something liberal egalitarians something something moral economies
By the way, I noticed the formatting was all fucked up in this post - https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/facilitative-bloodlessnesslaundering-violence/. I write these offline and I think maybe the, I dunno, computer sorcery in my writing app is recording indentations and whatnot in a way that is being read by the Buttondown, uh, gnomes as instructions to go wild with the formatting. I’ll try to avoid that in the future but I am a tech ignoramus and also pretty lazy, so no promises.
First off just a heads up - I assume everyone getting email notifications here and follow this is already aware of Abby’s work but in case not, I wanted to flag up this recent post of hers further developing the social murder analysis of the pandemic and public health - https://buttondown.email/abbycartus/archive/propositions-on-social-murder-3-social-murder/ and I also want to flag up the Alex Heffron’s back to writing on the pandemic as well - https://livingwithoutthevirus.substack.com/ Alright, so, trying to write to think now...
We don’t primarily keep capitalism because of any arguments in its favor that anyone has or any positive feelings anyone has about it. The system sticks around because it’s self-reproducing and getting out of it is really hard. Ideas and feelings do matter, though even there I think negative ideas - ‘you can’t beat the system!’ - and negative feelings play a much bigger role than any positive ideas like ‘capitalism promotes freedom!’ or positive feelings about the system.
That said, it is still worthwhile to take on pro-system positions. On that, I’m a big fan of Tony Smith’s book Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism, as I’ve mentioned before. Above all I like the account of how capitalism works, including the role of the capitalist state in capitalism society. (I reviewed it here with two other good books, if that’s any interest https://legalform.blog/2023/01/30/review-essay-economic-power-liberalism-and-crisis-nate-holdren/) As the title sort of indicates, the book is also about some non-marxists, liberal egalitarians Smith calls them. These are theorists who I think of as coming in two flavors: liberal EGALITARIANS and LIBERAL egalitarians. The first are utopian about capitalism and the state, and neglect the capitalist character of the state, believing that the problems in capitalist society aren’t baked in to this type of society, such that with sufficient regulation by the state we can have a capitalism that has eliminated all the problems that anticapitalists say are inherent to the system. This flavor of liberal egalitarian tends to focus on bringing about a better capitalism that’s more egalitarian than the current one. The second flavor are pessimistic about possibilities beyond capitalism. They think this kind of society is basically as good as it gets. I suspect that most actually existing liberal egalitarians are a mix of the two flavors and move between those two positions depending on the context.
Smith focuses on liberal egalitarian theorists, specifically, paying particular attention to philosophers. What he doesn’t say but I think is also correct is that there are other liberal egalitarians who aren’t theorists but are liberal egalitarian practitioners. (Of course anyone can hold those views.) What I mean is that there are people who play particular roles in the maintenance of this world in this specific form, as a capitalist society. Now, we all make capitalism and help keep society capitalist by our actions, actions that are situationally compelled, but there’s a complex division of labor so we don’t all participate in the making of capitalism in the same ways. What I’m thinking about here are positions that in a previous post (https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/experts-in-the-common-good/) I called experts in the common good, meaning professionals in public health, medicine, law, etc.
I have a hunch that often liberal egalitarian practitioners aren’t especially in either of the liberal egalitarian headspaces I mentioned above - practitioners, I suspect, aren’t living in consciously theorizing outlooks all the time but rather are absorbed in the doing of their practice immediately before them in the form of a set of specific tasks. For instance, when I’m teaching a class, I rarely have in mind how that class is situated in any sort of institutional or social context, I’m mostly thinking about what this student said about that bit of this book and classroom stuff like keeping an eye on the clock, bringing more voices in to the conversation, etc. I have all kinds of opinions - I am beset by packs of opinions, I’m lousy with views! - about higher ed but they’re often not immediately present on my mind when I’m doing my job teaching. I’m in the zone, focused, having bracketed out the bigger picture, so more general views aren’t immediately on my mind. But sometimes they are on my mind.
That is to say that some of the time people reach for theories or are actively enrolled in - actively have on their mind - ideological accounts of how the system works. Smith’s book is a good account of the general contours of those theories/ideologies. It’s not that people reach for the specific academic theorists he writes about, it’s that those theorists distill the theories of liberal egalitarians and those theories appear in less distilled form in the ideologies that are in the mix in the world, in people’s lives and thoughts.
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Abby’s written some very thought provoking and exciting thoughts about social murder and moral economy struggles: https://buttondown.email/abbycartus/archive/propositions-on-social-murder-2-moral-economy/ You should check it out. (She’s referencing an essay I wrote and imho she gives all the content of my essay that anyone needs but if anyone wanted to read that essay of mine I’ve put a draft at this link, which includes a link to the published version as well if that’s of any interest. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gfOFgRREktqbaDYsfkVuTxDOvtr_CqTAGwZNfwl75K0/edit?usp=sharing)
For now, moral economy as I use the term is a short hand for a situation where there’s a set of norms and ideologies in place that promote behavior in keeping with capitalism as it is organized concretely in a specific time and place, with those norms and ideologies also serving as a resource against downward restructuring. (And efforts at downward restructuring tend to occur, we should expect them, due to capitalism’s crisis tendencies.) This means a moral economy involves capitalism-promoting ideologies and practices that can be drawn on for purposes of conflict against capitalists and the state in specific conditions. Those kinds of conflicts have a limited politics, being about conserving the status quo against it getting worse. That’s certainly important, to be sure, but it doesn’t promote an expansively better future so much as says ‘don’t take away the specific future in capitalism that we were promised.’ Again, very important and all power to people in struggle, just saying this ‘we had a deal!’ perspective is limited.
I sort of referenced this in my post on experts in the common good, I think those experts have views that aren’t reducible to their role in capitalism and at the same time those views are part of how they play their role in capitalism. (A different marxist than me could explain how these people have fetishized and fetishized forms of perception of/accounts of capitalist society; I feel like I understand that stuff when I read it but for some reason it never sticks in my head.) Abby’s post brings out how those people can be the subjects of moral economy struggles, fighting for preserving an old deal. I think these sorts of liberal egalitarian practitioners may play sometimes play a role in channeling conflicts into existing means of dispute resolution and simultaneously shaping what people think ‘resolution’ means (as I sort of talked about in relation to Brian Milstein’s definitions of emergency vs crisis here https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/capitalism-and-catastropheemergencycrisis/ and the bits of this post on system compatible conflicts https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/thinking-out-loud-at-tedious-length-naturally/). Those means of dispute resolution are part of what, if I recall correctly, Simon Clarke somewhere refers to as institutional forms of class collaboration and class domination (the former being a mode of the latter).
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I have a gut feeling that there’s some further connection between liberal egalitarians, at least some kinds of liberal egalitarians anyway, and moral economies/moral economy struggles but I don’t know what that is right now, I gotta think more about it and see if I can figure it out. I had hoped I could write my way to this my writing this post, this started with a note to that effect, that I should try to write my way to figuring out that connection. One to keep chewing on.
I think this is related, not totally sure, I’m inclined to say that some experts in the common good have and perhaps foster preconceptions and outlooks that are inaccurate - they have bad maps of the social order, so to speak. And that’s not accidental - it’s not just or not mainly (or not even at all...!) a matter of winning over all the liberal egalitarians, so much as liberal egalitarianism or moral economy ideology is sort of exuded by institutions and life in capitalism to a significant degree. (Peter Burnham has a good line on this the exact wording of which escapes me just now, about the ideological effects of institutional practices that aren’t primarily about ‘doing’ ideology. I think of it like this: being treated as a nobody has effects on people independent of and not reducible to being TOLD you’re a nobody.)
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I will also add that while I’m pessimistic about the results of moral economy struggles, it’s not just a matter of ‘that’s not an ideologically revolutionary conflict so it’s bad. As Søren Mau wrote about here https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/communism-is-freedom "belief in the actual possibility of organizing our shared life in an entirely different and better way (...) is generally not a question of having the right ideas, arguments, and analyses” but mainly comes from “concrete experiences of being able to act and make changes together with other people” which helps foster “confidence in the ability of collective action to change the course of history.” That “confidence can’t be conjured up by good arguments,” it has an experiential requirement. (He adds that “millions of people in the early decades of the 20th century considered socialism to be a real possibility within reach,” not “because socialist intellectuals had finally managed to sufficiently sharpen their arguments, but because the worker’s movement in its heyday had created political organizations that were capable of giving people a lived experience of accomplishing concrete improvements in their quality of life by means of collective action.”) Moral economy struggles can contribute to that confidence. They don’t necessarily, though - it depends to some degree on if they win or not and, I think at least as important and probably more important, is the form or manner of the struggle. Giving control to experts and operating within state structures, I think that kind of form of struggle tends to either reduce the confidence Mau wrote about and/or to promote some version of liberal egalitarianism - belief in capitalism’s perfectibility or insurpassability, and/or to promote further enrollment of people into a moral economy outlook. I’ll add as well that I think a significant factor in all of this is both a radical anticapitalist analysis and what Anton Pannekoek refers to as “moral force,” “proletarian virtue,” “solidarity, the spirit of unity, organization.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1936/05/power-classes.htm Moral economy struggles are real but limited expressions of this virtue and solidarity, and those struggles can expand solidarity while also having tendencies in them - and, often, political actors operating in those struggles, in tandem with those tendencies - to limit their contributions to developing solidarity. This part of why left politics and analysis in relation to and inside those struggles (including conflict inside those struggles) matters, it seems to me.