partial knowledge and unpleasant shocks
I’m making my way through Beverley Best’s new book The Automatic Fetish with a mind to probably writing a review of it later. I have some quibbles that I’m unsure of for now and over all I like it a lot. It’s a commentary on the third volume of Marx’s Capital that sticks closely to the original text, for better and for worse (and mostly for better). I imagine a lot of my quibbles will resolve after I finish the whole book, being largely a matter of impatience on my part. Anyway, I was reading it today and had some thoughts I wanted to flesh out.
I’m not entirely sure but I get the sense that Best thinks capitalism generates misperceptions or bad explanations of capitalism - that people in capitalist society tend to actively get capitalism wrong, for reasons rooted in the capitalist character of this society. I disagree with that, though I’d add that first, I may change my mind as I read (either changing my mind about Best believing this, or becoming convinced of the point by the end of the book), and second, my disagreement is a quibble so little that this may be the narcissism of small differences on my part.
Instead of saying capitalism actively generates mis-explanations of the system, as Best may be arguing, I’m inclined to say something slightly different. (This is a newish thought for me, so again I may change my mind and even if it ends up being that Best does think the wrong thing that I think she thinks, it’s generative for me to read her arguments.) It seems to me that the issue is not social generation of bad explanations of this society, but rather the issue is one of purposes.
Capitalism is a society where the reproduction of society and its parts is subordinated to making money into more money. Best’s book is good on this (if it’s any interest, some other books good on this discussed by me here https://legalform.blog/2023/01/30/review-essay-economic-power-liberalism-and-crisis-nate-holdren/ and here https://spectrejournal.com/on-economic-compulsion/) That ongoing reproduction bakes in a great deal of destruction, harm, suffering, and death, because the reproduction of society as a machine for turning money into more money is in part an ongoing process of the machine grinding up some of its component parts, though never so much that the machine itself stops working, and those parts are human lives.
In a social context where the options are be a well functioning part of the murder/money machine or kick rocks and starve, most people understandably live as functional parts of the machine, regardless of whether they understand themselves as doing so. I want to stress that this isn’t really a matter of choice: people don’t consciously accept the system so much as we’re produced by it, live out its dynamics, and come to consciousness of those dynamics only later amid that living out - and often only after something’s gone wrong. (I’ll add as well that ‘something’s gone wrong’ is the default life position and life outlook to an important degree in capitalism, because so much is so often going awry.) In that kind of context, our purposes much of the time are a matter of living our lives in this system and - pardon the mixed metaphor - staying above the water, because people who go under don’t often come back up. In doing so, we mostly work with frameworks for navigating our little patch of the social landscape, and often those frameworks work well enough. When things aren’t working - when we’re going under or getting chewed up by the machine - that’s much more often just a case of shit happens - because social murder is a normal, implacable, ever-ongoing process in a society like this - rather than being the result of anything we could have averted through our individual choices.
That’s all to say first off that we have ideas and whatnot that serve us well enough for practical purposes as denizens of this society, with those ideas varying by where exactly we are on the food chain and in the social landscape, and second, that the purpose of these ideas is rarely explanation but rather navigating the context we’re in or performing some kinds of tasks - that is, a lot of the ideas we live by are part of playing our roles in continuing to produce and reproduce this society. Those ideas often work pretty well even when not fully accurate. For instance, consider the idea that if you work hard you can be whatever you want to be, or that if you get a college degree you’ll get a good job. Those are simply false. On the other hand, those beliefs tend to be held by people following relatively ordinary life paths which do eventuate into some degree of relative success (in the sense of getting by), and they’re meshed with a lot of practical knowhow and sensibilities - all the things we know, believe, feel, habits of mind and actions, etc - bound up with living out things like formal schooling and employment. Of course, those beliefs are also held by a lot of people who get totally wrecked by this society, some of whom then start to think ‘what the fuck happened, I did what I was supposed to!’ While doing the former - ie, getting by - there’s simply no use or need for social explanations: marxism is basically useless for a lot of ordinary social purposes. While doing the latter - trying not to drown/fall into the machine - there is a bit more use for social explanations, though I suspect that often people mostly need to successfully scramble and then seek explanations after they’re in less immediate danger.
I’m agnostic about whether or not the kinds of thinking we engage in during the ordinary course of life above the water shape our thinking during the times when we get pulled below the water and afterward, as the survivors try to make sense of those experiences. Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t, and instead what feels like a shaping influence of those ideas is just a relative lack of other, better ideas (ie, actual explanations). Either way, the ordinary ideas that we have as ordinary members of this society, ideas for practical navigation of this society, are little use for actually understanding and explaining this society, not least because those ideas just simply aren’t for social explanation. By analogy, at the end of every semester I tally up grades and turn them in, which involves some use of spreadsheets and online dropdown menus, and as such also involves depicting students and their work as abstractions boiled down to such a degree that basically everything that actually matters about them and about what happened during the semester is absent. The skills and ideas involved in doing this have pretty much nothing whatsoever to do with understanding why students behave as they do or with teaching well, which makes sense because they’re not remotely for those purposes - instead they’re about managing students in various ways related to credentialing them for the labor market and getting tuition from them, and about my employer managing me to make sure I’m managing students well enough in light of those priorities.
This is all to say that in a sense capitalism is a society of small localized purposes and purpose-built headspaces, outlooks, knowhow, and the latter don’t add up to or can’t be expanded into a larger social theory. (I wrote about this early in the life of this blog under the term ‘partial knowledges’ https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/partial-knowledges-and-the-limited-perception-of/ and this was also on my mind in writing about experts in doing good in the world within the limited social context we’re currently trapped in https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/experts-in-the-common-good/) We all face small local sets of tasks in our social positions, and in one important respect none of those are a microcosm: society isn’t just a small set of tasks writ large. Its bigness involves greater complexity and patterns of motion and relationship that shape the sets of small tasks we face, and so which generate the localized purposes, knowhow, etc. And as I said, getting the big picture - the really big picture I mean - is often just not necessary, useful, or rewarded.
Having typed this all out I find I’m more amenable to Best’s points than I was when I started (the differences between what Best says and what I’ve said here are smaller than I thought, I think, though I think still there is some real difference here?). To my mind, one takeaway point from all of this is that we can think of capitalism as a big picture composed of smaller components that were generated by the whole. (The machine metaphor is a misleading one here as it’s easy to think of machines as parts that add up to a whole, whereas really the whole constructs the parts, as strange as that may sound: individuals aren’t prior to capitalism, we’re situated individuals constructed by this society as inflected in the locations and facets of this society that we endure.) Furthermore, the smaller components are unlikely to have the big picture generally speaking (with some very important exceptions) and are unlikely to spontaneously generate a picture of the whole when things are proceeding in relatively ordinary fashion. That’s part of why we need critical analysis (I wrote a bit about this in my piece in the LPE Blog’s symposium on Marta Russell a while back - https://lpeproject.org/blog/moral-equality-marxism-and-outraged-empathy/) provided by traditions like marxism and by the forms of collective thought and collective action (collective action in turn being partly product of, partly a contributor to, and partly a form of collective thought).
As I’ve been typing this I’ve had in the back of my head that I think this stuff is related to the pandemic and other aspects of social murder insofar as the normal baselines starting place is one of being ill-equipped to perceive the system’s big picture operations and the harmful effects of those operations to their fullest extent. I think a lot of people actually do have a lot of the big picture already due to their life experiences, but people are busy getting by and knowing the big picture doesn’t mean one can predict the future, especially since the system regularly produces unexpected forms of harm and injustice: the hellscape is in one sense an endless nightmare that’s always the same and in another sense it’s an endless nightmare because it’s nonstop terrible surprises, and each time we enter a new phase of terrible surprise we have to start to work out where we are and what’s happening, starting out under-equipped by what’s ready to hand (our practical knowhow and localized headspace I mean). Part of the point of a marxist analysis is to provide a framework for our life experiences to cohere, so that we can start to perceive and understand more of the big picture and how we’ve lived through parts of that big picture, and can compare notes with each other on the differences and similarities in what we’ve experienced, and what we might try to do about all of that beyond the immediate scramble to stay afloat/stay out of getting ground to pieces in the machine. That is to say, marxism isn’t a content we acquire that then makes the world entirely transparent so much as it’s simultaneously the ongoing work (and a set of tools, tools that we continue to revise, for doing the ongoing work) of thinking about what actually happens in our actual lives, comparing notes on that with each other, and trying to mitigate the harm in the short term and in the long term taking apart this murder-machine society and building a new society centered on human dignity.
Having gotten to the end here, I think part of what I’ve arrived at is that the pandemic has played out as it has because of how society was set up pre-pandemic, both in the fundamental and theoretical sense (ie, that we live in a capitalist society) and in the smaller scale and more concrete sense (ie, that we live in this particular capitalist society in this time and place). I was fumbling for this thought when I wrote about Abby’s great essay on how party-political-partisan explanations of the pandemic don’t really hold water (https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/explaining-the-explanations-or-neither-their/). In effect, this society sets up dominoes and periodically knocks them down, crushing a lot of us in the process, and whenever that happens it changes how we think about this society, at least potentially, and requires some explanation. The degree to which we’re shocked by the latest round of dominoes crushing people is the degree to which we didn’t really grasp this society as it actually exists (as Walter Benjamin put it, “the astonishment that the things we are experiencing (...) are “still” possible (...) is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.” Against that untenable conception of capitalist society, Benjamin insists “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency.”) That said, I’d also stress that oftentimes failing to grasp this society as it actually exists is in an important way bound up with us continuing to retain our sense of dignity and human worth. To really perceive the death machine fully in all its bloody whirling gears and not despair is hard, and harder in a context of disorganization, isolation, and fragmentation like we’re in (and like we and our forbears have so often been in previously). Sometimes people can perceive that reality and despair, either by going ‘well, we can’t beat ‘em so I’ll join ‘em’ and get on the management track or otherwise pursuing their own ends (this happens to Morgan Rosser in Williams’s novel Border Country), or go ‘well fuck that was awful, I think I’ll try to tune out.’ In important respects, retaining a sense of human worth in the face of pervasive and murderous indignity may sometimes temporarily require what Benjamin called an untenable conception of history. (And now I’m thinking again about this song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j7LPVobyQQ and the lines "How could we have been so naïve? Well, I think when all is said and done, just cuz we were young, it don’t mean we were wrong.” It occurs to me that naivete - and for that matter, panic - might be worth digging into further as keywords through which functionaries of the dominant culture/ideology think about, delegitimize, and manage opposition. And maybe music is in part a social practice - hardly the only one, of course - of maintaining a gut level commitment to human dignity and to coping with how that commitment often makes life in this hellscape a process of continual unpleasant shocks.)