Corporate Enterprises

A short addendum to my last post. It is striking that war and revolution unite people in destruction, in tearing things down, in fierce opposition to some foe. Is the bliss of cooperation possible in more constructive, creative endeavors? Sports and business don’t fully count here since are so wrapped up in competition, in having an opponent that must be beat. How about art? The making of a film or a play, or of a Gothic cathedral, requires many hands working in concert. Certainly, that’s where Ruskin located his utopia, in the corporate effort to create Notre-Dame.

In his famous and influential “Nature of the Gothic,” Ruskin imagines a perfect Hegelian society, where unified purpose also enables individual distinction. It is precisely not about everyone moving in lock-step, but about each contributing according to his talents—with that contribution being recognized, appreciated, and honored. A sense of individual satisfaction in work well done and, crucially, work self-directed is joined to an over-arching project. I get to work on my small piece in freedom, but am also driven by the knowledge of how it contributes to the whole.

The vast body of scholarship is constructed along similar lines. Yet for those of us immersed in it, it hardly seems ideal. How did the stone-mason in 13^th century Paris feel about his work from day to day? Surely Ruskin idealizes.

Still, one’s scholarship depends on and is in conversation with the work of others. And one’s own work is certainly pointless if not contributing to something that we represent, vaguely enough it is true, as “knowledge.” Without that, where would we be—just seekers of prestige in our designated circle of Bourdieuian hell.

All of which is to say the Hegelian/Ruskinian dream is a beautiful, even a worthy, one. We do well to keep trying to make it real. And while alive to all the imperfections that inflict its semblances in our daily lives, we should also suspect the cynicism that would undermine those efforts entirely. Hence my desire to avoid simply scorning the Hardt/Negri book or the efforts of our “prefiguative” democrats.

Utopian Passion

The heartfelt disgust at neoliberalism’s cruelty that animates Hardt and Negri’s work is, quite simply, admirable. And the equally passionate desire for the “commons” and for “cooperation”—along with the desire to imagine a politics, along with forms of political action, that body forth such cooperation in a shared space—is also praiseworthy. Just because their sharp analysis of neoliberalism is not matched with a correspondingly acute description of what to do next is no reason to disparage the work.

Here’s the fullest statement of the longed-for utopia in the book.

“The history of general strikes is animated by an insurrectional and constituent passion: not passion in the sense of a charismatic or thaumaturgic event, but passion that lives in the highest moments of political ethics, in the intersection of resistance and solidarity, when spontaneity and organization, insurrection and constituent power are most closely tied together. It is an act, to use the language of ethical philosophy, when rationality and love triumph together. In the ‘strike’ passion, reason creates a dynamic of common freedom and love generates an expansive action of equality. Calls for coalition, tous ensemble, speak the language of reason and freedom; expressions of camaraderie, companer@s, sisters and brothers, are the language of love and equality. The general strike thus gives flesh to the bare bones of the language of human rights” (Assembly, 241).

“O, then was it bliss to be alive. The resemblance to Arendt’s celebration of “the lost treasure of revolution” impresses me. The importance of ends, of purposes, of outcomes shrinks; it is the political action itself that looms large, the ecstatic moment of union with others in the fierce present of “resistance,” of love. Success is almost beside the point. The strike is not a moment of building or of becoming. It is a moment of pure being, of being-with, of the ecstatic loss of self in something larger than the self.

(To be fair, Hardt and Negri’s term “constituent power” is meant to signal that the power immanent to the general strike is constructive, it constitutes things. They certainly don’t want to say that the strike, like Auden’s poetry, “makes nothing happen.” But “constituent power” is another instance of their sloganeering. How this power constitutes anything and what it constitutes are never addressed.)

The longing for a worthy collective, a larger cause to which I can willingly, happily, in a full unshadowed endorsement, immerse myself must beckon to us all at some point or another. Even the staunchest individual imagines a soul mate, an absorbing and fulfilling love. A perfect union.

Love, admittedly, is difficult. I am often astonished at both how mundane love is—and how improbable at exactly the same time. We are all such prickly beasts, full of selfish desires and self-regarding hurts and shames and needs. The slightest things rub us the wrong way, make us wrinkle our noses in disgust. “I don’t want to be associated with that.” Such sensitivities afflict our personal loves and consistently poison less personal associations. So when it actually works, when our incorporation (a potent word when its bodily root is taken seriously) is complete—and satisfying–it seems nothing short of a miracle.

And here’s the rub. Few experiences appear to scratch the itch for belonging so intensely as war. Nostalgia for war is rampant among those who have participated in one. And Hardt and Negri’s romance of the general strike sounds remarkably similar to soldier’s memories of being in the army. The logic of William James’s famous essay, “A Moral Equivalent of War,” weighs upon me. James was eloquent, in Varieties of Religious Experience, about the desire to merge the self into some cause, some entity, larger than self. In many respects, that longing is religion for James. War can look like religion’s equivalent—the stakes are appropriately high, the denial of the self’s petty needs fully imperative.

“War is the health of the state,” wrote Randolph Bourne. Presumably, war thus should be the exact opposite of everything that Hardt and Negri desire from politics. They want ecstasy without destruction, with everything on the line even though violence is absent. I sympathize. I, too, want that. At least some of the time. I am, I suspect, more attached to individuality than they are. I want to reserve my right to have reservations, to maintain an ironic distance from collective enterprises, to be allowed to judge them as well as participate in them. No unreflective belonging.

One final thought. Bourne’s famous statement can be taken in another way. Reading the book about the American war in the Pacific, it is impossible not to be impressed by the feats of organization and coordination the state managed during World War II. The moving parts were almost infinite; the details that needed to be anticipated and then taken care of simply mind-boggling. As an intellectual challenge, a challenge then joined to the material and psychological challenges, the war—and how America responded to it—is awe-inspiring. If anything ever proved that communism could work, it was what America did in the five years from 1940 to 1945, when a centrally planned economy that appropriated every single member of society and assigned them their place in the war-making machine performed its task extremely well.

Hornfischer (the author of the book on the Pacific War) is a fairly typical right-leaning military historian. He is fully taken with the romance of American power and deeply proud of American know-how and courage. He never cottons on the extent that the America of the war years was a communist society if ever there was one. But he also pays just about no attention to the sand in the machine. For him, the war operations were just about frictionless, with only a few minor, if unfortunate, mishaps (he really can’t even bring himself to call them screw-ups). Most telling, perhaps, is the fact that he deems artillery and air bombardment (long-distance killing) as almost always effective, whereas most analysts have concluded that the military has always over-estimated their efficacy.

It wasn’t just for humor’s sake, with no connection to reality, that the common sailor resorted to the ever-present euphemism, SNAFU. Situation Normal All Fucked Up. The best laid plans and all that. The romance of war, like all romances, tends to eliminate the warts. Many a soldier was not a happy camper, and even the happy ones usually had scant respect for the abilities of the higher-ups, with their fancy uniforms and even fancier plans.

Assembly is driven by a desire for a moment (at least a moment, even though it seems to suggest we could have an era) when all are in lockstep. Be careful what you wish for. War, based on nationalist solidarity, is the closest we’ve come to such ecstatic unity. Maybe the revolutionary moment, the longed for assembly of the multitude out in the public square protesting the evils of neoliberalism, compares. But I’ll put in my two cheers for liberal pluralism all the same. Lockstep just doesn’t appeal to me all that much.

Combating the Ills of Neoliberalism

I finished, over the holiday break, four rather different books: Hardt and Negri’s Assembly (Oxford UP, 2017); Donatella deela Porta’s Social Movements in Times of Austerity (Polity, 2015); Mark Kurlansky’s history, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (Random House, 2005); and a book by a military historian about the war in Pacific in 1944-45, with primary emphasis on the battles in the Marianas, the taking of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. [James Hornfischer, The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-45 (Bantam, 2017).] My father was part of the Marine contingent on both Saipan and Tinian, which was part of my reason for reading the book.

It would be east enough to make fun of the Hardt and Negri. They keep insisting that a successful social movement must have “lasting institutions” and a strategy that will enable it to survive over the long haul. But everything they value is evanescent, a fact mostly attributable to their anarchistic horror of leaders, intellectuals, bureaucracy, organization, hierarchy, representation (as opposed to direct democracy), etc. etc. The della Porta book only confirms that the most recent anti-neoliberalism protestors share all of Hardt and Negri’s suspicions of hierarchy and organization. In fact, Kurlansky’s makes it clear that SDS, especially in its Columbia moment in 1968, shared the same antipathy to leadership.

I can’t help but believe that the hyper organized world of the right, with its top-down command structure and its deployment of money to hire the cadres required to lobby the state, and find the loopholes in existing regulations/tax laws, and fight its battles in courts, will continue to eat the left’s lunch so long as the left insists on fighting shy of organization and an articulated strategy complete with plans for its being carried out.

At one level it is just a boring question of scale. Boring because this issue has troubled theorists of democracy since before the flood. Direct democracy in any populace larger than two or three thousand just seems impossible. It is even bloody inefficient and frustrating when the numbers are relatively small.

But, even more significant (or so it seems to me), is the breezy way that Hardt and Negri write off the state. They see no path back to a revitalized social democracy because they believe the state is a dead letter. Della Porta correctly sees that many of the anti-austerity protests are “restorative” in focus. That is, they want the state to restore lost benefits, protections, security etc. But she also correctly notes that the fundamental crisis is that the state has become unresponsive. The desires and complaints of citizens go unheard. Oligarchy or plutocracy means the state does not attend to the needs of its citizens.

So, yes, there is a crisis of the state. But to simply let the state be captured by the 1% out of either a fatalistic sense that it can never be otherwise or because relying on an analytic that claims the state is powerless in the world of global capital seems incredibly foolhardy. It’s not an either/or when it comes to power. Of course, the state is not omnipotent; it never was, and it is probably true that it is less powerful now (in Europe and North America; all bets are off in the rest of the world) than it was in 1950 (at least in the US and UK and USSR; Spain and France would be interesting cases to consider in that year, whereas Germany hardly had a state at the time.) Certainly the state is stronger now in Singapore or South Korea than it was in 1950. What about China? That’s a fascinating question, probably best answered by saying more powerful in some respects, less powerful in others—which just indicates exactly how silly it is to say the state is no longer a significant actor, or that the state’s power can be determined along some one-dimensional axis.

The logic of direct democracy leads to smaller and smaller political units precisely at the time when globalization means that economic units are getting larger and larger. It’s enough to make the cigar chomping capitalist salivate. No possible countervailing power to capital on the horizon. How could anyone possibly think that some kind of political control over the economic could be achieved by getting smaller? Yes, the state has drifted far from democratic accountability. And, yes, such accountability was never all that great in the past (although definitely better in the case of the US than it currently is). But to simply decide we need to find/locate democracy elsewhere seems to me a suicidal path to follow, a ceding of the field of power to the people we most want to divest of power.

Hardt and Negri are clear that a transfer of power is what they seek. They are dodgy on the issue of violence in relation to such a transfer. They insist violence under current conditions is bound to be counter-productive, but their historical examples (the historical figures they admire) all used violence for political ends. Similarly, they are dodgy about power. Like a number of other recent figures (including Judith Butler who follows Arendt’s lead in her meditations on this issue), Hardt and Negri want power without sovereignty. I am very sympathetic to this desire, but I can’t work my way to a clear understanding of what it means. I get the slogan but, as often in Hardt and Negri (for example, the call for “lasting institutions” or their desire to have the multitude determine strategy and the leaders only tactics), there is not enough meat behind the slogan to actually understand what it could possibly mean—either in theory or in practice.

But I said I didn’t want to just carp about their work. I am in quest of something very specific: some strategy/tactic (I don’t think the distinction means much in the context of my quest) that the left could effectively employ at this dark moment. Della Porta tells us that social movement studies teaches us that “innovations” in strategy/tactics are few and far between, usually only slight deviations from previous forms. In addition, she places, I think, her finger on another dilemma (besides the one about the limits on human ingenuity): the anti-austerity movements combine a deep skepticism about the ability of existing political institutions to respond adequately to citizens’ needs with a failure to create “new organizational forms” that would substitute for the existing political infrastructure. The result is a not very satisfying mixture of “prefigurative” politics with rather pathetic appeals to the powers that be. The prefigurative part is the attempted creation of the democratic spaces the movement wants to make more general. The appeals part (the passivity) is looking to the state for redress of grievances. To quote her:

[E]ven if movements have stressed prefiguration, citizens need a (paradigmatic) change of public policy decisions. What they claim is a return of the public, which also means states and other public institutions taking back competences they had released during neoliberalism. Even if the appeal is to reconstruct (decentralized) commons, robust interventions of legal and institutional character are required. This is difficult to implement until the movements are able to influence institutional decision-making” (221).

What I fail to see is even a half-hearted attempt to imagine concretely what shape the “robust interventions of legal and institutional character” should be. Forgive all debt is not an actionable plan. Restructuring the legal terms of debt is—and requires specific proposals. And then there has to be a way to exert real pressure on the mandarins who are currently immune to it.

I said I wouldn’t carp—and here it has been all carping. I am going to reserve my positive point for tomorrow, one that actually comes back to the World War II narrative in an odd way.

But, before that, a last summary statement: the evils—and the means for achieving those evils—of neoliberalism are, by now, clearly understood by the commentators on the left. The analysis of neoliberalism in both Hardt/Negri and della Porta are completely convincing. Privatization emerges as equally important as, and perhaps much more nefarious than, globalization. Thus, what the left now desires is also quite clear: a reclaiming of the commons, the construction (or reconstruction) of a public domain immune from rents, and a robust democracy that occupies (that salient term) that common space and allows for collective control of the polity. I have no argument with either the analysis or the desires. I am only searching about for some means that seem plausible—plausible in the sense of having some chance of leading to a successful consummation of these desires.

Neoliberalism as Reactionary

Yesterday’s post worried the question of (in Lear’s words) whether there is “any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts”? Seeking the answer in psychology, in some persistent, albeit not universal, set of motivating impulses (ambition, the quest for status, envy, and resentment) is one way to go.

Another possibility is to refuse to personalize things in that way—and to look instead to structural causes. That path is suggested by Hardt and Negri’s insistence that neoliberalism is reactionary. (I am reading their latest tome, Assembly [Oxford UP, 2017].)

Here’s my reconstruction of the argument: The Keynesian welfare state compromise worked well enough from 1950 to 1965, but the social upheavals of the sixties revealed the deep discontent produced by capitalism even in its most benign form. Neoliberalism—starting with Reagan and Thatcher—was a direct move to reign in the students, union workers, and other malcontents who had shaken things to the core in the 60s. Turning the economic screws down tighter went hand-in-glove with various strategies to diminish democratic input, heighten the power of elites, and demonize both dissenters and those who agitated for continued and even increased welfare (such as provisions for health care).

This analysis has more than a little plausibility going for it. Oddly, it is not accompanied in Hardt and Negri (who, when all is said and done, are Marxists) with an economic analysis focusing on the economic woes of the 1970s. Certainly, it is true that today’s conservative economists are continually refighting the wars of the 70s, where inflation is the dragon to be slain—despite the fact of almost non-existent inflation for over twenty years now. Similarly, the zombie of the welfare queen and, more generally, of the undeserving poor has proved unkillable—perhaps even more as the danger conservatives must continually work against than as a figure in the public imagination. Neoliberalism is the set of nostrums meant to control the hungry masses who are coming after the plutocrat’s and the nation’s wealth.

Ironically, of course, the traditional fear that in a democracy the masses will plunder the public treasury has been turned on its head over the past forty years in America—and around the globe. It is the rich, through privatization primarily but also through the state abetting more predatory business practices, that has plundered the collective wealth of the nation. Hardt and Negri are good on this score, even if their way of describing it—namely, as “extraction of the common”—is rather different than mine.

In short, don’t look for the evil in men’s hearts—or even for the errors their passions lead them into. Look instead to whom they identify as their enemies, what they understand as the threats to their well-being. It’s a conflict ridden world—and the key is to see where and how the lines are drawn. Then identify on which side someone stands.

Still, what happened in the 1970s beyond the counter-revolution against the radical forces of the 1960s? What produced inflation accompanied by stalled economic growth—the combination that led to the belief on the part of many elites that the largesse of post-war Keynesian state was no longer sustainable? Yes, there were tax revolts etc., just the niggardly refusal to pay the bill any longer. So we could say that cutting off the funds led, predictably, to a recession caused by a lack of demand—in other words, a classic capitalist downturn. When you don’t pay the workers enough, when you extract excessive profits that immiserate the many, you end up with a crisis of over-production and need to shut down the factories for a while, which means laying off the workers, which impoverishes them even further, and thus deepens the crisis because demand is depressed even further. The classic viscous circle.

But that doesn’t explain inflation, which (just as classically) occurs when too much money is chasing too few goods. Inflation should be the result of under-production. Except—and here comes the rub. The other source of inflation is the result of open, globalized trade relations as contrasted to the kind of closed system analysis that explains inflation through under-production. Inflation in a globalized system occurs when the national currency no longer buys as much on the world market. The “oil shock” meant the American dollar went into the tank. In 1972, a three week visit to England and Scotland (not counting the airfare) cost me $200. Yes, I was doing it on the cheap, but still . . . Another three weeks in England in 1978 cost me $1200. The change in the almighty dollar was that drastic and that fast.

The eventual response to this shift in America’s position in the global economy was to outsource manufacturing to other lands and to have America concentrate on finance capital rather than industrial capital. Neoliberalism—and its imperatives—can’t be understood without taking this transformation into account. Here, again, Hardt and Negri are useful. And maybe even help to answer a puzzle that goes back to the hard hearts of our Republican legislators.

The puzzle is a familiar one: if capitalism depends on consumers to fuel continual growth (i.e. if capitalism is always in need of new markets or in ways of exploiting existing markets more efficiently), then why does capitalism, especially in its neo-liberal and globalized form, seek so relentlessly to drive down wages. It’s the opposite of the Henry Ford principle of paying his workers enough so they could buy his cars. It takes the soft-hearted liberals from FDR to Bernie Sanders to save capitalism from the fate Marx predicted for it.

BUT . . . maybe the logic of finance capital makes that view of things a misunderstanding of the forces currently in play. Finance capital is not seeking profits from people buying produced goods. Instead, finance capital finds its profits in ROI (return on investment). Think of how private equity firms work. They swoop in to buy up a company, they then use those company’s assets to take out loans, and then (in many cases) drive the company into bankruptcy because of that high debt. The game here is not to get people to buy things. They just need people (usually other financial institutions) to buy debt. The profits are the result of “extraction,” as Hardt and Negri say. So long as someone places a value on something, that thing can be leveraged—and money made. Who needs consumers? Who needs the people? It’s just a self-enclosed world of financial dealings, only related in incredibly abstract and distant ways to anything “real.”

This might seem far-fetched, but Hardt and Negri offer a great example: gentrification. Properties in the most desired cities—New York, Vancouver, London, San Francisco etc.—spiral upward in price not just because people wish to live there, but also because they are seen as both safe and incredibly lucrative investments. Money just chases money, with nothing “real” (except perhaps the “upgrades” to granite countertops and glass brick showers) changing. Of course, such spirals lead, inevitably, to bubbles and collapses. An odd term: bubble. Because you can’t know it’s a bubble because it isn’t a bubble until the moment when confidence collapses, when the hive mind decides everything is overpriced. Overpriced in relation to what? There is no measure, no standard, beyond that mysterious collective sense of what is sensible. Of course for most of us—those not in 1% or 5%–“sensible” prices were left behind four or five years ago.

Critiques of speculation as disconnected from anything real are as old as the Tulip craze and the South Sea Bubble of the 1700s. As is the use of debt—both taking it on and forcing it upon others—to gain wealth. (If we believe David Graeber, debt goes back 5000 years.) What seems to distinguish neoliberalism is the orientation of capitalism (and of the political, legal, and social institutions that enable it) away from production of goods and towards the profits to be made through finance. In other words, financial speculation was always there—but social and political policy was not constructed to aid and abet it since the conventional wisdom remained that the production of goods was the primary road to wealth—both personal and national.

Trump offers a good case for how hard it is to think about this shift. The man never produced a single thing in his life, yet seems to think that wealth comes from the production of goods. He even seems to think that he has produced some things. In any case, his rhetoric is all about restoring prosperity through a return to industrial capitalism. But most of his actions (his anti-immigration policies are an exception here) are directed toward enabling finance capitalism. In other words, the full import of the shift hasn’t registered yet for many people.

A full-scale economic determinism, then, would tell us not to look for motives for hard-heartedness within the Republicans, but look instead to the changed nature of capitalism to explain their actions. Causes are external, not internal. The masses—defined here as those with no money to invest—are no longer relevant to prosperity, so should be ignored on that account. And if democracy can be contained, then the masses need no longer be feared either. The legislator will prosper by knowing who his true master is: not the voters, but the plutocrat.

So, for the determinist, neliberalism is reactionary in another sense: it is a reaction to this shift from industrial to financial capitalism.