The State

If, as yesterday’s post argued, trade unions are no longer in a position to effectively counter-balance the power of capitalism, then some other site of power, some other institution, must play that role. The contemporary right (the neoliberals, if we are going to use that terminology) demonizes trade unions at every turn. The moral fury they direct against even the slightest hint of collective action on the part of workers has always baffled me. Just what is morally wrong here? Why is such collective action so reprehensible? Other forms of collective action—political parties, lobbyists, trade and professional associations, the NRA and the AARP—are not anathematized, but trade unions are somehow beyond the pale. I refuse to reduce this to sheer economic interest and bad faith; their moral outrage would be unsustainable if it didn’t somehow resonate beyond the quarters in which it directly serves economic interest.

Of course, the primary rhetorical move is to claim trade unions are an infringement on freedom. Even workers who don’t endorse the union must pay their union dues. A similar argument, of course, is made against the state—with taxes standing in as tyrannical in the way that union dues are. The union and that state are both robbers.

The right’s commitment to undermining unions (which has a long and continuous history dating back to the 1870s) goes hand-in-hand with it more recent commitment to undermining the state. And I think the right is absolutely correct to see the state, like the unions, as a potential danger to its deep commitment to economic inequality. The state is a threat to profit insofar as everyone of its regulations—from labor law to environmental and public health measures—makes doing business more costly.

Despite the right’s (or neoliberalism’s) obvious desire to decrease the power of the state, the left has been much more lukewarm in its embrace of the state. [A side-note: yes, the American right wants to increase the power of the state when it comes to regulating private conduct and in matters relating to “national security.” Capitalism—as the Marriott response to socially conservative legislation shows—has no particular sympathy for the issues that motivate conservative moralists. But the right is still the “party of order”; it does want a strong police force and military; it just doesn’t want any of that state power directed toward reining in money-making practices.)

While you would be very hard pressed to find a leftist who does not think unions are a good thing, attitudes toward the state are more ambivalent. I don’t think the right is wrong when it identifies the state as a potential problem for the achievement of its ends. The state is the only plausible (it seems to me) site of a power strong enough to combat capitalist power. So why don’t leftists rally to the state’s support?

Let me try to count the ways.

The insistence that the state has been entirely captured by the capitalists—and only serves their interests. This morphs into a necessitarian doctrine that such must always be the case. The state will always be in cahoots with capitalism. (The fallacy here is turning a contingency into a necessity. Plus it would seem to encourage a fatalistic quietism; we are doubly screwed because political and economic power work hand-in-hand and it is useless to try to pry them apart. My argument, finally, is that the chances of grabbing political power are, at the moment, better than the chances of grabbing economic power. We have at least a fighting chance on the political battlefront, whereas the legal—and moral and habitual—protections afforded private property make wresting economic power away from the corporations and the wealthy much less likely. It will take a political victory to begin to undermine the sources, structures, and institutions of economic power.)

If #1 is a version of the left’s time-worn critique of “liberalism” and the “liberal state,” now we can entertain the anarchist suspicion of the state, most recently given voice in James Scott’s Against the Grain (Yale UP, 2017). The notion here is that all concentrations of power are inevitably bad. My riposte is that, yes, power tends to accumulate—and that accumulations of power are generally not conducive to the general welfare. But I don’t think there is any wishing away of power—or of its tendency to accumulate. Thus, one needs to find ways to counterbalance powers (in the plural). In a world in which economic power has concentrated on a scale perhaps unprecedented (the “perhaps” because, arguably, the Dutch and English East India companies of the 16^th and 17^th centuries were more powerful than Google and Apple today), to abandon the state as a possible counterweight seems suicidal. There is certainly no reason to think Google is going to be more beneficent than a state—or more accountable. To dismantle political power unilaterally in the face of economic power is to refuse to engage in the contest that we wish to win. It is certainly deeply concerning that, as economic centers of power get larger and larger, political units get smaller and smaller (the break-up of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the possible break-ups of Britain and Spain).

A harder to characterize, but no less real, general disillusionment with politics as dirty, corrupt, and indirect (taking so much time to effect such imperfect pieces of legislation and the cumbersome bureaucratic state action that follows legislative victories). I feel this way myself some 75% of the time. One result of this sentiment is to turn one’s back on the state and get involved in “service” work. We have seen a huge proliferation of “humanitarian organizations.” These seem “clean” in a way politics is not—and also go out into the field and actually do the work of helping people. The results—even if limited to a fairly small number of beneficiaries—are at least visible in the way that the beneficiaries of state policies rarely are. (We see that the number of uninsured has gone down after the enactment of ObamaCare, but those are numbers not visible people). Despairing of the state’s ability to deliver the goods, many leftists (especially among the young) have turned to non-state charity operations. Letting the political, the state, off the hook in this way, not pressuring it to provide for its citizens, is a bad idea in my view—even though, as a personal choice about where to put one’s efforts, it seems to me more than easy to understand, to be a more appealing course to follow.

The final position, which seems that of Hardt/Negri and some other recent writers, is that the state is a spent force, that it actually no longer has sufficient power to hem in economic power. We must mobilize another kind of power altogether if we are to bring neoliberalism to its knees—or even mitigate some of the suffering it inflicts. Conspicuously absent from such views is any plausible agent of this force that will stop neoliberalism in its tracks. Now, of course, an analysis of the state’s deficiencies need not present something to take the state’s place. If I cannot walk with a broken leg, it does nothing to undermine the truth of my statement that I cannot walk if I do not consider alternatives to walking. The argument that the state is powerless usually point to three factors: 1) capital flight in the age of globalization means the state cannot impose terms/regulations on capital because it will just move to jurisdictions that give it a better deal. We are in a race to the bottom that the state is helpless to stop. 2) Even though the multinational and international organizations—like the GHO and GATT—and the international trade agreements—like the EU and NAFTA—are not particularly effective, they are constraining upon state actions, so power is leaking away from the national state; and 3) the blackmail and direct power of capital is such that most countries are now democracies in name only. There is no path toward citizens getting the state to serve their interests as opposed to the interests of capital. [This last point is a new version of the classic complaint that the state is just an agent of the capitalists. It tends to come accompanied with the notion that the state, therefore, is at best useless and at worst another enemy that must be overcome in the larger fight against capitalism. And the solution offered is usually the direct action of the populace, bypassing the state as its instrument, against the forces of capital. Hence the recurrent dream of the general strike. Refusal, non-compliance, civil disobedience on a grand scale.]

The main burden of this post, then, is that the left abandons the battle to capture the state—and to put its power to work advancing the left’s agenda and curtailing economic power—only at the risk of making a bad situation worse. Despair about the state is really despair about the very possibility of democracy. It can never be a government of, by, and for the people. It will always be the instrument of the economic royalists.

To be concrete: what the state can do to rein in (at the very least) economic power is not a mystery. Three strategies (all of which, I believe, are necessary) are in play.

Interference (regulation and establishing the rules of the game) in productive and money-making operations themselves. This strategy covers everything from setting conditions of work, guarantees of employment and minimum compensation, worker’s rights, unemployment insurance, etc. That is, various laws that alter distribution of effort, risk, and profit internal to capitalist procedures. Protection of—nay, promotion of—union creation and activity. These are all mechanisms to shift the distribution of market inputs and outcomes.

Interference external (or after the fact) of market processes and outcomes. In a word, taxes. Progressive taxation–including income, wealth and estate taxes—that work against the tendency of capital to accumulate in a few hands. Similarly, stringent anti-trust laws to combat the tendency toward monopoly.

Regulation of “externalities”(notably pollution) in the name of the public good, along with the positive provision of certain goods (transportation, health, parks, sanitation, public utilities, and education—I would add housing) that are not well handled by market processes. Here we get environmental regulations and public health measures, plus transit systems, municipal water and electricity, parks, libraries, schools etc.

All of this provides a suitably ambitious agenda for a left that intends to capture the state to serve its vision of the public good—a good that necessarily entails limiting the power of markets to determine either public or individual fates.

Two issues remain.

Must we reconcile ourselves to the existence of markets? Not only are there factions on the left that want to ignore or dismantle the state, there are also factions who declare any tolerance for markets apostasy. I think a regulated market is preferable to any of the alternatives currently on offer (and I mean on offer theoretically as well as in reality.) I would love to be convinced otherwise, to be shown a model of a non-market society that seemed to me both plausible and desirable. Until then, I am going with regulated markets.

The big question. Can the state actually counterbalance the power of capital? If capital is mobile precisely where the state it tied to a territory and most citizens are immobile due to legalities of citizenship and the realities of economic means, then what can the state leverage against capitalism? As I have argued in previous posts, the only place capitalism is vulnerable is the bottom line. You must hold some power over profits, have some way to damage profits, if you want to bring capitalism to heel. Yet it is exactly when the state interferes in profit-making, that capital flees to a new jurisdiction. What can possibly halt capital flight? The answer, it seems to me, is stability. Despite all the rhetoric, lots of capital (hardly all, but hardly an insignificant amount either) hates risk. There wouldn’t be so much money invested in US Treasury bonds (at a paltry return) if safety wasn’t the highest priority for lots of capital. What the rich Western countries have to offer capital are stable political and social orders, along with proximity to rich consumers. This isn’t a pretty answer. It means the West has a market advantage because of its contrast to more turbulent and more impoverished parts of the world. But, at this moment at least, the West needs to trade on this strength by making capital pay for the privilege of investment in the West. It just means the cost of doing business in the West will be higher (because of taxes and regulations) and, in addition (this is where the state needs to start throwing its weight around) there will also be a cost exacted for whatever functions capital exports in order to get around those higher costs. Call this protectionism or whatever you will. But—just as we need a transaction tax to raise the costs to financial capital of its various speculative moves—we need a “flight tax” that does not allow capital to move seamlessly across borders. And if a corporation retaliates by moving wholesale to the Bahamas, then there needs to be an “access tax” to gain entry to the US or UK or French market. These things are not impossible. States have been way too timid in the face of capital flight—especially when those states have jurisdiction over very large markets and enjoy political and social stability.

Enough for today. Plenty to chew on and follow up about.

On Unions

Boltanski and Chiapello (B&C hereafter) devote a whole chapter to the decline of labor unions. Contrary to what I believed, labor unions are, in fact, very weak in France and have been getting weaker steadily since the 1960s. Their weakness is measured in the steep decline of the number of strike days imposed on capitalist enterprises each year and in rapidly declining membership.

Of course, strikes have become almost non-existent in the US. France, at least, has a tradition of “general strikes,” i.e. of people taking to the street to protest various government policies. The French demonstrations have some bite because, unlike American demonstrations, they do not take place on weekends and thus actually—and sometimes seriously—disrupt business as usual. At the very least, I’d say, you have to have a significant number of workers not showing up for work for a demonstration to have any leverage on either the economic or political powers that be.

In short, only actions that impact the bottom line will garner a response. Witness the power of a firm like Marriott when it weighs in against discriminatory legislation against gays. Making such legislation carry an economic cost—as happened in both Arizona and North Carolina—has been just about the only effective strategy against right-wing legislation over the past ten years.

B&C’s question is why the transition to neoliberalism occurred without very much being mounted in the way of resistance. “Changes in the world of work during this period continued to prompt complaints or indignation. But the institutions traditionally responsible for transforming complaint—a way of expressing discontent that remains attached to people in their particularity—into a general condemnation and public protest were widely discredited and/or paralysed at the time” (273).

The particular institution that had been dismantled was the union. I want to dwell for a moment on the general point—and it is my disagreement with Occupy and Hardt/Negri. Getting people out onto the street via Twitter cannot substitute for having the institutions that will translate that expressed discontent into power that can be brought to bear against the opposing powers that are exploiting people.

It is, of course, an old story in the US, one that dates back to the 1950s (but not to the 1930s): the quiescence of the workers. Why do they let themselves be mistreated? It is certainly not that they don’t see the mistreatment. It is because they don’t see an alternative, a truly effective way to force a change in the conditions of work.

In the 1950s were pretty bad, the 2000s are much worse. Now there are no strikes at all, and just about no collective bargaining. Each worker is on his or her own, negotiating for herself in terms of salary, and subject to workplace rules that are simply imposed from above and against which she waives all rights of appeal upon signing the work contract. In the state employment system in which I oversaw a staff of seven, it was the worst of both worlds for my staff members. They were constrained by the salary ranges within a job “band” (hence a collectively designated wage), but got none of the benefits of being part of a collective because all of the details of working conditions, as well as the established salaries for each band, were not a product of or subject to collective bargaining. It was take it or leave it.

B&C give a meticulous account of the multiple causes of deunionization. The economic causes—subcontracting, the movement to part-time or short-term contracts, rising unemployment, smaller, integrated (i.e. mixing levels of workers) work teams that had the effect of isolating workers from one another, individualized performance reviews and bonuses that differentiate among workers doing the same jobs—are many and powerful. Some of them were deliberately adopted to weaken the strength of unions. Others were driven more by the new management ideas about how to increase productivity. Others still (like rising unemployment and the downward pressure on wages) could be linked to macro-economic factors beyond any firm’s or even any state’s (simple or obvious) control.

But they also insist on the affective dimension. Here’s what I take to be the most plausible case to be made along those lines; I am inspired here by B&C but not following them exactly. My account is more my way of making sense of the transformation. And here academia seems pretty much in line with the rest of the economic world. The key is the fairly rigid distinction between permanent employees and those who are non-permanent. On the one hand, the insiders (those with tenure in the academy, or the essential workers who are central to a firm’s “core mission”) are given a ladder to climb—one that makes it imperative to manage one’s career, to enhance (at every turn) one’s “human capital.” In the business world, this becomes in B&C’s terms, the “projective” model. One attaches oneself to successive projects—and networks out from them to the next project. The workers who show an ability to bring projects to successful completion become highly prized—and efforts are made to “retain” them. The winners in this contest are those who develop—and show off—rare and valuable skills.

The losers, on the other hand, are those who do something that lots of other people can also do. They are easily replaceable (given high rates of unemployment) and, thus, need not be retained on long-term contracts. The firm gains much needed “flexibility” by having workers it can easily let go when economic conditions demand, while it can also save money by outsourcing non-core functions to subcontractors, who (inevitably) pay workers less and offer little to nothing in the way of benefits. (Of course, the benefits debacle is fairly unique to the US. Health benefits are not tied to employment elsewhere.)

How does this connect to the decline of unions? Pretty straightforwardly. The winners have nothing that the want or could get from a union. Their leverage against an employer is entirely individual. They can threaten to take their skills elsewhere—the infamous “outside offer” of academia. They are their own best advocates—and they are negotiating with the employer for something for themselves, not for any collective, not for colleagues and fellow workers.

Once shorn of these highly prized workers, the winners that the enterprise sees as vital to its success, the union loses much power. And when the firm outsources to subcontractors (who are, invariably, nonunion shops), the union even loses the workers who would find a union crucial to their interests. For the lower level workers still left in the firm, their loyalty to the union is undermined by the union’s impotence. The union has done—and seems incapable of doing—anything for them; it cannot prevent outsourcing and it hasn’t the strength to either win significant wage increases or improved working conditions in negotiations in which management seems to hold all the trump cards. Instead, the union (where it still exists) negotiates a set of “concessions” that make working conditions and wages worse in order to protect the existence of what jobs still remain. And going on strike is off the table because the union isn’t strong enough to make a strike actually effective.

No wonder, then, that any affective connection to the union is lost. All the union has ever done is to agree to “concessions” and it is taking my money while proving spectacularly ineffective in promoting or protecting my interests.

Thus, the decline of unions is easy to understand. But that decline has had disastrous consequences. It has left workers utterly naked in the face of neoliberalism. The obvious question, then, is what institution can provide that crucial transition (that B&C identify) from randomized complaints/discontent to effective transformation of the causes of those complaints?

Frankly, I don’t see any alternative to the state as that institution. So that’s where I will go in subsequent posts.

The New Spirit of Capitalism

I am 270 pages into Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism and hopelessly behind on the list of topics raised by the book that I’d like to write blog posts about.

The book is nothing less than an attempt to update Max Weber for neoliberalism. What is the spirit of capitalism—the ethos that provides justifications and motivations—for the individuals who live and work under capitalism’s current regime? The argument, then, like Weber’s is that economic determinism is not sufficient for an explanation of why prevailing capitalist practices change. The move from Keynesian welfare-state capitalism to neo-liberalism is not solely motivated by a response to shifting “objective” conditions: i.e. the 1970s oil shock, globalization, the new digital technologies. Boltanski and Chiapello by no means ignore those factors, but insist that “spiritual” changes in mind-set and ideas of justice and of the “good life” also play a role. Concretely, they argue that “critiques” of capitalism have an impact—and that capitalism shifts its practices to respond to and disarm those critiques. Capitalism, in other words, must align itself, at least to some extent, to the desires enunciated in critique if it expects to find willing adherents, productive and engaged workers. A capitalism that simply exploited workers outright without offering any plausible justification of its practices (in terms of claims that those practices are just and redound to the common good, and in terms of personal satisfactions that it can offer individuals within a capitalist society), they claim, would be unsustainable.

I am not utterly convinced. Sheer economic need is a powerful motivator—and when combined with powerlessness can lead people to acquiesce (however reluctantly) in a social and economic system that can also recognize as oppressive. There is every evidence that slaves in the American South hated the conditions under which their lives were lived, but failed to rebel because rebellion seemed futile. They didn’t like the life they had, but recognized no realizable alternative to it. Surely many in the world today experience their lives similarly.

But—and this is the great strength of this remarkable book—any large-scale change in social (think of changing definitions of marriage), political (think of the transition from monarchies to democracies), or economic (think of the transition from Keynesian to neo-liberal regimes) practices will be accompanied by lots and lots of words. Those words are the ideological explanations/justifications of the shift: why it is necessary, desirable, deplorable, to be resisted, to be assisted. Boltanski and Chiapello (in ways I full-heartedly endorse) want to use the term “ideology” as a completely neutral designator. An ideology is simply the discursive justification of, along with an attempt to understand, a particular social formation. Whether that ideology is true or false, plausible or risible, is a separate matter. All sides to the issue will produce their ideological account of it. They want to reserve judgment to a second stage of evaluation. At the outset, all ideologies are created equal; all are aiming for the same thing: to justify and motivate.

So, for today at least, let me just focus on one concrete example of their approach at work. Trade unions. Without a doubt, there has been an aggressive assault upon unions by the forces of neoliberalism. Equally without a doubt, the decline of unions has been an almost completely unmitigated disaster for under-skilled and under-educated workers. What B and C call the “casualization” of work—and what more recent writers have begun to call the “precariat”—has been enabled by the destruction of unions able to pose a credible threat to employers’ undermining job security.

At its most moralistic and nostalgic, leftists bemoaning this shift will locate its ideological component as the shift from collectivism to individualism. (Often, of course, this is identified as a particular sin/failing of Americans. But B & C document the same shift in France.) Union workers understood that they held their fate in common. They steadfastly refused to jettison their “solidarity.” But a new selfishness has allowed a “divide and conquer” strategy on the part of the evil capitalists to win.

Such denunciatory readings of the situation fail, however, to capture the ways in which individualism is plausible and motivating. Any teacher who has asked students to do “group work” knows the problem. I also encountered it in concrete terms when I managed a staff of seven at the university. Because my staff existed within a “step system,” the best workers could not be rewarded with a pay raise, since all employees who shared a certain job designation/description received the same pay. The inevitable result was that my best workers were constantly looking for new jobs as a means to getting a higher salary, while my mediocre workers stayed put. I could not keep good staff. It made perfect sense for those who could to seek higher paying jobs.

In other words, worker solidarity only makes sense when there is a very large group of workers who are all essentially doing the same work, with the same level of skill required. Even there, annoyance (or worse) directed at the incompetent or the lazy will arise. But in any organization where there are many different skill levels needed, where a path for advancement to a higher level job is relatively open, solidarity doesn’t only lose its appeal. It doesn’t even make much sense. I am not a worker on the factory line today and expect to be one come thirty years from today. Rather, I am in a position that I assume that I will grow out of—and do not want to be tied down to someone who is content in the position I also, for this moment, occupy.

Certainly, we can bemoan the worker’s ambition, the mindset that has her focused on how she will advance over her lifetime to better jobs than her current one. But can we really say she would be better off without that mind set? Do we really want to tie her to one job for life? With all my leftist sympathies, I couldn’t possibly advise my young, ambitious staff to do anything but continue to look for paths to advancement. I had no right to stand in their way in the name of an ideal of worker solidarity.

And it is precisely that—the feeling that there is only one obvious response, only one ethical path—when faced with a situation that defines a “spirit.” Theoretically supportive of unions, I could intellectually understand the basis of the step system under which my staff operated. But practically, on the ground, as a matter of practical reason (in precisely the Aristotelian and Kantian sense), I could only recommend behavior that undermined that system. That’s what it means to say there is a “new spirit” in town.