thinking out loud about Simon Clarke and public health
Happy holidays all. I bet it'll be next year before we communicate again. I hope to remember to make a stupid 'wow a whole year ago' joke and more importantly I hope you're all keeping on keeping on despite the hellworld's hellworldishness. I had a Simon Clarke phrase rattling around in my head along with some frustration over my not having anything that felt like an actual thought so I figured I'd type a while and see where it went. The result's below. One more thing: Steve Tombs kindly wrote to me to make me aware of his work since I wasn't. It looks very up my alley and you'll like it too, I think. Here's his faculty profile page https://www.open.ac.uk/people/st7699 and you can also use this link to see stuff he's done using social murder as an explicit category of analysis: https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=“steve+tombs”+”social+murder”
Nice to meet a fellow traveler and I look forward to reading his stuff. If any of you read his stuff before I do (which feels likely, I'm a slow reader, and so tired!) I'd love to hear them.
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As I hope I’ve made clear, I’m a big fan of the marxist sociologist and theorist Simon Clarke (sadly recently deceased), especially his book Keynesianism, Monetarism, and the Crisis of the State and some articles he wrote around the time he wrote that book. Part of what I like about this work in particular is that he takes a novel and insightful reading of Marx and understanding of capitalism in general that he developed in other work and puts it work in understanding concrete historical phenomena. In the process, he further develops his account of capitalism by creating bridging terms or junction concepts from the macro level analysis to the more fine grained accounts. I think this work has a great deal to offer for understanding the covid pandemic and other expressions of capitalism’s tendency to social murder, and I put some of his stuff in the Open Marxism files I mentioned a while back (here, including a link to those files if that’s of any interest: https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/open-marxism-excerpts-link/)
Some of Clarke’s concepts that I’m thinking of are the idea that the elements that compose society and the economy in their concrete reality at any actually existing time and place in capitalist society are what Clarke calls “institutional forms of class domination.” He refers as well to institutional forms of class collaboration. The concept faces two or three directions. For people who focus abstractly on class domination, the concept underscores that class domination as a general patterns of social life is always encountered concretely, in a specific form of organizing and reproducing that domination. For people who focus on particular phenomena and policy, and for people who think about the economy generally in an economistic way, the concept underlies that the phenomena they’re thinking about are power relations, internally conflictual ones. A third aspect of these concepts is that they indicate that the best on offer in capitalism is still below what people deserve: the best most socially just capitalism is still composed of relationships of domination. Of course we can reasonably think that some forms of domination are even worse than others, but it’s important not to lower our standards to ‘the nicest, most livable form of domination we can imagine’ - I think there’s a lot of pressure in the direction.
One source of that pressure is that the difference between different forms of domination is often literally life and death for some people. A closely related source is that fights over those life and death issues are often very intensive, losses are heartbreaking and often literally lethal, and victories are rare, very hard won, and very high stakes. As a result, people who have taken part in those efforts or identify with them can be understandably frustrated or annoyed to hear that their efforts eventuated in a still unacceptable end state. To my mind this means that the activity and organization involved in a life or death conflict over the specific ways to organize capitalist social relations in a particular time and place can end up being, at least in part because of the life and death character of that conflict, a form of loyal opposition to the system more generally and to the new specific forms of organizing capitalism that emerge out of that struggle. To put it another way, class collaboration can exist in a way that involves a tremendous amount of conflict and class domination can often have conflict as the way it exists and is reproduced over time. Lack of social peace or presence of social conflict are not evidence of the fragility of capitalist social relation. They can also be the ways capitalism’s reproduction exists, in the form of dynamic transformation from one specific way to ‘do’ capitalism to another. Let me try it this way: it’s possible that metamorphose from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly seems to the organism living out that change like a very unsettled process of old ways breaking down, but that process is also the ongoing unfolding of its life. I dunno if that metaphor works, sorry. My point is that fighting massively over specific ways to do capitalism is compatible with continuing to do capitalism and most likely that continuation’s historically normal existence over time is as people continuing to fight massively in changing ways.
To my mind this has two takeaway points. Generally speaking, social movements need to understand capitalism and to have specifically anticapitalist analysis - they have to have marxist analysis or different analyses that account for all the key elements of a marxist account of capitalism. This is not to say the process goes ‘learn nerdy Marx shit, then fight better’ though I do think it can sometimes play out that way. I think much more likely what happens is people are engaged in collective action in various ways, running into various walls and so on, draw their own conclusions and reflect together, with their analysis including a mix of novel insights and reinventing the wheel of previous accounts of society as well as a mix of existing analyses, marxist and otherwise. (It’s a bit like a language: at any given moment, words are coming into being in subcultures and so on as well as new words coming in from other languages.) It’s all unfinished and heterogeneous at any moment and dynamic over time. We can identify better and worse kinds of that dynamism and some of the better ones will involve getting more marxist over time as one element. Otherwise, social movements will be less able to understand capitalist society and to practice forms of collective action in better ways. That’s not to say that marxism is a guarantee of any of that, far from it, but it is to say that radicals need to be open about our politics, to work with each other (even if just in the form of fighting among ourselves...!), and to do so in relation to social movements in ways that create more of us and spread our ideas, as well as learning from the insights social movements generate. (Generally speaking, when one area of social life gets newly politicized for some people that’s a process of conflict, and that process is something the left has to work through - being leftists with good analysis of the world thus far doesn’t provide us with guarantees of understanding new phenomena, it provides us with starting points and a framework for the thinking and arguing involved in living in a dynamic historical process.)
The other takeaway point is that this applies to the institutions and bodies of thought that so many of us felt let us down massively as the pandemic started: public health is an institutional form of class domination and class collaboration. It’s not a neutrally beneficent set of ideas and organizations, it’s a set of ways of living out capitalist social relations, lived out partly in the form of relatively open conflicts and partly in the form of ideologically suppressed conflict (and/or as resources for ideologically obfuscating the reality of conflict within power relationships).
As I’ve said, in my view capitalism is always generating social murder in some fashion (even if the concrete realities of social murder might not be immediately perceptible from a specific vantage point at a particular place and time) which means anything that fosters the ongoing existence of the system is something that comes with a body count. I’m not sure how to put this and I’m not sure I could fully robustly present the argument for this, but I think that the demand to respect the hard work and heartache of the most recent fight over life in capitalism can end up blunting critical sensibilities, in a kind of ‘look that was as good as we could do’ kind of way. That’s understandable and may well be true, but it remains the case that ‘as good as could be done’ can still be unacceptable and a place we need to push forward from.
This feels very unsatisfactory so let me try one more time: I suspect that a lot of the people, institutions, and bodies of thought that so many of us rightly expected better from and which so badly let us down in the pandemic did so by being what and who they really were, not because of any departure. We expected a departure, we expected institutional forms of class collaboration - of depoliticizing the basic power relations of capitalist society and the harms they necessarily generate, and of channeling conflicts over those power relations in system-compatible directions - to be resources for generating intra-systemic conflicts to a much greater degree than it turns out they really were, and to be resources for (or forms of) opposition to the core logics of capitalism in ways that they simply were not.
That’s overly flattened, I think, leaving out the internal conflicts in all of that, but what I’m fumbling for here is that public health as institutions and ideas is simultaneously a form of intrasystemic politics (a way to live out the pattern of conflicts that capitalism is) against other such forms and also a form of the ongoing life and reproduction of the system rather than anything antisystemic (the difference between the former and the latter is one of analytical perspective, I think). I think a more militantly pro-social justice public health (more apparently radical but not anticapitalist) is fully possible and why it hasn’t existed, certainly in the US, is an interesting and pressing question. I think an anticapitalist public health - a health communist politics, if you will (by the way, if you’ve not read Health Communism, well, get your act together! buy it here: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2801-health-communism and listen to Death Panel! https://www.deathpanel.net/) - is also possible and is at best going to be at a tangent to the former: the relationship or translation between militancy and radicalism is very complicated, so to speak. For the moment, I'll call the former social democratic public health and the latter health communism.
The development of social democratic public health in the US would save a lot of lives and reduce a lot of suffering. Its development would involve some processes that encouraged the development of a more widespread politics of health communism, and at the same time, as a set of institutional forms of class domination and class collaboration, it would also discourage (or work to sideline) a more widespread health communist politics: social democracy is not the first step toward revolution, it's one of many steps in a direction other than revolution (even if it's the most humane of such steps). A little more concretely, the fight for a more humane response to covid looks one way when the end goal is a better form of class domination with a lower body count (which I think is the best position on offer in any currently legitimate form of public health - bearing in mind that I'm an ignoramus - and we know that we're very far from seeing this best position be hegemonic in public health let alone powerful in the larger world) and it looks another way when informed by a view that says there is no acceptable nonzero number of covid harms and says that ultimately we want to end the world that generated covid and the normalization of its harms.