Pyramids, dynamism, surplus population
The Industrial Workers of the World famously depicted capitalism as a pyramid (google “pyramid of capitalist society”) with the working class at the bottom. It’s a good clear simple agitational graphic. I’m partial to using the pyramid metaphor to depict hierarchy quickly - I’m always drawing triangles on the board while I’m teaching. We live in a pyramid shaped society made up of pyramid shaped institutions: there’s a chain of command in the waged workplace, government agencies are internally hierarchical, I’m the authority over students in the classroom, adults outrank parents, etc.
All diagrams simplify, they’re tools for highlighting some qualities and not others. One thing that’s left out of the simple pyramid diagram is dynamism, of two kinds. One, the specific hierarchical institutions that express social relations more generally are in flux at an uneven pace, due to capitalism’s various tendencies. Think about the transformations in education and healthcare, for instance. Two, there’s a dynamism over the life course, and generally downward. If we’re all stick figures standing on the side of a pyramid, the pyramid is greased, and many of us are sliding downward at various (and variable) speeds.
What I have in mind here is that working class people tend toward falling into or at least falling closer to status as so-called relative surplus population. This can happen to large chunks of the population due capitalism’s system dynamism (also not represented in the pyramid) - an economic crash puts a lot of people out of work and may foster austerity reducing welfare and public service cuts, ecological and environmental disasters can leave people homeless or disabled, etc. I think of this sometimes through the metaphor of being below, at, or above sea level during a storm. A lot of people are above the water line in ordinary conditions but ordinary is temporary and unstable in capitalism - the water line moves, unexpectedly and largely for the worse.
In addition, and this is what’s really on my mind, individual members of the working class tend to trend toward becoming surplus population with age, in two ways. One is straightforwardly a matter of retirement: retirees are to some extent outside the labor market and are recipients of payments that help them get along (ish) in that condition. Many end up having to do work for money to supplement though. Two, over time people age into disability. As I think I said the other day though I can’t remember if it was here or elsewhere or a mix of the two, in important respects for certain social locations, age, disability, and class are names for the same social process understood from different perspectives. Working class people age into disability in part due to the accreting of the harms of social murder in their lives (the Utah Philips song “All Used Up” gets at this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96HNaDDhVeE) with institutional conditions at any given time defining when someone what physical conditions disqualify people from paid work (again this is all a matter of degree and continuum).
I assume anyone reading this is already familiar with it but in case not, the book Health Communism gets into a lot of these important dynamics, it’s very good and I recommend it highly. https://www.versobooks.com/products/2801-health-communism. One of the points it makes repeatedly is that people consigned to the status of relative surplus population often become socially disqualified in that they lose say over their bodies and lives (and a lot of people didn’t have much say in the first place) both explicit and formal ways - being locked up in institutions, having their wishes explicitly refused by authorities acting over them, often authorities who have an aura of benevolent, caregiving expertise - and in implicit and informal ways - by being deprived of what one needs to have a good life, being stigmatized, disrespected, ignored, discarded. Furthermore, surplus populations often become raw material for institutions to profit or gain status or other resources from: as patients, residents, inmates, care recipients, etc, people become a resource used instrumentally for some institutions’ purposes, and often actors in those institutions have some mix of formal order-giving power, informal power to extort compliance (I’m thinking of how doctors can refuse to write prescriptions, for instance), plus cultural authority to impose or partially impose an account of what the factual situation is (thinking of doctors telling a suffering patient ‘you’re fine!’ which is not only a denial of care but a legitimation of that denial and at least a potential undermining of the patient’s understanding of their own experience and of their loved ones’ understanding thereof - ‘well, the doctor said you’re fine, as you sure it’s not in your head...?). I heard Luke Beesley (https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/persons/luke-beesley) say in a talk “misfortunes hunt in packs.” Vulnerability begets vulnerability, harm makes future harm more likely - shit rolls down hill so the further down hill one is the more shit one has to deal with, and the more likely one is to slide further down hill. All of the patterns also have (and, maybe, also endogenously produce - off-gas?) legitimating ideologies to defend them and diffuse criticism and protest.
This has been on my mind lately as my mom’s had some challenges getting good care after a needed surgery. It’s infuriating and I also have a sense that there are baseline expectations of the fundamental beneficence of medical institutions and providers which are only partially true (and I do think partially true; I suspect these providers live with tensions that make them act out periodically), and the expectation of that benevolence sets people up to be surprised by less than fully benevolent behavior. And that behavior too is accompanied by legitimating ideologies of varying degrees of public, official legitimacy (that a doctor knows better than patient is relatively acceptable to say in public despite being questionable, while doctors’ sexism is less acceptable though a loud subtext in a lot of settings).
I was also thinking about the terrible avalanche of covid deaths among nursing home residents and nursing home employees. Last I looked, if I recall correctly, something like ten to fifteen percent of covid deaths in the US were among care home residents when that population is something like one percent of the US population. Appalling, genuinely evil and to a significant degree the direct result of the ways the government decided to manage the pandemic. Administered deaths. If I remember correctly Abby talked about this in the Q and A to our Socialism 2023 conference panel. (By the way the transcript of the panel presentations is online here now https://www.deathpanel.net/transcripts/s23-how-capitalism-kills-covid-and-social-murder.) At one point she said ‘the social mediates the biological’ which is a great succinct statement of an important concept, and she also said something the specifics of which escape me now about how biological elements of aging do not explain the massive awful clustering of covid deaths in nursing homes - that’s socially produced, not the result of unmediated biology.
Here again the violence is accompanied by legitimating ideologies, with age as biology being one (basically they died because of their intrinsic biological qualities absent social mediation and absent policy action, which is bullshit, straight up apologism for atrocity) and age as disqualification being another (as in a kind of ‘they’re just old people, not people-people’ sensibility, the sort that pats old people on the head - condescension is only ever a few steps away from violence, conceptually speaking https://writingtothink.wixsite.com/mysite-2/post/talmbout-condescension or maybe a little more precisely, ambient forms of condescension are a handy resource for the perpetrators and profiteers of violence to reach to when it’s expedient to do so - and as in a kind of balancing the scales ‘well, they had a good long life prior to now...’ kind of mealy mouth quietism). I have a hunch that the concentration of a significant amount of covid deaths in those populations played some important ideological and agnotological role in defusing or delaying potential challenges to the pandemic as a form of social murder and I have a further hunch that those deaths were not evenly distributed along race and class lines. Ditto for nursing home workers, who tend to fall low on the food chain themselves. Here too the pandemic stands as an amplification of longstanding pre-pandemic social patterns, nursing home residents being largely discarded surplus populations. Likewise it’s my understanding that homeless people have far higher rates of covid mortality. https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/the-mortality-of-the-us-homeless-population/
Final thought on this for the moment: I think one could get pretty far down the road of understanding the pandemic by starting from ‘this is a disease destroying surplus populations’, that explaining a lot of the distribution of harms, the relatively non-disruptive character of that destruction to social and political institution (relative to the scale of the harms), and the relative lack of urgency from a lot of quarters - and the patterns in the relative success and failure of the government’s efforts to bring about anti-solidaristic responses to the pandemic (with rich and white people being generally worse on behaviors, attitudes, and policy preferences).
Self-involved meta note. Work's getting more hectic over the semester so it's steadily harder to think, let alone read (easier for me to type out thoughts and find a thread to pull on than to read, which has a higher minimum threshold of energy and alertness to make concentration possible). In that context I'm glad to be writing these thoughts here since thinking encourages thinking - having these themes on my mind means I'm ready to explore these themes more, not just ready to but sort of hungry to. I hadn't anticipated that as a benefit. We'll see if this lasts as the semester's mental enfoggening progrsses. I hope so.
ps- did I already plug Abby's latest on moral economies and social murder? I can't remember. It's here, I found it super thought provoking. https://buttondown.email/abbycartus/archive/propositions-on-social-murder-2-moral-economy/