'your sickness is insubordination, pleb!'
I wrote this the other day on the alphasmart then lost the cable to get the words off the alpha. Harrumph. I've now ordered like 4 of those cables in hopes of avoiding such a circumstances in the future. I no longer remember this post beyond the most general point summarized in the title (I started back to teaching yesterday and am feeling very wiped out by that and the other tasks and resulting mental noise that goes with the start of the semester) which is a little troubling but whatever. I also suspect I'm clumsily and idiosyncratically reinventing wheels already crafted by folk more skilled (and with more appropriate tools) than me but, again, whatever. Here I stand I can do no other, as it were. Anywho enough prefatory wheel-spinning, time to get into the body of the post, which is to say, a different wheel-spinning.
I had a thought. I think Ive mentioned before on here but am not entirely sure - I’m a big fan of an essay Ralph Miliband wrote in the late 70s called “A State of De-Subordination.” I haven’t read it in a while so am going from memory. As I recall it, Miliband argued that in the UK at the time subordinated people had become more restive in their subordination, in a diffuse and multi-faceted way, bringing on pushback from their superiors and a broad sense among the representatives of social superiors that Something Must Be Done. Given what happened soon after - I think Miliband wrote it in 1979 and Thatcher was elected very shortly afterward - it seems prescient. I’m inclined to read it as less timebound and as noting descriptively that periods of ‘de-subordintion’ can recur in society. I’d say there were such periods in the 50s and again in the 60s. (It’s worth adding that this isn’t meant to indicate a neat, clean distinction between periods when order-givers get their way without friction and periods when they don’t so much as to say there’s a continuum there and also that the general trend and particular instances are distinct: a period when many people are less prone to uncomplainingly live life at the bottom of the hill is still a period when some people complain a great deal, and vice versa, a peiod of general complaint still involves widespread active submission to authority).
Anyhow this was on my mind again in relation to the pandemic. The at least partial moral panics about quiet quitting, the Great Resignation, ‘no one wants to work’, etc are, from the perspective of the powerful, insubordination because plebs are there to shut the fuck up and be used.
A related thought: there’s some connection here that I’m not clear on with the concept or concepts of depoliticization, which to my mind are helpfully descriptive of a good deal that happens in capitalist society. There are two senses of the term that I’m taken with, one is a momentary sense: this action or rhetoric is depoliticizing. For instance, Biden said very early on that nothing could be done to alter the trajectory of the pandemic. That’s depoliticizing. It’s not only rhetorical, though. Outsourcing decision-making power to someone else is also depoliticizing, since it’s harder to be held accountable for actions that aren’t under one’s control. In this sense of depoliticization the term indicates an approach to statecraft that is technocratic rather than democratic. That said, the version of politics implied here is a version of politicking under capitalism - the distinction tracks onto different ways to be in or navigate or to ‘do’ capitalist social relations. The other sense of depoliticization is more fundamental and structural, Tony Smith calls this ‘the bifurcation of the political’, it refers to how a great deal of social life is rendered private in important respects (this is a big part of what defines ‘the economy’ and ‘economic’). Here the distinction is between different ways of conducting social affair in general, not specific instances of that conduct, and it ultimately refers to a difference between capitalist and emancipated post-capitalist societies (socialist, communist, whatever term you prefer). In the latter sort of societies social decisions are made democratically. The implication here is that some aspects of social life are appropriately to be considered political yet those aspects are, in capitalism, inappropriately treated as apolitical. So there’s two conditions or statuses or phenomena: aspects of social life that by any reasonable sense of ‘political’ are or are not political (it’s unclear what falls under ‘not’ here, to be honest), and whether those aspects are lived out in social practice as political or not - a third aspect, really: what politics, exactly? I’m not sure if this will make sense so I may be muddying the waters but depoliticization is a way of doing politics, just an objectionable one. Not all objectionable politics are depoliticized, though.
Where I wanted to go with this is that I think in capitalism there’s a kind of impatience with democracy and perhaps with the very status of being political (in the sense of being a matter of how people are together in a collective sense, with that being subject to changes when deliberated on collectively). That is, the private character of much of social production in capitalism is a matter of doing politics in an objectionable fashion and people doing so can get accustomed to doing so and invested in it, especially if they benefit more from those arrangements than other and/or have more power in them than others. And as I’ve talked a bit about on here before, some of the time that way of doing things has negative effects but people don’t want to hear about them - ignorance is preferable and convenient sometimes. So under those conditions, awareness that the social practices in question are political in character can be frustrating, upsetting, otherwise distressing, and certainly the prospect of doing some degree of social/institutional re-organization to make less democratic social organization more democratic is a threat in various ways as well.
Linking that to desubordination and the pandemic: to point out that a relationship or practice is political and should be treated as such, or to point out that it’s undemocratic and should be democratized, is often unpopular with the powerful and can seem unealistic to people habituated to current social patterns. Not all desubordination has to do this though it may trend in that direction (I’ve argued that we should think of the first New Left in the UK as existing in a context of desubordination in the late 50s and early 60s and as trying to invervene in that context to make the widespread social condition of desubordination more self-conscious and, so to speak, programmatic). On the other hand any serious effort to democratize any elements of society, let alone a widespread program of democratization, will be seen (correctly) as subordinates opposing the normalized forms of authority to which they’ve been expected to submit.
What this has to do with the pandemic is at least in part that not wanting to get sick or work sick is objectively insubordination much of the time, at least above a certain low level ‘hey give me a day off now and then’ kind of accommodation (and even that’s far from universally accorded to people!). It’s often insubordination of two distinct kinds. The first is simply not following the order to be present and do as expected (sometimes willfully - I don’t want to get sick so I mask at work even though this is not what everyone at my job would prefer I do - and sometimes less willfully: someone who is too sick to work isn’t choosing to be so, they just have needs that are incompatible with demands on them. The distinction between these is complicated and itself political in important respects, since ‘too sick to work’ is partly a judgment on what constitutes an acceptably dignified treatment by other people). The second kind of insubordination is in making an order be directly given or making apparent the reality of power differentials, that there is coercion and the giving and taking of orders. That is, some of the time there’s a loud subtext that subordinates anticipate the orders and expectations from their superiors so those superiors don’t have to even formulate them explicitly or even notice their presence. That is, sometimes it’s convenient and pleasant for people to not accurately understand the social situaion/relationships/practices they inhabit, and subordinates who trouble the conveniences and pleasantries their superiors expect will be understood as in some way out of line, whether or not there’s a clear and namable infraction present. This is all in part to say that the existing patterns and structures of authority reinforce social murder, especially when it’s such a large scale instance or set of instances of social murder as we’re facing in the pandemic. The pandemic means people have additional needs - a a mix of new ones and intensified old ones - that weigh against (that is, stand as an at least partial justification for acting in friction with) prevailing standards, practices, and relationships of authority including those involved in capital accumulation. So that set of relationships and practices of authority fosters reasons/provides resources for people in positions of relative authority to push back on afflicted subordinates in various ways - that is, reasons/resources for being accomplices to the patterns of social murder. And at the same time some of those people don’t want to think of themselves as being so, let alone be drawn into deliberation on the matter (in part because of the general impatience with politics that I think depoliticized forms of politics tend to foster) so they also reach for excuses and justification, which various minimizer courtiers (the scum! [spits on ground]) get paid well to supply.
One other thought, on the minimizers: I think it’s likely that a lot of (de)political conversation occurs in a condition of partial openness (David Lyin’heart writes for the New York Times, that’s a kind of publicness and openness) but it’s only partial because it’s not actually directed at everyone (Dave’s not writing for us, he’s writing for people who matter socially - he’s not going to openly say ‘shut the fuck up and get in the wood chipper, pleb’ but he’s offering resources to people who don’t want to have to say that out loud or admit to themselves that they want to say that and simply isn’t talking to us plebs, but part of the trick and the psychodrama involved is not admitting that they’re not talking to us: it’s an only partially admitted in-group, so to speak, because making the distinctions more explicit would call attention to political matters more comfortably depoliticized). And as I’ve suggested before I think a lot of what’s going on in pandemic statecraft and the actions of state allies like the pundits and public health/medical authorities and whatnot is not actually an effort to manufacture consent at the population level in the sense in which was attempted with the Iraq war: there’s not really a claim that’s equivalent to ‘Iraq has WMDs so we have to take this course of action’ regarding the pandemic. Instead there’s lots of lack of information and a kind of polluting or sabotaging the values and analyses by which people think about the pandemic. It’s not manufacturing consent so much as preventing (making scarce and less workable the resources fo) dissent and also reimposing or maintaining subordination, to minimize the degree to which the pandemic poses a threat of widespread and escalating desubordination (because of the generation of new needs and intensification of old ones). I have a hunch that one element of this is a kind of fracturing of current and preventing of new practices/contexts of processing and responding to the pandemic collectively. I suspect the relative isolation many of us covid zero zealots have noted is not just incidental but is tied into the relative lack of conscious, collective, organized deliberation on the pandemic, its effects, and what should happen next -- ie part of why we feel so exhaustingly isolated is because of the relative vacuum of popular power, I think (paired with the dislocation involved in our clear sense that shit is super fucked while loudspeakers blare continually that everybody’s happy nowadays).