incredibly fascinating, has been unfairly sidelined/shelved, and still has insights that are worthwhile in the present. I also want to add that ‘humanism’ is a term some people think they know the meaning of and those meanings tend to be ones they feel strongly about, and that’s generally misapplied to the socialist humanists of the first new left because the really just meant ‘socialists who think the humanities, broadly construed, and the good things, broadly construed, that the humanities foster, are very important in general and especially for socialism.) Having read a bit more of that stuff I now have a greater appreciation of how for Thompson’s (and Williams’s and their other fellow travelers’) holistic sensibility didn’t respect an economy/institutions/culture division. Capitalist society doesn’t just undergo economic changes. It undergoes multifaceted transformations that touch a great many aspects of life, aspects often called economic, political, legal, cultural, etc: whole ways of life face pressures to become different whole ways of life, in processes that conflict-laden, contested, exist in reality as struggles, etc etc.
So, when a transformation or proposed transformation occurs that would cut away at a prior way of living in a way that people find outrageous, and people know how to take collective action, we tend to find moral economy struggles. I pushed a point about this that I think Thompson wouldn’t have liked but which in my view is implicit in his account. That point is that the conditions that give rise to a moral economy struggle are, prior to the transformation that touches off the conflict, are order-conserving. That is to say, there are elements of institutions and culture which promote a degree of relatively orderly working out of capitalist social relations and those same elements, under changed conditions, become subject to being repurposed by people to oppose that transformation. That opposition is in important respects a kind of social disorder, especially from the perspective of powerful actors as it involves actions that aren’t acceptable behaviors in normal circumstances.
I stressed that this matters because it means moral economy struggles have a dynamic that pulls them toward remaining defensive. To put it very simply, a moral economy struggle is something like a battle between partisans of a new worsened future for others (though profitable for themselves) and partisans of life as it was, say, 6 months or five years ago. Now, I’m very aware that collective action can be transformative for participants and witnesses, and that it can constitute spaces for practices of collective deliberation that makes it even moreso. Furthermore, that deliberation (via direct conversation and via publications, visual art, songs, etc) can be a way that people push past defensiveness and into something more radical - in the right circumstances, partisans of life as it was five years ago can become partisans of an emancipated future. Counting on those circumstances to just occur, however, or to be naturally generated by the struggle, is a mistake - the odds are poor, it’s a bad bet, so to speak. (To be clear, this amounts to a circuitous and wordy route to stressing the importance of organization and active attempt to intervene in struggle by the far left, which is not at all a new point to arrive at on my part.)
Having typed all of that out, I had a new thought. (One of the main points for doing this li’l blog o’ mine.) I’m a big fan of an essay by Ralph Miliband called ‘A State of De-Subordination?’ published in 1978 or 1979, just before the Thatcher government if I recall correctly. It argued something like the following: ‘Britain today is in a condition where many people who are subordinated are contesting that subordination directly in open conflict like strikes and indirectly in forms of exit, evasion, etc like youth culture, drug-taking, a general decline of deference to social betters, etc.’ The new thought I had is that I wonder how such a condition relates to moral economies. I think the two concepts aren’t identical but there’s overlap. An attack from above on a moral economy leads to less respect for/deference to those above, for one thing, and collective action from below in response to such attacks does so even further. I also think that ‘we want a new future’ and ‘we want life like it was five, or ten, or more years ago’ kinds of sensibilities are common and are probably especially commonly expressed in things like subcultures, local cultures, etc etc. I dunno. I gotta think more about it. I do suspect that ‘states of de-subordination’ are recurrent phenomena such that the specific one in the late 70s UK that Miliband wrote about was one member of a general species of social phenomena, so to speak.