Situating concrete aspects of social murder and response to it within capital's circuits
I want to try something. Specifically, I want to try to situate harms generated by capitalist society, and more specifically, means of responding to those harms, in relation to an abstract, compressed account Marx gives of capitalism’s operations. This might be a stupid idea, I dunno, I gotta try it out and see. I am in part retreading some of the ground of my chapter on social murder in the Marxist state theory book, but I think only in part. Part of why I wanted to get clearer on this is that I’m currently reading David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz’s Building The World’s That Kill Us. I’d describe it as an attempt to write a single volume introduction to the entire temporal sweep of US history where the theme is public health and occupational safety. It has a lot to recommend it and I’m thinking of trying to develop a class I could teach that takes it as the main course textbook. At the same time, it’s not a Marxist book so it has some limits. Until a little while ago I’d have said those limits amount to this: what unifies the harms it talks about isn’t as specified as it could be. I sat down to type this out, though, because the thought occurred to me that there are also real social processes that work to differentiate the harms the book talks about in a way that is antisolidaristic and serve to disorganize the working class, and those also are worth specification (something I’m not sure I can actually do yet myself). My hope is that thinking through the location of harms in relation to the stuff in Marx that are on my mind might help with that. We’ll see, I guess.
In the second volume of Capital Marx describes capital as repeating what he calls a circuit, beginning with the advance of money and ending with even more money. This circuit never ends, so the ending is always temporary: investments are re-invested. This can look wonky at first but I think it’s clarifying when thought through. Marx depicts the circuit like this:
M-C(mp+lp)...P...C’-M’. (Later I’m going to abbreviate this M...M’, by the way.) M is money. A dash is an exchange in the market. C is a commodity of set of commodities, specified via the paranthetical as C(mp) meaning the means of production, i.e., machines and tools and facilities and raw materials, and C(lp) meaning labor power, i.e., the time and energy and skill and obedience of employees. The ellipses indicate time passing outside market exchange and P is production, meaning employees use the means of production to do or make something new, specifically a new commodity or set of commodities. That something new is C’, pronounced “see prime”, with the apostrophe indicating that it’s different from the C earlier in the circuit. The dash, again, is an exchange in the market, and M’, pronounced “emm prime” is a a new set of money, a larger one, resulting from the sale of the goods or services produced.
Each capitalist enterprise enacts this circuit, and, of course, production in society write large exists in the form of many such enterprises: this circuit’s actual existence is in the form of many, many such circuits, interacting and interdepending. Some aspects of that interdependence are implied in the fact that the circuit begins and ends with exchanges of money for commodities: the non-labor-power inputs required for production in any given enterprise, ie, the commodified means of production abbreviated C(mp) are, as, commodities the commodity outputs of other enterprises. Every capitalist enterprise needs to find suppliers and buyers in order to keep performing the circuit M...M’.
Elsewhere in v2 of Capital specifies some of this even further by noting that there are two basic kinds of products of capitalist enterprises, which define who those enterprises are selling to. Marx calls these ‘departments.’ Very simply, some companies make commodities that other capitalists buy - the commodified means of production I mentioned. Marx calls those ‘department one’, the industries that manufacture the means of production. Other companies make consumer goods - the industries that make means of subsistence or what Marx there calls “articles of consumption.” Marx calls those companies ‘department two.’ More on this in a moment.
I mentioned that the inputs for capitalist production are commodities. In the terms I just mentioned, the suppliers of means of production are in department one. Importantly, the labor power inputs for production are also commodities, but they’re not produced as commodities, generally speaking: people aren’t generally produced deliberately as goods for sale on the market. Furthermore, generally speaking people aren’t sold by an enterprise that produced them as goods to be specifically profitably sold as a commodity. That is, labor power, while a commodity, is generally not C’, the C’ that in the circuit is generally not labor power, and the sale of labor power doesn’t generally result in M’, meaning a sum of money greater than the money invested to produce it. (I keep saying ‘generally’ because there may be the odd exception here and there and it’s possible to invent scenarios imagining this but those are not the prevailing conditions in capitalism most of the time.) Labor power’s generally not profitable to sell, so to speak. It’s profitable to buy and put to use on means of production.
Marx depicts a second circuit distinct from the one I’ve been discussing. This second circuit is C-M-C, with the first C and the last C referring to different commodities. Marx calls this simple circulation. He has a longer discussion of this circuit in volume 1 of Capital that I won’t get into in any detail here. For now, one way to think of this circuit is think about selling off some stuff to pay bills. I’ve never really earned a living wage in my life other than a couple three exceptional years now and again, so I’ve periodically found myself with bills to pay and scraping to find the money. Sometimes - to my great regret and linger anger - in those times I’ve sold records and books. That’s a version of C-M-C. I bring a box of books to the used bookstore intending to sell them. They’re the initial C in that circuit. The bookstore buys them, giving me some money, M. I then have paid that money to buy stuff to live on - food, housing, medicine, whatever. That stuff is the final C in that circuit. One thing to note here is there’s not profiting on my part. I sell some stuff, so I get money, then I spend that money on other stuff, which I then use up, so I need to find some other way to get money again in the future.
Another way to think of this circuit of simple circulation, and this is why I really bring it up, is that this is what part of the larger circuit of capitalist production is for the working class. That is, when the capitalist does M-C(lp) as part of that larger circuit, the capitalist buys labor power. The buying of labor power is one element in the circuit of capital. Workers who participate are doing C(lp)-M. For the working class, the the selling of labor power for wages is a first step in a circuit of simple circulation. The next step is using that money to buy stuff, ie, it’s M-C. Again, as I said, there’s no profiting here for the people who sold their labor power. They (or rather, we) continue to need to sell labor power in the future, we have to keep repeating our participation in C-M-C where the initial C is C(lp), our labor power for sale, the M is money wages, and the final C is the various stuff we need to live on, what Marx calls means of subsistence. Those means of subsistence are generally produced by capitalists as well - there are some practices of nonmarket distribution. For instance, my neighbor who lives behind me across the alley has a little garden and grows corn, he just dropped off a few ears the other day as a gift. We have some raspberry bushes in our backyard. They’re kind of unwieldy sometimes - thorny, grow real fast, produce berries suddenly in huge quantities. So we sometimes end up behind on picking them then have to rush to pick them before bugs infest them, then we have too many berries. We freeze some for later use (a nonmarket provisioning though supported by past commodity purchases - the plants, the freezer, the land our house sits on - and by our ongoing purchases of plastic storage bags and electricity), and we give some away. We gave some to another neighbor who in turn baked some pastries with them and dropped some of those off to us. More nonmarket distribution. My neighbors and my family could also conceivably sell some of our extra stuff when we find ourselves with, respectively, more corn, pastry, and berries than we can use. In that case, that would be market distribution in the form of simple circulation, since none of us would be likely to make a profit on an investment nor would we be exchanging good produced for the purpose of profitable sale. We’re just using those exchanges as a convenient way to conduct a kind of money-mediated-barter - we have extra stuff we can’t use, we swap it to get different stuff we can use. (Marx talks more about this in the early part of v1 of Capital.) My point is that none of this really departs from the basic logic of simple circulation, which has two important facets for my purposes here: it’s about getting stuff to use up - the final commodity at the end of C-M-C is consumed, not resold - and there’s no real profit, certainly not enough to live on, such that we remain compelled to keep engaging in the sale of labor power, which, again, is for us a variation of C-M-C.
You might by now reasonably be asking what any of this has to do with what I said at the beginning, about harms and social murder and means of responding to those harms. Very fair, and I appreciate your patience. Let me try to answer.
First of all, some general observations. The point of the circuit from M...M’ is to produce M’, ie, to get a return on investment, to ‘valorize value’ as Marx puts it. That point is not a whim, it’s a requirement. (In his wonderful book Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism, Tony Smith calls this ‘the valorization imperative.’) Businesses that don’t sufficiently profit and grow by re-investing tend to eventually get outcompeted by those that do. This means that any substantive purpose to the products made - their use value, in Marx’s terms - is secondary to the primary goal of profiting and expanding (ie, accumulating). That secondary purpose does have to be served sufficiently that the product will be sold, but that’s it, that’s the bar that has to be cleared: is this useful enough to be salable. That’s a real bar but one that gets lowered at least a little by the fact that many of the buyers are other capitalists who are buying these commodities as inputs into capitalist production processes, ie, productions processes with the same subordination of substantive usefulness of the products to the primary purpose of profitability.
Furthermore, it’s not capitalists doing the work generally speaking, but workers, further lowering the bar a little. Workers whose boss buys substandard inputs, whether willfully or because that’s all that’s available on the market at that time and place are likely to be told something like ‘look figure it out’ with serious consequences if can’t or refuse to do so, because their employer controls their access to money. That’s an admittedly wonky way to put something that I think most people with a regular job have experienced now and again. It’s variation on how shit rolls down hill. (Oh, let me add, when I refer to use value as substantive purposes, that doesn’t mean use values are good. There are good, bad, and neutral substantive purposes, and the oppressive, violent character of capitalist social relations tends to encourage bad ones: teargas and bullets has the use value of hurting people, for instance.)
Built in to all of this is also that generally speaking there’s a lag in time and a, I don’t know, displacement in space between the maker of a product and the user of a product. Again, wonky, sorry. What I mean is that companies in department one, the industries of the means of production are generally making and selling stuff used elsewhere by other companies and companies in department two, the industries of articles of consumption, are generally making and selling stuff used elsewhere by consumers. That ‘elsewhere-ness’ (jesus, I’m so sorry) means that any harmful quality to the product made and sold will manifest, well, elsewhere, and also later, after production. In addition, the pressures of the valorization imperative mean if there is such a harm, the producing company doesn’t want to pay for it, and they can try to avoid paying in a variety of ways.
Furthermore, there is a kind of fragmentation or individualization involved here: if, say, a company that makes hammers for use in construction sites makes hammers with a high rate of failure - say every 100th hammer has a neck that will snap causing the head to fly off dangerously after the 100th time it’s used to strike something - the buyers don’t know at least two things by virtue of being buyers (ie, the market exchange doesn’t necessarily involve the buyer coming to possess this info). One, they don’t how how many such hammers there are in the batch they bought or the failure rate and so on. Two, they don’t know if this is just the hammers they bought, or all hammers sold by that company. Ditto for consumer goods - if every 100th popsicle has some arsenic in it, say. There’s another additional difficulty here which is that often the defective product may be defective but not so defective as to cause sufficient harm to be noticed as defective and held to be so defective in degree that the buyer will be able (because informed) and willing to engage in some kind of dispute. This amplifies the fragmentation or individualization. This is significant because it means there is likely to be a dynamic were not every population harmed by defective products knows itself to be a population, and not every one that does itself so will become an active constituency engaging in an effort to address the problem. That means we should expect that some instances of harmful products will lack for mechanisms to identify them, and some instances of harmful products identified will lack for mechanisms to remedy them.
In my chapter on social murder in the state theory book I get into various kinds of harms that are fostered by capitalism related to all this - in production, in consumption, in and around sites of production via pollution, etc - or Marx’s and Engels’s extensive and illuminating writings on those harms and how they’re systematically baked in to capitalism (the system is a death machine!). I won’t deliberately recapitulate that here - I figure if that interests you, you know how pirate and/or interlibrary loan a book, as your disposition leads you - but what I will say next does retread some of that ground from, I think, a slightly different perspective.
What I want to do here instead is what I said at the outset, try to situate those harms in relation to the circuits I talked about above. Coming back to that, the circuit of capital is M-C(mp+lp)...P...C’-M’. Let’s take that first step, a step with two subroutines really: M-C(mp) and M-C(lp). The second subroutine, for lack of a better term, is M-C(lp), the purchase of labor power. That can involve harms in that wages may be too low for cost of living and/or to fall over time. The first subroutine, (sorry, sorry, that word sucks, I can’t think of a better one right now) is M-C(mp), the purchase of means of production, can involve harms that occur or are actualized in the production process, so let’s talk about that, about ...P..., the second step in the circuit.
The capitalist may have bought means of production dangerous to production workers as well as the area surrounding where production occurs. For instance, I live just under a mile and a half south of a tire factory and just over a mile and a half west of another tire factory. I worry that they’re putting terrible shit in the air that my kids breathe in. History is absolutely fucking lousy with examples of this happening, as I’m sure you know. If they are putting toxic shit in the air that we in the neighborhood breathe in, then they’re also putting it into the air in the actual production process, for their employees to breathe in while at work. Pollution and toxins aside, there’s also means of production that’s dangerous to the workers using it - stuff that’s sharp, very hot, very cold, radioactive, etc etc. There are many, many work accidents regularly because of those qualities and at least some of those accidents are because potentially harmful qualities are baked in to the product and the product isn’t designed well enough to check those potential. That is, some products just aren’t safe enough by a humane standard but are still used in production, hurting people. There are other harms in production that aren’t due to the commodity inputs but due to the boss being a capitalist under pressure to profit maximally and so passing those pressures down to workers. Marx and Engels are very good on this. I cover what they say in my social murder chapter I mentioned.
After production, there’s the last phase of the circuit, C’-M’, the sale of the result of production. For goods in department one, ie, when the final product indicated by C’ is part of the means of production, I’ve already said what I planned to say on that, because that product forms an input for another capitalist enterprise to carry out the circuit M...M’. For good in department two, the product C’ is a consumer good. Again Marx and Engels have a lot to say on this that’s illuminating and I cover that in my chapter. All I’ll say here is that, as I know everyone knows, many consumer products are harmful in various ways, that harmfulness is systematically generated and it’s also systematically protected/reproduced - in capitalism a fuck up or an evil tends to repeat for a while, so to speak, because the system makes course corrections harder, in part for some reasons I said above (individualization/fragmentation and whatnot). There are also harms that arise because the final product is too expensive for some people, leading to deprivation.
As usual I’m aware this is abstract and kind of wonky and I especially don’t like that because I’m talking about stuff that is genuinely harming and sometimes killing people, and being abstract and wonky about that doesn’t feel like treating that terrible reality with sufficient moral gravity. If it reads that way to anyone, I’m genuinely sorry, that’s not my intent. Anyway, my point just now is in part that I recognize some important limitations to this presentation of this subject matter. That said, and this is the other part of my point just now, my hunch is that this abstraction may have some use.
One thing I want to point out in what I’ve said right now is that while capitalism is deeply harmful, genuinely kills people as I said - I mean it when I say the system is a death machine - it’s a system that kills in distinctly different forms. That’s part of why I wanted to break down the circuit like I’ve attempted here: I said there are harms or potential for harms baked in to the exchange M-C(lp), into the exchange M-C(mp) that manifest in the production process (we might call those input-conditioned harms, meaning harms that the means of production carry in the door with them, so to speak), additional harms in production that are derived from the capitalist’s simultaneously having power over their employees and being subject to the pressures of the valorization imperative, potential harms in the final product C’, and harms that happen in the space around production’s physical location (like pollution).
Each of these harms is similar as a capital-generated harm, ie, as social murder, but the point is that harms arising from different distinct phases in capital’s circuits will be harms with very different concrete forms. Being underpaid and being exposed to toxins at work are harms, wrongs, and caused by the employer and the context the employer is in, yet they’re different harms experientially and physically and/or psychologically. Insofar as people may be situated differently in relation to these processes and thus endure distinct harms - say I work in a very underpaid and relatively low toxin part of the company while you work in a far better paid but far higher toxin part of the company and our friend who doesn’t work there lives right across from the most toxic point in the production process and so is slowly dying from pollution. The three of us might not know about each other’s issues or see our issues as each a species in the same basic genus. Likewise, we might realize these problems exist but see them as unique to this company when the reality is that everyone employed in our industry and everyone living around plants in this industry shares similar issues. Of course, when I say ‘we might not...’, we also might! The history of the workers’ movement has many examples of how that comes to happen and what can result. My point is really just that the operation of t circuit distributes the harms it generates in ways that form obstacles to identifying and acting in response to those harms. That history I mentioned involves people attempting to overcome those obstacles, and sometimes succeeding.
There’s a further problem or set of problems in that the way I present this stuff here, abstractly via capital’s circuits, likely makes the commonalities seem easier to identify than they are. What I mean to say is that all of the above exists in the form of concrete production processes that, in their concrete qualities, differ substantially from each other, which means the concrete harms also differ. Work accidents in, say, power plants, construction sites, hospitals, and meatpacking plants all have a lot in common when looked at from one set of perspectives - as I said, they’re all harms, wrongs, caused by the capitalist employer - and yet when looked at in terms of the specific physical and/or psychological harms inflicted and in the specific physical and organizational processes causing any specific accident they can differ wildly. The latter is incredibly practically relevant as well, in that both treating the actual harm will always, and preventing further such harms in the future will often, require addressing the harm and/or causes of the harm very concretely. This too fosters fragmentation/individualization, which, again, can be overcome but it is an obstacle to course corrections.
In my social murder chapter I’ve mentioned a few times, I talk about the capitalist state and how it tends to encourage responses to specific instances of system-generated harms to be relatively system-compatible. I suspect that makes those responses less likely to provide much to the harmed people in the short term, and it also protects the sources of harm. What I want to mention here - and I really should end as this is too long even though I’ve only really started to get to what was actually on my mind when I sat down to type - is this. For lack of better terms I’m going to say it this way: the theory of social murder helps identify a bloody unity to the system’s hurting and killing people.
What I’ve tried to stress here is that the systemic operations that generate that hurting and killing exist in a fragmented, individualized form such that the the bloody unity isn’t always immediately apparent (hence the importance of Engels’s and Marx’s writings on this stuff!). I’ve further tried to stress that this fragmentation and individualization has two, I don’t know, contributing streams: one, that the operation of the circuit over time involves, I don’t know, a differentiation of concrete harms derived from differences of ‘location’ within or in relation to the circuit. Two, the concrete diversity of the physical and organizational aspects of production processes carried out across the two departments of production, tied to the differences in the products made and thus the different means of production and labors involved.
What I want to add now is that I think this fragmenting and individualizing is in important respects woven into institutions - above all state institutions - for responding to system-generated harms and that those institutions, by virtue of that weaving-in, end up further reproducing the fragmenting and individualizing. This is because institutions like, say, a Department of Mine Inspections, or a fund to provide care for black lung disease sufferers, will tend to focus on the concrete realities of production and/or harms. They’ll actively have to do so in order to serve their constituents, who really need them! Insofar as they take on an employer, to demand either resources or prevention of future similar harms, they’re likely to focus on elements of the harms that are specific to particular locations within (ie, phases of, steps within) the circuit of capital. I mentioned some frankly slightly silly examples above said ‘we might not know.’ That potential not-knowing can get institutionalized as part of struggles and politicking such that the resulting institutions reproduce that not-knowing. On the other hand, as I said, we might know, and the workers’ movement has a long and rich history of people figuring out underlying commonality across superficially disparate harms. ‘Not-knowing’ and knowing are degrees here, not absolutes, and those relative differences of degree can get institutionalized as well.
In addition, I mentioned in passing that my chapter gets into a little more detail on the limits of some pathways for dealing with social murder, specifically pathways paved by or on the grounds of the capitalist state. One element of those limitations is that the state tends to serve - is pressured to serve - to keep accumulation in general going. This means that small to moderate exceptions can be dealt with: one exceptionally toxic or otherwise hazardous plant is a soluble problem. Or to change the example, if we find out tomorrow that one very specific brand of midrange laptop is giving people cancer at high rates, that’s not a particularly hard problem to solve from a systemic perspective (ie, the fix doesn’t cause system problems). On the other hand, if we find out tomorrow that ever computer and smart phone in the world is taking 20 years off the lives of everyone who uses them, the fix for that problem would be so huge and disruptive that it would be unlikely to be implemented: sometimes social murder is so large in scale that it becomes too big to fail, so to speak. We’re facing that with regard to climate change and we faced - continue to face - that with covid transmission. (I remain a covid zero zealot!)
This limitation on system disruption - that the state has to make capital’s circuits generally keep going - is part of why the state discourages militancy and whatnot, which is a lot of what I had in mind my chapter. This limitation is also related to the matter of fragmentation and individualization that I’ve mentioned. This isn’t conspiratorial, to be clear, it’s to say that the system selects for system-compatible solutions and against disruptions of capital’s circuits, and that selection plays out within/via state action sometimes. Again too wonky and abstract. Let me try again. I mentioned a fund for the healthcare needs sufferers of black lung disease and a bureau of mine inspection. We can imagine alternative things. For instance, providing free healthcare to all persons for all of their needs would mean no need for a distinct fund for the healthcare needs of suffers of specific diseases. For another instance, instead of just a department focused on mines and similarly industry-specific state agencies, we could have a department focused on work safety as such - and we came to have one in the US in the mid-to-late 20th century, namely OSHA. Instead of a group of state experts and relying on state action for remedies (remedies which by virtue of being matters of public policy are subject to watering down by corporate lobbying) we could have a work safety organization by and for workers, that disrupts production any time there’s a hazard in some city, state, country.... Each of these ‘for instance’s is at least somewhat more disruptive than the preceding. As I’ve tried to say, there are both limits on how much disruption the system will tolerate before a response and also systemic pressures that in effect select in favor of less disruption and against more disruption of capital’s circuits. What I really mean here is that the more holistic and efficacious kinds of responses to social murder that many of us think are necessary and/or morally justified will be harder to really institutionalize within the state and the ordinary operations of capitalist society than less holistic and/or less efficacious ones. Again, real obstacles, and again, they can potentially be overcome.
Final thought and then I really am going to go. I have in effect said that institutional forms of responding the various harms the system generates will have a tendency to be localist, so to speak. I mean that they will tend to focus on concrete realities of the specific harms, which are in turn downstream from both the particulars of the physical and organizational aspects of that industry or enterprise, conditioned as well by location/phase within the capital circuits involved: harms from the specific means of production C(mp), harms involved in the exchange M-C(lp) etc. As with much else in capitalism, these localized perspectives can often work well enough in their immediate context to facilitate getting by, so to speak, rather than localized systemic breakdown. On the other hand, these localized perspectives are not miniature version of a social theory. They don’t scale up. They are products of, and reproduce, the fragmentation/individualization I’ve been talking about. To really understand these realities I’ve been fumbling to talk about here, we need to both have a fair bit of the information that exists in these localized perspectives (Marx read a lot of factory inspector reports to write parts of v1 of Capital; we can think of him doing so as him collecting local information from localized sources), we need to clump it together and look for patterns (as Marx did), and we need to critically analyze and interpret those patterns via Marx’s larger theory of capitalism.
And, at the risk of putting too fine a point on it, these localist institutional forms of responding to elements of the broad tendency to social murder will not generally have a tendency to de-localize, to do the clumping and critical analysis above certain limits. They’ll generally have the opposite, a tendency to try - and they’ll generally have resources to aid that attempt - to stave off those more far-reaching perspectives and actions. Once again, superable obstacles, but still obstacles. When those obstacles are overcome, that overcoming will tend to be partial (ie, limited wins) and/or relatively temporary (ie, wins can be eroded or reversed).
I think what I called localism in the above last two paragraphs will tend to be reflected in and actively reproduced by the forms of professional knowledge, academic disciplines, etc, and in the concrete organization of institutions that work on any of this stuff, with non-localist - holistic, universalist? - approaches tending to be less likely to come into existence or to persist except in those exceptional circumstances when the class is really on the march. This means marxists trying to engage those forms of professional knowledge etc are likely to be pushing uphill in terms of interlocutors and to need to subject the concepts - explicit and especially implicit! - of those forms of knowledge to a great deal of theoretical examination and criticism. Really, those forms of knowledge and their concepts should be treated by Marxists as objects of examination and criticism that we mean to take apart and replace with better ones. Marxists shouldn’t so much collect the ideas of capitalist society for our own purposes as we should strip those ideas for parts as part of our efforts at making ideas against capitalist society and for communism. That effort is unlikely to be rewarded by official institutions of society, at least not if the effort is working at all and is tied to more concretely and immediately practical left politics.
Gah! I lost my train a thought a bit - train too long, but also too slow… I specifically and deliberately had the bit on simple circulation above because I wanted to mention something related to state institutions that I didn’t get into. Simple circulation for sellers of labor power is C(lp)-M-C(ms), meaning the sale of commodified labor power for money used to purchase commodified means of subsistence. Similar to what I said above, there are problems that can arise in the circuits of simple circulation. In the first step, the exchange C(lp)-M there might be too little pay, wage theft, illegally low pay in places with minimum wage laws, pay below what the union contract specifies where such exists, etc. (I had a job once where my paycheck bounced. It led to me crying in my car in the parking lot of the grocery store by my house.) What I said above about selection pressures against disruption goes here too. There can be problems in the phase when we’re in possession of money - robberies of various kind, less often counterfeiting, bank failure. There can be problems in the exchanges of money for means of subsistence M-C(ms), like being ripped off or refused service or not having enough money for enough stuff. And there can be problems in the means of subsistence themselves - harmful products - for reasons I said above. Here too these problems share commonalities in crucial ways but their distribution and experience differs substantially. All the concrete problems and harms I’m gesturing to here can each be understood and addressed, and those understandings and ways of addressing those problems can all be institutionalized, in different ways. For instance, a problem of lack of enough money for enough means of subsistence can be addressed by efforts to raise pay, like wage laws and unionionization, or efforts to supply means of buying food like SNAP, or supplying means of subsistence to particular subsets of the population: medicaid for limited healthcare for the very poor, medicare for limited healthcare for the elderly, Veteran’s Affairs hospitals for veterans, the WIC program for parents of small kids, etc etc. Again, problems of fragmentation and individualization. (My memory’s foggy now but elements of this are discussed in at least one of the chapters in the classic Simon Clarke edited collection The State Debate and in the sort of related book In And Against The State, I should give those another look.) Also worth mentioning that being a client, and especially an individualized client, of an agency is different than being a member of a fighting collectivity. (Ditto last parenthetical!) Not all routes to an end are politically equal and generally speaking we on the left should aim for meeting needs/demands via forms of popular power that lay groundwork for more popular power - forms of democratization of social relations with capacity to build on themselves, so to speak.