thinking out loud at tedious length (naturally) about capitalism and crisis (again, still)
The pandemic isn't just a biological event, it's a political event, the social mediates the biological, as Abby put it someplace, it's a set of social relations, it's dynamically unfolding pattern of power and conflict. As readers of my blog here will know, I think it can't be understood without a grasp of capitalism and especially of the capitalist state. (By the way, I have a chapter in this on social murder and I think the rest of the book will also be helpful for clarifying this stuff in general, including both the insights it will contain and by arguing out the differences among some of the positions in it. https://link.springer.com/book/9783031361661) I also think an abstract theoretical understanding of the capitalist state is just a necessary condition and not a sufficient condition for understanding the pandemic. The theory has to be correctly put to work in relation to the specific historical process and the empirical evidence. Trying to clarify my own grasp of all of this is a major purpose of this blog. A related one is the hope to foster conversation with friends and comrades so we all get better at this, and to a lesser degree I do hope to win people over to this general view as summarized above and to the Open Marxism tradition in particular (the importance of which I'm fully convinced of and also I hope to use the blog to deepen my grasp of the tradition). I say 'to a lesser degree' because I think for now people have to already be somewhat c0nvinced for any of this to make sense or to feel worth engaging, by virtue (vice!) of my still working out the thoughts here. Anyway. Toward these ends I've been looking over some work in the tradition, specifically dissertations by Peter Burnham, Graham Taylor, Laura Tedesco, and Graham van Wyk, all of whom were Simon Clarke students. I've read this stuff before out of ongoing interest but hadn't th0ught of it much in relation to the pandemic. That connection is a work in progress as is my over all grasp of the material. (I can throw up links to these works later in case anyone's interested.) What's below is me writing to think in response to this work, not quite notes on it but all inspired by it. Kinda long and as ever your mileage may vary. (When I notice the newsletter character of this thing, rather than the writing to think and just good conversation with specific people element, I get more self-conscious, falling out of the open mode.)
I want to say as well that Alex Heffron (hi Alex!) said two things recently in correspondence/conversation on some of these themes, which I found very thought provoking and illuminating, I want to think more about these later and I hope he will write this up more long form as well. One, to a significant degree, the success of the vaccine was to demotivate solidaristic action, and I'd add to help state actors get off the hook for doing anything good for anyone and also to victim blame. Two, a lot of people have tried to outsource politics to the crisis, in the sense that we thought the catastrophe itself would automatically do the important political work that has to actually be undertaken by collective action.
Alright, the thoughts on capitalism and crisis and yadhayadhayahda....
Capitalist society is violently dynamic - it’s subject to and generates changes that are very hard to stop - and at the same time (as implied by emphasizing that its dynamism is specifically a violent one) it’s also a society of atrocious stasis and continuity: capitalism changes to stay the same. One key element of these processes is that capitalism reproduces the preconditions for its own existence. Capitalism is not human nature nor is it synonymous with society as such, it’s a particular kind of society with an origin in history, and yet it’s also a society that in a sense replays that origin - it continues to re-originate itself, so to speak. It dynamism is in finding novel ways to repeat that origin, as it undermines existing institutions that express capitalist social relations while simultaneously recreating its pre-conditions.
While it’s easy to think of capitalism as an economy, and while I tend to stress the importance of the capitalist state, capitalism is fundamentally a class society and what gets reproduced above all is the contours of its social relations of class. One important element of these contours is the imposition of a labor market on most of the population (which is closely related to the commodification of what people need to live and the relative lack of any real capacity for people to produce what they need to live without buying and selling commodities). Another is the internal fracturing or dissociation of much of the ruling class into being capitalists who have to compete with each other, which helps create capitalism’s tendency toward some kinds of social crises. A third is the existence of the capitalist state. It seems to be the case that all class societies have states and that all states are class states, but not all class societies and class states are identical: capitalism a specific kind of class society, and it has a specifically capitalist state.
Part of capitalism’s dynamic violence can be thought of in terms of walls: the system erects brick walls, then forces people to hurl themselves and other people at those walls at high speed, face-first. There is a wall between everyone and what they need to live, a wall consisting of the fact that most of what we want and need can only be had by buying it with money. Capitalism hurls people at that wall by forcing people into unemployment or by lowering their incomes. There’s another call consisting of the fact that goods and services are to be produced as commodities for sale and the productive units that made them have to be able to make them profitably. Capitalism hurls people at that wall by fostering competition for market share such that capitalists in the aggregate make more stuff than can be sold, and invest in the capacity to make more stuff than can be sold, with the result being that periodically some capitalists find that they can’t profitably sell the goods they came to market with and so their investment in productive capacity was wasted. Those businesses going under is an engine for throwing people at the wall of unemployment and income loss. Other destructive patterns follow from these dynamics and from capitalism’s basic organizational principles or social systemic realities, I’ve talked about these in terms of social murder.
Some people live with all this awfulness by a kind of secular theodicy, believing that humanity can’t do any better: this general sort of society is basically as good as it gets, we live in what is basically the best possible world such that any complaints we have are unrealistic. Something else that can happen is that in response to all this violence is that our class enemies and their ideologues develop their own utopian imaginations, where they picture being liberated from how capitalism limits them. (I’m thinking here of a remark by China Mieville that we already live in a utopian society, it’s just not our utopia.) In our enemies’ utopias, capitalism has no crisis tendencies, class struggle is eliminated or kept at a controllable simmer, no one suffers in a way that the powerful have to perceive.
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Many of the marxist writers I like best tend to emphasize the centrality of class struggle to capitalism and I think there’s a lot to recommend that centrality. That said, it’s easy to stylize class struggle into heroic images of relatively historically infrequent instances when the ostensible representatives of the working class and capitalist class square off in fairly clearly demarcated ways that are outside the patterns of ordinary life in capitalist society. Those instances certainly do occur and are tremendously important in lots of ways, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Every facet of capitalist social relations, every moment of its processes, is tension-laden, friction-prone, and subject to a kind of situationally specific conflict. Not all of that is liberatory, far from it. Furthermore, not all of it is struggle vertically between workers and capitalists, subordinates and superiors. Much of it is also intra-class struggle, where members of the same class jockey for position. Intra-capitalist struggle in the form of competition (and intra-state conflict in the form of trade policies and military conflicts, among other things) are massively important as well. All of these conflicts can be sources of kinds of crises in capitalism and are also effects of or are intensified by crises as well. Again, capitalist society is violently dynamic in that it generates unforeseen calamity in ways that make everyone’s futures hard to predict so that steering and navigating is very challenging, though of course this is not an evenly distributed malady by any means.
Particular state agencies and capacities are in part a product of all these conflicts. The state is in various ways subject to capitalism’s recurrent social instability, and it works to navigate that instability, in part by managing the expression and consequence of the insecurity capitalism causes in various populations’ lives, and managing the effects for itself of that insecurity. As I’ve written about, it often tends to work to depoliticize these effects.
On this, I highly, highly recommend Jack Copley’s book Governing Financialization. (I reviewed it at Legal Form a while back along with two other books.) Copley argues via a detailed examination of the UK in the late 20th century that capitalist states tend to enact depoliticized forms of disciplining people to capitalist social relations - depoliticized insofar as they try to avoid political responsibility for enacting that discipline - in order to defuse or resolve crises. He argues as well that states tend to enact palliative measures that mitigate the immediate effects of crises in people’s lives, measures which tend to create other challenges. I like the Copley book a lot like I said and I think this is certainly implied in the book but I don’t recall if he says this explicitly or not and I don’t want to put words in his mouth. It seems to me those palliative measures are small, local politicizations of social relations that have to be cabined off, contained so to prevent further expansions (in my view the massive drop in child poverty due to pandemic income support policies in the US is a good example), with those measures and the expansions they potentially point to being in tension with the current specific way that capitalism is organized and furthermore adding tension to the system, fuel to the variously reverberating conflicts that the system consists in or is beset by.
In these conflicts and catastrophes, actually existing capitalism in its concrete particulars is transformed and while remaining the same in general. On the transformation, the institutions of the state get re-organized, some offices closed and/or defunded, new ones opened or old ones reinvigorated, and sometimes new state capacities developed or old ones expanded in ways that are transformative (the expansion of state surveillance capacity is one example, the growth of the administrative state earlier is another example). The specific forms that class struggle takes get changed as well (this is an axe I’ve been grinding for a while over at Organizing Work about labor law, labor law doesn’t simply promote or inhibit the growth of unions where ‘growth’ and ‘unions’ are static, unchanging categories, but rather labor law sets a baseline wherein a certain range of expression of conflicts and aspirations is more available and another range is less available; all of that is deeply political, it’s a matter of differing political practices and to some extent different visions and practices of what ‘politics’ really means).
Generally speaking the forms of struggle and aspiration that are tolerated through official institutions tend to be system compatible, that compatibility generated in part because the stakes for people are often really, really high in the short term. That compatibility includes qualities like individualization (my problem, not our problem), sectoral- or subject-specific kinds of claiming (formatting us as members of one specific legally protected group or being a person in a specific jurisdiction and with the problem being just one facet of our lives, and as small a facet as possible - like being a tenant or a retiree rather than a more expansive politicization of class relations), relative down-stream-ness (the issue is with something that lies with the most proximate decision-maker, not with underlying institutional - let alone fundamental social - organization), by virtue of some of the above a prevention of democratization (what kind of housing do people deserve is an issue that many people might have a lot to say about, especially if we had real power over the matter in the short term), and a tendency toward expert rule, with that expertise being a mix of knowledge about the world (medical, scientific, social-scientific, etc) and knowledge about elements of state procedure (law, policy, navigating bureaucracy, etc). All of these forms of channeling conflict into system-compatibility - and really, compatibility with a specific way of institutionalizing the system - help to reduce the system- and institution-disruptive quality of conflicts and catastrophes, and all these forms of channeling are themselves transformed over time by conflict and catastrophe. I wrote previously about Brian Milstein’s technical and arguably idiosyncratic definitions of emergency and crisis. Regardless of what one thinks about his usage as definitions of those particular terms (I happen to think they’re good, despite my having a fairly big reservation that by making a technical term out of terms used fairly widely with less precision his usage invites some degree of confusion), there a ton of good in his emphasis on conditions where existing institutions are adequate to a challenge or inadequate, with ‘adequate’ itself politically defined as a result of conflict, and on how situations of institutional inadequacy tend to generate changes to existing institutions and/or development of new ones.
The transformations of institutions through conflict and catastrophe are themselves constrained by the relative social necessity of remaining a capitalist society - breaking with capitalism is definitely possible but it’s hard to imagine that occurring as anything other than a social rupture within capitalist social relations and which as such is highly consequential in its disruptiveness to people’s lives and to institutions. So it makes sense that there’s a kind of gravitational pull for institutions to point against such a rupture, and for people to tend in the short term toward system-compatible resolutions to their problems (which means system-compatible definitions of ‘resolution’ and of what ‘adequate to a challenge’ means). This is to say, capitalism reproduces its general fundamental conditions of market dependency, private ownership of the means of production, its basic architecture as a class society and a society that has a state as a core element of its operation as a social system.
I’m thinking here of a bit in the Grundrisse where Marx tugs at different conceptions of production, distribution, and consumption, as part of his larger effort to both analyze capitalism’s social logic and to historicize and denaturalize that logic (i.e., to show that capitalism is just one form of human society among other possible ones). He writes that distribution in the ordinary sense of the term - “distribution of products,” the kinds of social phenomena it’s relatively easy to talk about in terms of distributive (in)justice - is downstream from, an effect of, a different kind of distribution, in two senses: “(1) the distribution of the instruments of production, and (2), which is a further specification of the same relation, the distribution of the members of the society among the different kinds of production.” He immediately adds that the second, the distribution of people to positions in the social division of labor, which includes being born and socialized into a class position, is “Subsumption of the individuals under specific relations of production.” He further underlines that distribution in the ordinary sense of the term is “only a result of this distribution” - the distribution of productive capacities, class positions, and people to them - “is comprised within the process of production itself and determines the structure of production. To examine production while disregarding this internal distribution within it is obviously an empty abstraction; while conversely, the distribution of products follows by itself from this distribution which forms an original moment of production.” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm)
As I said above, capitalism continually re-posits its originating and enabling conditions, it re-originates itself, which means the distribution of class positions - that distribution of class positions includes/permits a limited range of ways society’s productive capacities can be organized - and an allocation of actual people to places in that class structure. That allocation is very strict in its generality - working class people will nearly always remain in the working class, for instance - and pretty open in its particulars - you might have any number of jobs, say. Part of the violence of crisis is destroying the particulars, and a lot of human beings in the process, in ways that reproduce the general pattern: you remain required to have an income while your prior source of income is no longer available, so you scramble.
Often the destruction is particularly intense when people are caught between two conflicting imperatives of the system: you have to have money to get stuff to live on, and you have do something that facilitates capital accumulation to get any appreciable amount of money. People find themselves unable to do the second while still subject to the first, and they get wrecked as a result. And as I mentioned the other day in talking about vulnerability and disqualification, once wrecked one is often just out of luck. The needs that go with hardship are often more expensive, and if there’s no money to meet those needs, it’s not a problem to anyone with any social power - unless it’s made into a problem by collective action.
Also - a fragment from a few days ago or so, which I don't think I posted but I can't remember. Marx abbreviates the circuit of capital as follows: M-C...P...C’-M’. It’s wonky stuff. M is money, C is commodities, P is production, C’ (the apostrophe is pronounced “prime”) means new transformed commodities, M’ means new transformed money i.e. more money. The dashes represent exchanges in markets, the ellipses represent the passage of time. Capitalists spend money to buy stuff and hire people, the stuff and people are used to make more stuff that can be sold for more money than the initial outlay. All the inputs are commodities, all the outputs are commodities. This means the process of capital reproduces the basic condition where society is market dependent.
Capitalist society is made up of multiple productive units carrying out this process over and over again, making commodities and buying commodities, and it’s made up of not fully commodified processes of producing labor power (the having and raising of children is rarely entirely commodified, however much commodification may encroach), with a great many people forced to commodify their labor power at some point in life in order to get money to life.
A lot can go wrong in the relationships among these different units - there’s a lot of moving parts, and they have a tendency to stop moving. One basic vulnerability to crisis is the lag between making stuff and selling stuff, Marx’s ellipses. A business makes some stuff, or invests in the capacity to make some stuff, and hopes to be able to sell the stuff. When they can’t do so, serious consequences result. If enough places face serious consequences, then the buyers who relied on them run into trouble, becoming less able to get the commodities they need to make the commodities they sell. There are various reasons crises can break out. Simon Clarke has a good account in my opinion, of the tendency for capitalism to overproduce capitalist wealth in the form of productive capacity, and then destroy it, something like this: every enterprise wants to capture more market share, and produces or invests in productive capacity accordingly. Simplifying massively, say there’s a hundred dollars available to buy products with in an industry, and there are ten companies in that industry with roughly equal capacity. Each one is pressured to try to make enough products to net at least eleven dollars rather than an equal ten, leading to someone getting squeezed out, and this happens forever: there’s always pressure to make more and acquire more productive capacity than the market can bear, with the periodic result that there’s no buyer for the stuff and the money invested in that productive capacity was wasted. When this is widespread enough it can lead to big meltdowns that destroy a lot of goods and productive capacity, put a lot of people out of work.