shameless self-promotion: Lochner edition
hi all,
I hope you’re all doing as well as can be - getting some amount of enrichment activities, glimpsing just enough of the world outside the enclosure to feed your spirit but not so much as to make you restive, etc. (Please forgive my failing sense of humor. Again. Not for the last time.) Between starting back to teaching and some writing projects time for the open-ended thinking out loud that we center in our brand here at Open Mode Industries, LLC has been scant. And it remains so, this is just me letting you know I’ve had an article published, in case that’s your kind of thing. It’s here:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-labor-and-working-class-history/article/labor-history-and-class-violence-a-meditation-on-the-anniversary-of-lochner-v-new-york/A732309F4B31770EA5706F0FD16AA708
The gist: I wrote a reflection on an almost universally despised early 20th century court case, where I say basically ‘we are right to despise it, but some of us despise it marxistly and others do not, let’s unpack those differences a little.’ It’s partly me trying to suggest some value, or at least raise some questions that might spark some interest, in marxism to audiences that don’t presume it’s of value and interest. If you’re already a fully convinced member of the choir it might not be as zealous a sermon as you (we!) prefer, sorry if so.
I’ll add that two things are lurking in the background here and which I continue to think about. One, which I’ve spent more time on recently, reflectively, and at length is agnotology/‘how do they live with themselves’: the Supreme Court in this case seems to have just looked at some awful shit and gone ‘ehhh it’s not THAT bad.’ They’re hardly exceptional in that. How such people are generated, and, how such people get the intellectual resources they need to be thus insulated from what are, to many of the rest of us, urgent and often unbearable realities to really perceive, this interests me. I’ll continue to inquire into that for a while I think, here at my little blog/newsletter and maybe elsewhere.
Two, which I’ve inquired into at the edges of other work but not recently devoted a lot of attention to and which used to be a major preoccupation when I was more directly politically active, is how to think about reforms that improve people’s lives by mitigating the harms of capitalism. My hunch is that these are often thought about through what are, in my humble opinion, the wrong conceptual frameworks relative to the values and purposes of socialist revolution. Two quick examples of bad ways to think about this: a) workers’ lives got better, so socialism is closer, b) workers’ lives got better, so socialism is farther way. Now, these are not equivalent in that I have deep contempt for the latter for reasons I won’t bother to explain except to say it’s cruel and callous in addition to wrong. The first is good-hearted and humane which is lovely, but also wrongheaded.
In brief, reforms are reformulations of systemic violence, reformulations that may well reduce that violence to some extent, yet also reorganize it such that the terrain for opposing that violence’s ongoing inflicting changes somewhat, often in ways that, despite the genuinely laudable mitigation of harm, make further such mitigations harder to achieve through the prior means of achieving them, and tend to dissolve the collective subjects that brought about those mitigations. (I get into this in my chapter on social murder in the state theory collection.) To my mind this isn’t really a theoretically soluble problem so much as it points to the need to change the terms in which we think about this stuff, from objective-conditions-centered terms to class/collective-subject-centered political terms.
The collective action of the working class is an active political process, it has to be built through lots of conversation and relationships and organization, which involves values, ideas, imagination, stories, metaphors... all the multifaceted things that factor into relationships and thinking. There’s nothing automatic about it. Another way to say this is that the subjective side of class struggle/class politics is at most underdetermined by (or, has a very highly mediated relationship to) objective conditions. (And, as I said at even more tedious length than usual - here at Open Mode Labs we are committed to finding ever new heights and depths and tedium: not what you want, but what you deserve - in my response to a lovely review by the inimitable Tony Smith, I think workers struggles are better conducted with openly social-revolutionary politics sooner rather than later: https://buttondown.com/nateholdren/archive/my-correct-views-on-a-couple-things-a-response-to/)
Furthermore, the same actions can have multiple meanings for multiple people: people can play multiple ‘games’ at once. Think of a rom-com movie where a teen is in a band or on a sports team, and wants to perform well according to the immediate standards of that activity, wants to impress some record label/recruiter, and wants to impress a love interest. This kind of trope is basically about navigating contending sets of norms that give different inflections to, and recommend different specific forms of performance within, the exact same activities. Likewise, roughly, social reforms can be life and death for the people fighting for them, a matter of professional ethics for some of the state and NGO personnel involved and careerism for others, and a cynical ploy to quiet down the rabble for still others. Those reforms are also often objectively, regardless of intent, forms of governance that channel collective action in some directions over others and shape political imaginaries. (I’ve beat this drum a while in my pieces over at Organizing Work (https://organizing.work/author/nate-holdren/), including trying to note that comparisons over time of ‘union density’ look different if we remember that ‘union’ has only a somewhat stable referent, and that stability itself is historically variable: unions varied far more in the US prior to the National Labor Relations Act, part of the point and a major effect of the Act was to reduce that variation. All of that is political in multiple ways.)
What this boils down to above all in my view is that the primary specifically revolutionary socialist criterion of evaluation should be ‘what does this contribute to building the kind of movement we want and need?’ I’m very well aware that that’s a hard question that we’re often significantly upstream from, unfortunately, both in theory and in practice. But it is in part to say that benefit or harm to workers isn’t the primary question politically for the far left, though those are urgent questions. It’s in part a matter of ‘what will be made of these benefits and harms?’ and, closely related, ‘what can we make of them? how can we be in dialog with our fellow proletarians about what to make of them?’ (which in turn is downstream from ‘how can we create a context where we can meaningfully be said to make something of them and to be meaningfully in dialog with our fellow proletarians?’)
Anyhow, yeah, I wrote a thing, check it out if you want, and for whatever it’s worth my remarks here are an attempt to situate the thing in terms of some of my prior and ongoing preoccupations. I think the former stuff - how do they live with themselves - is more personally preoccupying and less politically important. The latter is vice versa, less on my mind lately and more important politically, a reality I admit speaks to my own limitations!
Alright, that’s enough now. I’ll be back to bore you again eventually, count on it. For now, keep on trucking! Over and out!