notes toward grasping the politics of state responses to social murder
I’m in a bit of a rush so going to try to go fast here here. Two books I’m a huge fan of: Tony Smith’s Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism and Jack Copley’s Governing Financialization. (I reviewed them both at Legal Form along with Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion, a third book I’m a huge fan of. https://legalform.blog/2023/01/30/review-essay-economic-power-liberalism-and-crisis-nate-holdren/) Smith argues that capitalism is characterized by a split between a political domain - the state - and an apolitical domain - the economy. (He calls that ‘the bifurcation of the political.’ As a short hand I’m going to just say ’social bifurcation.’) The idea is that what happens in the economy is, by any reasonable definition of politics, political, and yet much of that activity is treated as apolitical both conceptually (taken as a given and not subject to deliberation or change) and in practice (sheltered from collective input etc).
Two closely related implications are, one, the state in capitalist society tends to be understood as the political domain and yet that domain involves a pretty narrowed range of political potential, and, two, part of the task of states in capitalist societies - as institutions staffed by personnel doing various kinds of work - is to contain and constrain politics, to prevent politics from happening or limits its scope when it breaks out. Implied in how I’ve framed this, and I think fully in keeping with Smith’s argument, is that the line of social bifurcation, the politics/economics split and public/private split, is not a stable permanent one but rather is an axis or avenue of tension and conflict that shifts over time historically. To put it another way, the line is elastic, stretched by events sometimes, snapping back sometimes, and shifting around as part of the historical unfolding of actually existing capitalist social relations.
Copley argues that over time as the UK government sought to navigate the uncertainties generated by capitalism’s tendencies toward crisis and major social conflict, i.e. class struggle, it regularly resorted to forms of statecraft that can be called depoliticized in important ways. Depoliticized statecraft might sound like a contradiction in terms and like it contradicts Smith, since the state is definitionally political and is where politics officially happens in capitalist societies, but it’s actually a complimentary point, one predicated on understanding depoliticization as itself a form of politics. The economy is actually political, with its apparently apolitical character actually serving to make the politics of the economy relatively chaotic and undemocratic. Similarly, state action is often trying to defuse or prevent or escape politics in one sense, which is in another important sense really a form of doing politics in a very top-down undemocratic and despairing manner (despairing in the sense of saying ‘nothing can be done about that!’).
There’s a fantastic literature on depoliticization as statecraft, including Copley’s book and which he builds on. I’ve borrowed a little from it before in some of writing on the covid pandemic and state management thereof https://buttondown.com/nateholdren/archive/the-hits-dont-start-volume-3-me-in-bill-of-health/ (and I plan to keep doing so, as I think it’s really fruitful stuff!). The best of that literature that I’ve read is, like Copley’s work, based in the Open Marxism tradition, which I’ve posted a bit about before. That literature helps show two elements of depoliticization as statecraft that I want to mention, that depoliticization can be rhetorical/ideological - think of Biden saying, shortly after assuming the presidency, something to the effect of ‘we can’t do anything to alter the trajectory of the pandemic’ - and can also be a matter of real institutional practice. On the latter, a simple example: it’s my understanding many cities have contracted out their parking meters to private companies. One result of that is that cities lose power to set the price of parking and thus lose some control over a mechanism that could be used to shape patterns of how people travel through and live in parts of urban space: it’s placed outside the scope of the municipal government’s authority, hence in an important respect depoliticized (relative to the existing powers of the existing city government). That sort of voluntary giving up of a power by government officials can be counterintuitive if one thinks politicians always want more power within their domain and/or a larger scope for their domain. It makes sense in another way, though, because if something isn’t in a politician’s domain then they can’t be held responsible for it. This means that depoliticized statecraft can be beneficial for individual politicians when pursuing unpopular actions and can also help states carry out interventions into social life that run counter to popular will. Very simply, if powerful people want something unpopular, democracy is a liability; depoliticized statecraft via its undemocratic character (I mean to say, even less democratic than ordinary operations of liberal democratic governments - themselves forms of organizing class rule despite their democratic elements) helps get around that liability.
I thought of this today as I read an article by Robert Knox, “A Marxist approach to R.M.T. v the United Kingdom.” https://www.academia.edu/40522021/A_Marxist_approach_to_R_M_T_v_the_United_Kingdom Rob’s a friend of mine and I like him a lot so I’m biased but I think he’s a really sharp thinker. I’m currently reading through a big stack of printouts of work of his, I recommend you do the same, it’s great stuff. Anyway, I won’t get into the details of this essay (it’s broadly about capitalism and law - specifically labor law - both in general and in an analysis of a specific court case, it’s very good) as the details don’t matter for what’s on my mind right this moment. At one point in the article - and I’m paraphrasing from memory so if this is clunky the clunk is a quality of thinking and writing, not Rob’s - he talks about changes in UK labor law and more broadly the turn to neoliberalism as helping to restore the conditions for capital accumulation and class rule, with that restoration being a political project. I want to think more about all of that a little more generally, with a mind toward my ongoing interests in the covid pandemic and my emerging interests in public health more generally. (Just to reiterate, any defects here shouldn’t reflect on Rob’s work - read his stuff, it’s great, and after you do, correspond with me about it!)
As I said, as I recall it, Rob writes about the turn to neoliberalism as a political project. This fits with some Simon Clarke has said and that I’ve borrowed a lot, namely that capitalism in general always exist as institutionalized in particular ways in concrete times and places. This has at least three important implications, one, that the institutions of capitalist society, even if apparently neutral - open to all, etc - and apolitical are actually forms of institutionalizing relationships of class domination, which are political relationships, two, that it’s important to understand how capitalism actually exists - how it’s concretely institutionalized - to understand what’s actually going in the world, and, three, that these forms of institutionalization of capitalist social relations are relatively temporary, tending to eventually give way to other ways to institutionalize capitalist social relations: in capitalism, one form of domination replaces another. That process of giving ways involves two basic speeds and related time periods. There are times of relative drift and inertia, apparently stable periods in which there’s institutional evolution, so to speak. And there are times of rapid intense change, apparently unstable periods in which there’s major institutional overhaul, both destructive and constructive (I mean those terms both as judgments - obviously the former has a negative connotation and the latter positive - and also as neutral non-judgmental terms, since one might destroy something bad or construct something terrible). The latter periods are significantly rooted in capitalism’s social tendency to generate various kinds of catastrophes/emergencies/crises and to class struggle, with those two tendencies being partly but only partly differentiable really.
Neoliberalism as political project is an example of the latter kind of period. That it was specifically a political project draws out something that I think is important, and that I’m still mulling. I think this is right, but I’m not totally sure. Tentatively, I’m inclined to say that the line of social bifurcation sort of breathes, it moves and stretches like a rubber band as I said. To put it another way, capitalism periodically will tend toward depoliticizing more social phenomena, and periodically will tend toward disruptive outbreaks of relative politicization, in that existing forms of institutionalizing capitalist social relations that were previously easy to take for granted and promoted relative order become suddenly contested (and/or become resources people can draw on to help mobilize; I wrote about this in my chapter in the Elgar Research Handbook on Law and Marxism in relation to some of EP Thompson’s work. https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/edcoll/9781788119856/9781788119856.00020.xml In relation to that, I want to stress that these forms of system-generated politicization are constrained: we can count on the system to generate fights over different possible directions within capitalism, different capitalist futures, but we can’t count on the system to generate anti-systemic fights. We have to build and organize those. That’s why I say specifically ‘disruptive outbreaks of relative politicization.)
Continuing on with a bit from Rob’s piece, as I said, as I recall it he talks about neoliberalism as a political project about restoring conditions for capital accumulation and class rule. Here I want to pull on some threads a little regarding the referent to the phrase “capital accumulation and class rule.” It seems to me that in some context that’s all of a piece. I think this can definitely be said to be the case for the 1970s and at least some of the 1980s in the UK. Put very simply, working class people in the UK were sufficiently insubordinate in various ways relative to their bosses and other social superiors that it seemed - reasonably, given their monstrous priorities - to capitalists and state personnel that the class had to be re-domesticated, so to speak, to help allow for a more capital-favorable economy. And at the same time, part of the restiveness of the working class and part of the worry by capitalists and the state over that restiveness was that capitalism as then organized - the specific forms of institutionalizing capitalist social relations that then existed - was flagging important ways not entirely reducible to actions of the working class.
To oversimplify, there was a subjective element to the problems of the period in the form of a militant working class, and an objective element in the form of flagging accumulation. Each contributed to the other, they’re only partially distinguishable yet they are partially distinguishable and it was their tandem operation that really added up to major problems for capitalists and the state. (I’d say the same about the US in the 1930s by the way.) Neoliberalism as political project responded to those major problems.
Now, as I said, sometimes capital accumulation and class rule are all of a piece. At other times, they don’t have to be. At least logically speaking anyway, it might be that greater intensification of capitalist class rule over the working class runs counter to capital accumulation in general (I think a fair bit of center-left political perspective amounts to saying ‘hey rightwingers your overly heavy handed approach to how to run capitalism is ultimately bad for the shareholders!’) and some of the time greater class autonomy or autonomy for pockets within the working class can help aid accumulation. That’s oversimplified really, in that I suspect what actually happens is more a matter of reworking the how of class rule - specific ways of institutionalizing class domination - with changes that seem bad and changes that seem good being a package deal and to some degree with some horse trading involved in the working out of those changes. This is broadly how I see the National Labor Relations Act, which in my view is product of a time when ‘restore accumulation and rule’ was basically one single goal, and which I’ve written about critically over at Organizing Work. https://organizing.work/2023/08/the-national-labor-relations-act-is-anti-strike-legislation/ The NLRA institutionalized some real constraints on capitalists and also on the labor movement, in ways that had some distributive benefits for workers while also in the longer term fostering a labor movement with reduced political potential (both for in-system politicking and anti-systemic politicking).
I had a compressed gut-level version of the above thoughts that I wanted to flesh out here. I guess mission accomplished now, so go me! That gut-level version was upstream from a second thought which goes as follows. I suspect that in times and places where capitalism’s tendency to social murder is especially intensely acting, and - I think, but not sure - where there’s not an active, identifiable, sustained practice of class struggle that’s subject to representation and negotiation, we’ll tend to see the outbreak of political projects focused more on protecting accumulation (often by protecting the population) with less immediate priority on class rule.
That’s not quite right, let me try again: political projects of restoration of accumulation-and-rule, understood as one single goal, will tend to be open-ended with regard to whether they’re trying to preserve the existing forms of institutionalizing capitalist social relations or trying to create new such forms. I suspect that generally those projects tend to mean at first to preserve those institutional forms, but when that’s not going well then they propose to overhaul those institutional forms as part of bringing out the desired restoration. When accumulation and rule are relatively independent priorities, on the other hand, we see political projects that are explicitly and consciously aimed at just one or the other priority (often with ramifications for the other, though). That’s a little closer to what I really mean, I’m still mulling all of this over.
Anyhow, what’s on my mind here is that I think workers’ compensation laws, which was what my book was about, and a good deal of welfare and public health policy is about re-organizing mechanisms for protecting accumulation more than about re-organizing mechanisms for practicing and sustaining class rule. (Insofar as institutions that protect accumulation are themselves institutions of class rule then the distinction I’m making is wrongheaded and that’s a fair point it seems to me. Still, I think the distinction holds to a limited degree in that what I’m trying to get at is that sometimes there’s explicit, conscious awareness and planning by powerful actors regarding both facets, i.e. accumulation and rule, and at other times they’re mostly aware of just one facet, even though at the same time their actions regarding that facet have ramifications for the other.)
So yeah, I’m inclined to see government health management initiatives, insofar as they are efforts to respond (responses that are always limited, from a Marxist/socialist perspective that insists on a robust commitment to justice and human dignity) to capitalism’s tendency to social murder, as political projects of protecting accumulation. Those are projects generated by both the system’s objective side - the inexorable killing in various, the tendencies to catastrophe and crisis - and subjective side dimensions of struggle. I suspect for any specific example of state health management we could lay out how much both those two sides were involved, and how much it was more one-sided. In the latter instances, relatively one-sided instances, I’m inclined to say we never get the subjective side, class struggles for health, without some important role of capitalism’s objective tendencies, but we do sometimes get those objective tendencies with less of a significant subject-side in the form of class struggle specifically. We might get in-house fights among top-down policy planners etc, but that’s a different sort of subject than what I have in mind by the admittedly limited phrase ‘the subjective side.’
If memory serves, and I’m really unsure if it does, the latter sorts of things are at least loosely what Gramsci meant by the term ‘passive revolution’, meaning top down reorganizations of how social relations are arranged, rather than reorganizations involving more back and forth between top down and bottom up initiatives. I may later decide to do a bit more reading and thinking about that category from Gramsci in part because I suspect that a fair bit of the history of state health management - public health, occupational safety, etc - falls under the umbrella of passive revolution (and also more simply and less relevantly in part because like I said I’m really not sure I remember it right - I think what I said here is correct but I recall little of the details, all of which I’ve gotten second or third hand - and I generally like to be more sure about what I’ve read than I am here). If I’m right, then it seems to me that typologizing shifts in health policy/health management institutions - and maybe approaches to conceptualizing health over time among the relevant personnel/professions? - in terms of how much do they lean toward passive revolution vs whatever the term is for changes that aren’t passive revolutions (I feel like I had it in my head until I reached for? oh well), would be a worthwhile exercise as a way to think about different version of state responses to the tendency to social murder. To put it another way, and as with much of this I’m not totally sure of this, doing so might help draw out some of differences and the commonalities within the class politics involved in different approaches to state management of social murder.