Too big to fail, comrades but not peers, etc etc
I had a thought or three while washing dishes that I wanted to write down - or really, I glanced down at the dirt and caught a glimpse of what might be the top of some thoughts and I figure I'll try to dig the rest of it out. Here goes!
I randomly saw a graph showing a big rise in pedestrian deaths in the US since 2010, in part because cars are bigger, heavier, and less safely designed. This too is social murder. Gun deaths as well. The list goes on. At this point I have a reflex where numbers of deaths from any cause evoke numbers of covid deaths. As ever in talking about any of this I want to stress that I know my own miseries are small compared to those of many, many others. Still, a head echoing with death is not something I would have wished for, despite my largely having made myself this way. I don’t like noticing but I do notice which deaths seem objectionable and which seem at most merely unfortunate to different people.
I had a new-to-me thought on this for once: I think there are differences over what sorts of deaths seem actionable, and by whom. In opposing war we think policymakers could decide otherwise and that with enough opposition, that possibility might become an actuality. Other deaths, like covid deaths for many people (and traffic deaths and gun deaths and overdoses and and and) seem either natural or social but arising from mechanisms so central to the social machinery that they might as well be natural, since that machinery feels like it can’t be stopped. Lenin says somewhere ‘politics begins when millions are in motion, not thousands, millions.’ Absent millions in motion, no politics. And removing the causes some kinds of social harms may take more millions than others. Without millions in motion against them, social harms might as well be natural for all their inevitability.
There’s an ambiguity in ‘social’ here in that in one sense of the term nearly everything is social, certainly most harm and arguably all harm, such that ‘social harm’ and ‘harm’ are synonyms, the ‘social’ a redundancy. But the point of using the term as I mean it here is to indicate two things (and these might be one thing said two ways, I’m unsure) The first is a degree of diffuseness where there’s no easily identifiable actor so the harm seems to emanate. The “who do I shoot?” scene in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath can be read as about this. It’s immediately about bureaucratic organization - if a bank employee dies, the bank will get a new employee - and, related, the impersonal character of capitalist enterprises - the bank is not just the sum of its parts but as an organization is an impersonal set of relationships that organizes its own parts and reproduces them. But the bank, acting as a monster made of people and doing things none of those people might want, is driven by the larger social relations that are its context and which constitute it - it’s a moment in the ongoing reproduction of capitalist social relations. In all these ways, there’s no one to shoot because the problem is only secondarily agents and is primarily the processes constructing agents and their options.
The second thing is that social harms are deeply rooted in the social system and so are hard to avoid or mitigate, even if their immediate local expression may be mitigatable. I don’t meant to let any responsible parties off the hook at all, far from it, but this is to say that the fact that so very many responsible parties act in the harm-creating and harm-intensifying ways they do means that their actions aren’t an explanation unless those actions themselves are explained by an account of how the social system operates.
The diffuseness and deep-rootedness of harms contributes, I think, to their seeming natural sometimes. Of course ‘diffuse’ and ‘deep-rooted’ are interpretable, disputable. I don’t mean to indicate some objective subject-determining character (‘when a problem is this deep rooted, it automatically follows that people will...’) Instead I mean to say that while I do think diffusion and deep-rootedness are real qualities of social harms that actually exist, whether those qualities stand as reasons to take those harms as quasi-natural and unchangeable or to none the less treat them as outrageous and political, that’s a difference of, well, politics. And analysis and theory and imagination, among other things. That’s to say, I don’t think people are going ‘this problem is too big so I give up’ so much as people who have given up likely point to that bigness in rationalizing their actions to themselves (if and when they do so). A labor movement friend used to say ‘you like the campaign as much as your last house visit.’ By analogy, contexts of meaningful action (again, both terms are interpretable and not fixed) are part of what make harms feel political and likewise lack of such contexts s part of how harms become quasi-natural. And once again, there are feedback loops: harms naturalized are harms further insulated from politicization.
I have a hunch that quantitatively smaller harms (I don’t like any kind of weighing harms against each other, but I do think we can identify scales) feel more actionable, at least when they’re big enough to be above some threshold. (Likewise harms that feel outrageous - outrage is powerful and important.) So pedestrian deaths and school shootings feel actionable to some people, though also right now, especially under the Democrats, an air of inevitability seems common and ideologically/politically very important. Harms that get to a big enough scale seem less actionable sometimes - climate change is like that for some people, gun deaths are like that for some people as well, though having said that I think it’s not the scale of the harm so much as its the scale of the harm combined with the existence (or the believable/imaginable possibility of) some collectivity that can respond to the harm: Lenin’s millions again.
So part of what I think goes on to some extent for some people regarding covid mitigation is that they think nothing can be done in the short term, at least nothing they can meaningfully do, and that includes protecting their own health (or they aren’t concerned about their own health in the short term if infected) especially when weighed against the (in my view often very overstated!) downsides of mitigation, either personally or in more collective and/or policy forms. Others of us, I think, either think we’re at greater risk or find the up- and down-sides weigh differently for various reasons, or think something really can be done in the shorter term, or are just, I don’t know, stubbornly and cantankerously committed to remaining critical of all of this.
Broke off last night after writing the above with this note on where to pick it up: “[too big to fail scales of social murder - the powerful will let it happen, help it happen if mitigating or stopping is too disruptive; we talked this on Death Panel]” Back now in the light of day with a glance at this I worry it comes off as more concerned with individual actions than I actually am. I am perplexed and sometimes annoyed by some specific people’s actions - comrades who I think ought to know better - and I am generally disappointed in the Marxist left and much of the labor movement when it comes to covid though I also think this disappointment, annoyance, and perplexity rest on some mistaken overestimations on my part. Furthermore, I just don’t think the pandemic really is made up of individual actions, it’s a pattern that structures individual actions, which is why we can’t individual action our way out of it (any more than we can each sort our trash and out of the climate catastrophes). So the individual actor is just wrong the wrong unit politically - Lenin’s millions again.
At the same time, as an individual actor myself with relationships with other individuals, I have reactions to their thoughts and actions. And I think what I’m fumbling for here, in part anyway, is that those thoughts and actions are largely the effect of larger patterns. I’m not sure about this but I kind of think that on some stuff anyway, agency has preconditions - and, again, individual agency on the pandemic is pretty small - and some of those preconditions include critical thought, individually, involving the various capacities, dispositions, experiences, moral values, etc, that make critical thought more likely and even more so certain collective contexts (even if it’s collective at a remove, collective intellectual life in mediated form - one person reading, encounter others via reading). I’ve written a bit about the distressing loneliness and sense of not being on the same page with people, I called it ‘broken sociality’ to have a name for it (https://www.pestemag.com/lost-to-follow-up/broken-sociality). I think with some people it’s not only a difference of values and assessment but also a difference of degree of doing critical thinking, as rude as I feel saying that. That’s both better and worse in that it means some people just aren’t our peers (‘our’ referring to covid zero zealot marxists, naturally).
Losing the thread again, or never finding it: part of what I think I’m getting at here is that there’s a lived social reality that makes various ideological responses to the pandemic plausible, or to put it another way, ideologies organize (conceptually, emotionally, narrativally) lived and perceived experience, and so the responses to the pandemic that I don’t like are actually pretty rational ones given the things people take as given (and some of which really are given! politics begins with millions, so prior to millions in motion, an apolitical condition is real in a sense. I should say, I only sort of agree with the ‘no politics unless millions in motion’ bit, I think really there are different politics at different scales, but whatever).
Okay on the bit from my notes from last night then I’m out. The last time I was on Death Panel we talked about a lawsuit in California about workers comp and covid harms to workers’ families. The CA supreme court sided with the devil, basically, above all because, the claim went, because siding against the devil here would make for so much potential liability for so many companies (covid being everywhere, basically, so all employers would be subject to liabilities and the economy is fragile if that degree of widespread liability were to exist) that the otherwise normal standards of liability can’t be applied and workers and their families just have to eat more shit. Nothing personal. Basically the scale of social murder is too big to fail, gotta let it happen. I have a hunch that something like this is going on in the minds of a lot of individuals as well, this is what I was trying to say above when riffing on the ‘social’ in social harms as referring to a diffuse and deeply rooted origin for those harms. I think people on the left, at least not Marxists anyway, aren’t saying social murder’s too big to fail so much as recognizing that the powers that be treat it as too big to fail, and absent those millions in motion they’re just disengaging from the matter, maybe.
Further hunch: I think some of us expect our comrades to be immediately able to correctly and critically think about issues and to be on the left - in the sense of committed to universal emancipation and so on - about those issues, when really what happens is people need to think through things individually and collectively. Often that thought process involves a lot of conflict within the left and also a lot of conflict in broader society, both of these kinds of conflicts being in part modes of collective intellect. That’s to say, it’s reasonable to expect our comrades to be better, but that’s an often unrealistic overestimation given that the reality is often the left doesn’t have a consensus that is in line with the leading edges of emancipatory struggle. Some of the left is part of those edges, some of the left is tracking with or informed by those leading edges and often is arguing with others on the left as a result, and new consensuses on the left are built from that kind of process. Of course we all wish these processes were less time consuming, were further along, etc. I don’t like to talk this way as it’s arrogant but it’s just true - we covid zero zealot marxists aren’t the majority yet, we will be one day, we represent a facet of a better future, we’re part of its presence in the worse present, and not all of our comrades (including people who genuinely do in other ways represent other facets of a better future) are there yet unfortunately.