notes on Rafael Khachaturian's account of the pandemic impasse
hey all, I hope you’re maintaining. I’m a little worse for the wear lately (and 1400 bucks poorer between the mechanic and the veterinarian, deep sigh) but am cautiously optimistic there will be a slower pace of the wearing soon. We’ll see. Anyhow, I wanted to write to recommend to you something I just now finished read and about which I’m very enthusiastic: the chapter by Rafael Khachaturian in the capitalist state theory book that my social murder chapter is in. The full chapter title is “Crisis, Social Reproduction, and the Capitalist State: Notes on an Uncertain Conjuncture” and he’s put it up on his web site here: https://www.rafaelkhachaturian.com/_files/ugd/b6a8ca_f8a0db0098b14675ba0cc2eefec2c6ca.pdf
Rafael also gave what I thought was an excellent talk on his chapter (starts at 6 minutes 30 seconds in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLTNGj6UxL8) at Red May, I’d suggest checking out both. I read the chapter after hearing the talk so of course I’m simultaneously convinced that must be the wrong order and also it’s what I think everyone should do (be wrong like me! it sucks!)
I have some quibbles and/or confusions in that I grew up on a different block in the neighborhood that is marxism - the chapter draws on Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, and Nicos Poulantzas, none of whom I’m familiar with, having read little of most of them and forgotten most of what I’ve read (I just remembered I’ve read a fair bit of Poulantzas, but 15 years ago, and not having done anything with it I’ve forgotten most of it). I may write another post unpacking some of those quibbles in order to clarify my own thinking, as I’m not sure how much they’re substantive differences vs just matters of word choice. Anyway for now I just want to get some notes down on the chapter.
The chapter helpfully and briefly reviews some other accounts of the pandemic (I assume marxist accounts but I’ve not read them yet so I can’t say for sure) and includes a good account of the capitalist state (that account lays out why it matters and is not mere semantics to conceptualize ‘the capitalist state’ - meaning a kind of state specific to capitalism and composing part of the social system in an important way - vs conceptualizing the state as merely in capitalist society - meaning there’s no important relationship between the form or kind of state and the social system, and treating the state as just happening to exist in a sense alongside capitalism) and notes that nothing’s really been resolved in the pandemic. The chapter also situates the pandemic in the somewhat longer historical perspective of the shift to neoliberalism in the mid-to-late 20th century, and takes pains to stress that the rise of neoliberalism was not in any way a weakening or retraction of the state but rather was a re-organization of the state.
One major argument it makes is that the US state seems to be significantly relinquishing its never especially robust commitment to social protection and welfare as well as its task of winning hearts and minds (‘ideological-popular legitimation’ as he puts it), while at the same time “its role in capital accumulation continues unabated.” (Page 79.) This state prioritization of the economy over other facets of its remit is connected to the chapter’s situating the pandemic in the neoliberal period, as the pandemic in effect continues, and arguably intensifies, the longer term trends in the direction of the state’s retraction from some kinds of activities (hearts and minds on the one hand and keeping people alive on the other) and continued emphasis on maintaining capital accumulation. The chapter also points out that a meaner state, especially in the pandemic, fosters calls for a kinder state. That is certainly reasonable and very high stakes - literally life or death for some people - but this push can easily take the form of a kind of left-liberalism - Tony Smith might call it liberal egalitarianism - which has an at best complicated and mediated relationship with the project of socialist revolution. (I went on at tedious length about this in my response to Smith the other day.) Furthermore, these reformist efforts can sometimes be hampered by failure to recognize that “the capitalist state (...) is structural weighted toward the dominance of the capitalist classes” which means “the state is not equally liable and conducive to any particular social project.” (p82.) As an aside I’m summarizing more than quoting here for reasons of space but the downside is that the clarity of the chapter’s prose doesn’t come through - Rafael’s really good at talking about complex ideas in clear prose.
We’re living through fucking awful times - the dire long neoliberal present, the hurts and horrors of which have built up for quite some time, and the especially nightmarish pandemic era - and that’s hard. Under these conditions, which enrich a few massively, our attention and empathy, rightly pointed downward, and our upward-directed outrage can combine to make us miss that none of this means the state has it easy on its own terms. That’s absolutely not a plea for sympathy for those fuckers, but rather it’s to underline what Rafael stresses in his chapter, that the state continues to face important challenges in these new conditions. The transformations in state priorities, organization, and action solves some issues for the state and creates others.
Rafael writes that “we may theorize the state as fulfilling three general roles within the capitalist mode of production: (1) creating the socially necessary conditions for ongoing capital accumulation; (2) ensuring a degree of social reproduction beyond the ‘strictly economic’ dimension of capitalist social relations; and (3) generating the political and ideological mechanisms of cohesion, through which both capital accumulation and social reproduction are represented and articulated.” (Page 83. The chapter give a good concise elaboration of those three points theoretically and with a little historical contextualization as well, like about the rise of the welfare state.) The first role seems to be going strongly in the present while the second and third, well, aren’t. That has downsides for state personnel in that the lack of social protection and welfare has costs in terms of legitimacy and potential in terms of economically disruptive social protest. The relative lack of hearts and minds having been won over means the state acts less democratically and at least appears to act more repressively, which burns more legitimacy. The point is that in a sense the state is, to quote my dear departed grandmother, robbing Peter to pay Paul. And those debts have to be repaid, at least in part, in the sense that the fact of success at one of those three roles coming at the expense of the others creates problems for the state and the personnel who staff it, so the state continues to have its own kind of hard time. (Jack Copley’s excellent book Governing Financialization is good on related matters. My review’s here: https://legalform.blog/2023/01/30/review-essay-economic-power-liberalism-and-crisis-nate-holdren/ He stresses that the state is in important respects continuously playing whack-a-mole as new problems keep cropping up, often as the result of the ways the old problems were handled, and that’s largely what policies and state institutions are: a sort of hardening of excretions [god I’m so sorry] exuded in a moment of conflict - imagine a squid squirting a cloud of ink, and the ink slowly turns to dry concrete - with those hardened results of momentary problem-solving in turn coming to both generate new problems and constrain state latitude in problem-mitigating.) To put it another way, Marx’s remark that people "make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past” applies to the state and its personnel. Furthermore “the past” that gives and transmits the circumstances under which the state acts consists in part of prior state actions. (Policymakers: they create tomorrow’s problems, today! That they do so sometimes by solving yesterday’s problems doesn’t change that, it just underscores how sticky the problem is.)
This all adds up to a turbulent situation to live through for all involved, though of course everyone passes through the storm in location specific ways, and, again, the state’s capacity for managing turbulence is reduced - not necessarily in terms of efficacy (though that may be happening currently, I’m unsure) but rather in the sense of there being a smaller repertoire of actions for the state to draw on in managing and navigating turbulence.
Unfortunately the challenges the state faces are largely not openings to a better future but rather help explain why the lay of the land for the coming while looks to be seriously inhospitable wilderness. As Rafael writes, "absent either a revolutionary mobilization of forces or a protracted equilibrium in which no social bloc or constellation of forces has the upper hand, crises may in fact become windows of opportunity for the reorganization of forces among the dominant classes towards a new arrangement for repro- ducing their power. More often than being revolutionary windows of opportunity, crises present existing powers with opportunities for adap- tation, readjustment, and even reinvention. In such a case, the strategies deployed by the state in response to the pandemic may become the basis for a new regime of accumulation and hegemonic order—a ‘new normal’—without severing the link between the capitalist state and capi- talist class power. The intensifying (perhaps now chronic) crisis of the capitalist state in its neoliberal form does not mean its collapse.” I was momentarily tempted to do a bit of amateur etymology and wordsmithing, looking for a smarter version of ‘storm-ocracy’ or ‘roll-of-the-dice-ocracy’ and I did not give in (for very long). Anyway, the instability of life in this social context/within this current configuration of capitalist society is certainly terrible and weighs on us heavily. More important analytically is that this instability can become a factor that reinforces or reproduces the current context: the instability the system inflicts on us can serve to help reproduce the system.
There are other interesting bits of the chapter, I can’t do it all justice here, people should definitely read the whole thing. I also think the description of the three basic roles the state plays - maybe we could call then lines or directions of obligation? - is generative for thinking further about aspects of the pandemic and policy and public health during the pandemic as well as being I suspect, helpful for for conceptually organize empirical inquiry. I think different policies and rhetorical gestures about the pandemic could be thought about in terms of state personnel navigating those three roles and the tensions between them.
Two final thoughts: I think the stuff in the chapter on the decline of state emphasis on ideological legitimation could be connected well to Goran Therborn - a lot of what seems to happen, I think, is still using ideology politically but less as a matter of promoting buy-in than promoting fear (‘vote for us or the president will be uncouth and orange!!’) or resignation. That connects as well with work on depoliticization by Peter Burnham and some of his students - depoliticization is a sort of ideological dodging of legitimation. Second, the end of the chapter suggests that we’re in a kind of condition of impasse - the water remains choppy for all and no force seems able to break out of this situation, leading to conflicts over who bears what costs. The chapter emphasizes that this kind of condition is more likely to lend itself to right-wing policies and downward restructuring of our lives and conditions than to any positive opening. That seems correct to me and it reminds me of an essay I like a great deal by Ralph Miliband, “A State of De-Subordination.” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/589656) As I recall it anyway, part of the argument parallels the conclusion of Rafael’s chapter: certain forces of promoting ideological submission - carrots and the winning of hearts and minds - aren’t working as well as they used to, with localized insubordination proliferating (in the present, being sick is from employers’ perspective insubordination as it’s the assertion of some need against the employers’ priorities) but not in a way able to cohesively or successfully push for positive social protection or welfare policies, while the state’s capacity to use sticks plus the baseline coercive/disciplinary character of ordinary capitalist social relations remains powerfully in effect in our lives. I’m paraphrasing there in ways that Miliband might not have accepted, I’m unsure, but in any case he talks about how a right-wing political turn seemed a likely resolution of the situation (short term and temporary like all such resolutions in capitalism), which proved prescient in context, unfortunately, given that Labour was already making a rightward turn and the Conservatives would soon take power and stomp the gas pedal in the move rightward.