We can think of governing as posing choices. Now then, mule, do you prefer the carrot or the stick? Choose freely. To put it another way, one aspect of governance involves having a lot of power to choose the game played, which is to say, having strong influence on the sets of rules/expectations in a given social environment and the set of choices that people are likely to make. One way to ideologically defend governance is to point out the freedom people to have within the defined set of rules and choices.

Sometimes there are conflicts over rules in the game, which can result in changes in those rules. Other times the game might change – one side might kick the chessboard off the table. In those moments the current rulers might be displaced from their game-setting position or the governance relationship might come into question all together.

Generally speaking governance is relatively stable when it’s like a casino, in that the house (the governing) win most games, and things continue along with the house in control. When a given game is relatively stable – “we are playing chess” – there’s conflict within the rules of the game — the governing wish to win at the chess game. And often governance is a complex set of tasks with a division of labor and different personnel. The people assigned to play a certain game at a certain time will face costs if they lose; those costs have real stakes. The governing tend to be relatively united against the governed, and to an increasing degree as the governed become more disruptive. At the same time, the governing also conflict among themselves, up and down their chains of command and horizontally among personnel at any given rank.

In my view, Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism is really powerful and important. I think the best formulation of this analysis is in his book Capital, Volume 1. Joseph Kay recently wrote a blog post about a book I’ve not read yet, by David Graeber, and that post made me want to write this post about aspects of Marx. Joseph described Marx as writing an immanent critique of capitalist economics. I understand this to mean that Marx tried to take on ideas about capitalism on their own terms and show how they have internal problems. I think this is a good way to understand Capital, Volume 1. (I’m just going to call it Capital from here on out.) In this blog post I lay out some further points about what I think Marx is and is not doing, matters that I think are useful for reading Marx.

What Capital presents is a sort of perfected capitalism, it’s capitalism without any accidents, capitalism as presented by the ideologues of capitalism. In the Grundrisse Marx uses the phrase “rational abstraction” to mean a useful general model that helps us to think about various things in the world and society. Marx’s presentation of capitalism is a rational abstraction: it’s a general model of capitalism. This general model has a few uses. For one thing, it helps to show that any form of capitalism will be unjust. Injustice under capitalism isn’t an accident, it’s at the core of capitalism: capitalism is unjust. A perfected capitalism will still generate immoral outcomes. For another, it shows some of the general dynamics of capitalism as a social system – some things we can expect to see some of the time regularly in capitalist societies.

Both of these things are useful. It’s important, though, that we not mistake Marx’s model for actually existing capitalism. This is something that Joseph talks about in his post. Joseph quotes Graeber saying that many readers of Marx forget the “as if” quality of Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism, which is to say, people forget that Marx’s work present a model, not actual capitalism. The model of capitalism that Marx presents is really powerful, but that model is not the same thing as knowing the history of what actually existing capitalism has been, including the range of different forms that capitalist societies and capitalist enterprises have taken.

In the preface to v2 of Capital, Engels says something that can be read as compatible with this. He writes that
Quote:
“Marx’s surplus value (…) represents the general form of the sum of values appropriated without any equivalent by the owners of the means of production (…) many intermediate links are required to arrive from an understanding of surplus-value in general at an understanding of (…) the laws of the distribution of surplus-value within the capitalist class.” (10.)
Marx’s model doesn’t just give us what actually happened in the history of capitalism or present capitalism. It gives us some concepts to use that help us conduct analysis of capitalism.

In the rest of this post I’m going to list a few places were I think we can see Marx suggesting himself that his work is dealing in models, or at least places where Marx seems amenable to that interpretation of his work. There are a few places where Marx suggests or implicitly admits that his model of capitalism is not the same thing as the reality of capitalism. For example, in Wage Labour and Capital, Marx wrote that:

Quote:
“The actual price of a commodity (…) stands always above or below the cost of production (…) the price of a commodity is indeed determined by its cost of production, but in such a manner that the periods in which the price of these commodities rises above the costs of production are balanced by the periods in which it sinks below the cost of production, and vice versa. Of course this does not hold good for a single given product of an industry, but only for that branch of industry. So also it does not hold good for an individual manufacturer, but only for the whole class of manufacturers.”
That is to say, when Marx talks about the labor theory of value and the determination of commodity prices by the labor time required to make commodities, he means it in very, very general terms. The point about the value of commodities was again a matter of Marx dealing with models and rational abstractions. Under a perfected, accident-free capitalism, Marx argues, commodities would be priced at the labor time it took to produce them. And that perfect pricing would be exploitive, because waged labor involves capitalists owning and selling goods that workers make, and the capitalists get to keep the additional value added to the goods by workers’ labor. Workers aren’t paid the value that we add to the goods and services our employers sell.

Another place were we can see the status of Marx’s model as a model is on chapter 26 of Capital. Here Marx writes about the violence that helped make capitalism possible in the first place. He calls this primitive accumulation. He writes that primitive accumulation “in different countries, assumes different aspects, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different periods. In England alone, which we take as our example, has it the classic form.” The actual history of capitalism has varied tremendously. Marx focused on just one example of capitalist society, that of England, in order to build his model for understanding capitalism in general. This is powerful conceptually, but it makes it hard to tell the difference between traits of English capitalism and capitalism as such. It’s also not necessarily the case that Marx always drew that line correctly – that is, it’s not always clear that Marx was right when he said something was part of English capitalism or part of capitalism as such.

In chapter 24 of Capital, Marx distinguishes between capitalists re-investing their money in order to make more money and capitalists spending their money for their own enjoyment. The first, investing money to make money, creates more capital. The second “consumes or expends it as revenue.” Marx adds that some of the time he analytically treats the same thing differently. That is, he has two different ways of discussing the wealth that capitalists extract from workers. Some of the time he discusses it “solely as a fund for supplying the individual consumption of the capitalist.” That’s what Marx means by revenue. Other times he treats it “solely as a fund for accumulation,” which is to say, solely as a matter of capitalists spending money to make more money. Marx points out that in actual social practice, capitalists’ wealth is “neither the one nor the other, but is both together. One portion is consumed by the capitalist as revenue, the other is employed as capital, is accumulated,” which is to say, wealth expended to create more wealth for capitalists.

Marx adds that through Capital he treats capitalists “as personified capital.” Capitalism as a social system exerts pressures that encourage capitalists to act in certain ways – to live up to the character type of “personified capital” – but no actual people are really just personified capital and nothing more. Marx’s point is an analytical one. By creating this character type who is only a capitalist and nothing else – that is, someone who cares only about the creation of wealth for it’s own sake – Marx can get at some of the core dynamics of capitalism. In actual social reality we never see this pure capitalism where capitalists are personified capital and nothing more. To the degree that capitalists are personified capital, the money they spend for their own personal consumption – money spent as revenue, Marx calls it – is money wasted, because it’s money that could have been spent making even more wealth. Marx writes that “So far (…) as his actions are a mere function of capital — endowed as capital is, in his person, with consciousness and a will — his own private consumption is a robbery perpetrated on accumulation.” Of course, actual existing capitalists don’t just care about capital accumulation. They also spend their wealth on things they enjoy and which don’t add to the creation of greater wealth – the expansion of their wealth is their primary priority in general, but it’s not their only priority all the time in all places. To put it another way, actually existing capitalists rarely conform 100% to the logic of the capitalist system. Capitalism is a system which rewards and encourages economistic behavior, and the best of Marx and the marxist tradition is an attack on that.

In chapter 10 of Capital, Marx notes that at this point in the book he has made an assumption that workers under capitalism in general are legally and formally free. He further notes that this assumption isn’t really accurate to the history of actually existing capitalism. It’s another rational abstraction. He writes that “as far as we have at present gone only the independent labourer, and therefore only the labourer legally qualified to act for himself, enters as a vendor of a commodity into a contract with the capitalist. If, therefore, in our historical sketch, on the one hand, modern industry, on the other, the labour of those who are physically and legally minors, play important parts, the former was to us only a special department, and the latter only a specially striking example of labour exploitation.”

In chapter 15 of Capital, Marx again not this analytical assumption and how it differs from the actual history of capitalism. Here he begins to suggest that this assumption should be abandoned. He notes that in the early part of the book, “Taking the exchange of commodities as our basis, our first assumption was that capitalist and labourer met as free persons, as independent owners of commodities; the one possessing money and means of production, the other labour-power.” That is, the first several chapters of Capital assumed that the working class worked for wages under relatively free circumstances, in the sense that they were compelled by the need to have wages and not by external force.

To put it another way, early in Capital the book assumes formally, legally free workers are the normal workers under capitalism. In chapter 15, however, Marx puts this assumption to the test of some aspects of the actual history of English capitalism. Marx notes that the introduction of machinery in various industries led to greater employment of women and children. These workers were not formally and legally free but rather legally disqualified. Marx writes that “now the capitalist buys children and young persons under age. Previously, the workman sold his own labour-power, which he disposed of nominally as a free agent. Now he sells wife and child. He has become a slave-dealer.” Marx here claims that there is a growth in the use of legally disqualified workers under capitalism, breaking the assumption of legally and formally free workers. Marx also probably underestimates the degree to which the working class was never all that formally and legally free. It’s not clear to me if this underestimation is another methodological assumption on Marx’s part or something he just got wrong.

These examples I’ve listed are moments when Marx seems to let on that he is dealing in models. Marx’s models are useful conceptually, but less so if we forget that they’re models. Marx used his models in part for this usefulness, but also in part because he was engaged with classical political economists. Political economists dealt largely with theoretical models. (I’m told the same is largely true of economists today, though their models are much more mathematically presented these days.) Marx learned from and criticized political economists and, as Joseph Kay wrote, he conducted an immanent critique of them. This meant dealing in models just as political economists did.

In my view, Marx’s models are very useful for thinking about capitalism and people should read volume 1 of Capital. (I recommend starting it with chapter 26 and reading to the end, then starting at the beginning and reading to the end. Or, read chapter 26 to the end, then chapter 4 through 25, then the first three chapters. The first three chapters are like the beginning of the movie The Usual Suspects: the ending totally changes the meaning of the beginning. Except the beginning of Capital is much more dull than that film.) I plan to read that Graeber book that Joseph reviewed. I would like to recommend a few other books here that I find useful alongside Marx. They’re not primarily theoretical works, though they’re smart sophisticated works.

One is the short book Historical Capitalism by Immanuel Wallerstein. The book collects some talks Wallerstein gave. In the beginning of the book Wallerstein makes a comment that speaks to what I’ve been saying here and what Joseph and Graeber talk about with regard to Marx and readings of Marx. Wallerstein described a limitation in a lot of things “written about capitalism by Marxists and others on the left,” namely the fault of logico-deductive analyses, starting from definitions of what capitalism was thought to be in essence, and then seeing how far it had developed in different places and times.” Wallerstein instead aimed “to see capitalism as a historical system, over the whole of its history and in concrete unique reality.” Wallerstein suggest that Marx moved back and forth between these two approaches. For Wallerstein, this is a “tension in [Marx's] presentation of his work between the exposition of capitalism as a perfected system (which had never in fact existed historically) and the analysis of the concrete day-to-day reality of the capitalist world.” The rest of Wallerstein’s book sketches elements of the over-all history of capitalism in his interpretation. It’s worth a read, especially alongside Marx’s Capital.

In addition to Wallerstein’s book, I’d also highly recommend Michael Perelman’s excellent book The Invention of Capitalism. Perelman compares the public writings of classical political economists with the journals and letters and the political and policy writings of those political economists during early capitalism and the transition to capitalist society. Their more public writings tended to treat markets as self-constituting and self-regulating but their private writings and their political interventions showed a keen understanding of the role of the state and of violence in creating and maintaining capitalism. The book is useful for its reminder that some capitalist ideologists know full well that their hymns to markets are ideological and false.

I would also highly recommend that people who want to understand the history of actually existing capitalism should engage with some recent-ish writings on the history of slavery, in particular Gavin Wright’s short and very readable book Slavery and American Economic Development, Dale Tomich’s book Through the Prism of Slavery and Walter Johnson’s essay “The Pedestal and the Veil.” Often slavery has been conceptually defined as not-capitalist or as pre-capitalist. Marx often discussed capitalism and slavery this way. This assumption is little more than an assertion about how to define the words capitalism and slavery – “if there’s slavery it’s not full capitalism, because we define full capitalism as not involving slavery” – and it’s not an illuminating definition. The reality of the history of slavery and capitalism is that they’re complicated – not all capitalism involved slavery and not all slavery was noncapitalist. In particular, the southern United States became a society which was no less capitalist than the north, it was just differently capitalist. The U.S. Civil War was a war between two different capitalist governments.

I’m going to end this blog post in a moment, with two quotes from E.P. Thompson, which I already posted in the discussion on Joseph Kay’s blog post. As I read Marx, Marx’s work in Capital was motivated by a sense like what Thompson expressed. Marx understood capitalism as a social system that limited human possibilities, and in ways that could and should be done away with. Marx’s metaphors sometimes show this, like when he talks about capitalists coining the blood of children into money. As someone who buried several of his children, Marx wouldn’t have used that imagery lightly. Marx’s judgements motivated his immanent critique of capitalism and the ideas of political economists, and these judgments are pretty clear in Marx’s writings, but most of Capital is spent developing the models.

Thompson said “
Quote:
The injury which advanced industrial capitalism did, and which the market society did, was to define human relations as being primarily economic. Marx engaged with orthodox political economy, and proposed revolutionary economic man as the answer to exploited economic man. But it is also implicit, particularly in the early Marx, that the injury is in defining man as “economic” at all.”
Thompson said elsewhere that
Quote:
“While one form which opposition to capitalism takes is in direct economic antagonism – resistance to exploitation whether as producer or consumer – another form is, exactly, resistance to capitalism’s innate tendency to reduce all human relationships to economic definitions. The two are inter-related, of course; but it is by no means certain which may prove to be, in the end, more revolutionary. (…) [People] desire, fitfully, not only direct economic satisfactions, but also to throw off this grotesque “economic” disguise which capitalism imposes upon them, and to resume a human shape.”

This post presents some writings and some videos that give an overview of the capitalist system.

The presentation below goes over the sources of capitalist wealth.

Note: When you have finished viewing that presentation, refresh this page so you can view the videos below.

Given how bad the capitalist system is for so many people, it’s easy to wonder where capitalism came from in the first place. It’s also no surprise that the history of capitalism is both a history of power and of resistance.

People fought against the initial rise of capitalism. The song below is about the Diggers, a group who fought the beginnings of capitalism in England. The lyrics are below the video.

The World Turned Upside Down

In 1649 to St. George’s Hill, a ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people’s will. They defied the landlords, they defied the laws, they were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs.

We come in peace they said, to dig and sow. We come to work the lands in common and to make the waste ground grow. This earth divided, we will make whole, so it will be a common treasury for all.

The sin of property we do disdain. No man has any right to buy and sell the earth for private gain. By theft and murder they took the land. Now everywhere the walls spring up at their command.

They make the laws to chain us well. The clergy dazzle us with heaven or they damn us into hell. We will not worship the God they serve, the God of greed who feed the rich while poor folk starve.

We work, we eat together. We need no swords. We will not bow to the masters or pay rent to the lords. Still we are free though we are poor.
You Diggers all stand up for glory, stand up now.

From the men of property the orders came. They sent the hired men and troopers to wipe out the Diggers’ claim. Tear down their cottages. Destroy their corn. They were dispersed, but still the vision lingers on.

You poor take courage. You rich take care. This earth was made a common treasury for everyone to share. All things in common, all people one. We come in peace. The orders came to cut them down.

What the Diggers were fighting against was a process called enclosure, the changes that made capitalism possible in the first place. As the example of the Diggers makes clear, this was a violent process. Capitalism originated with violence. The video below summarizes some of the history of enclosure.

The processes of enclosure didn’t just happen in England and they didn’t just happen once. They have been repeated, and been opposed, many times. In this video, David Harvey talks about recent examples, which he calls “accumulation by dispossession.”

In another speech, below, Harvey discusses the current crisis of capitalism. He goes over the different ways that people have tried to explain the crisis.

Discussion questions
The origins of capitalism involved a lot of violence beyond England. What are some things you know about the history of violence and brutality that helped create capitalism? Where are some other places where people were pushed off the land or otherwise brutalized as part of the rise of modern capitalism? Dick Gaughan’s song is about English peasants’ resistance to being pushed off the land. They called themselves the Diggers. What are some examples we know of where people resisted these attacks? What are some other names we know that people in struggle have given to themselves? How important are these collective names?

Capitalism originated with the dispossession of people from their homes, ways of life, and ways of getting what they wanted and needed. David Harvey argues that today we’re seeing similar forms of dispossession. What are some areas today where we can see this happening? And how are people fighting back?

The first presentation, about where capitalist wealth comes from, is about exploitation. Capitalists sell the things we do and make. The source of capitalists’ profits lies in the difference between our wages and the amount that they sell that stuff for. The material below that presentation points out that capitalists get wealth in another important way, through dispossessing people of their livelihoods. Exploitation and dispossession are important parts of capitalism today and the history of capitalism. David Harvey talks about the importance of uniting struggles against exploitation and struggles against dispossession. How well are movements today doing at this? What examples can we think of when this was done well in the past?

The last presentation is about the current economic crisis and where it came from. Understanding where the crisis came from is important, but it’s also important to talk about the meaning of the crisis. Many people suffered greatly and are still suffering from the crisis. And many people have been suffering under capitalism for a long time. How has the crisis had an effect on your life? What problems of life under capitalism have persisted under the crisis?

Suggested Reading on dispossession
Karl Marx discussed the origins of capitalism under the term “primitive accumulation.” Reading chapters 27-31 of his book Capital give a good overview of how Marx understood the origins of capitalism at least in England. These sections are much more readable than a lot of other things Marx wrote, they’re short, and they can be read without reading the rest of the book first. Chapter 27 is available online here, and the rest of Capital is online here.

The Midnight Notes collective’s essay on what they call New Enclosures is an attempt to talk about forms of dispossession happening now. Michael Perelman’s essay on the history of capitalism in England is worth reading as well. Perelman argues that economists knew that capitalism required state intervention to create and maintain.

Harry Cleaver’s commentaries on Marx’s writing are definitely worth reading as well. Cleaver discusses the historical origins of capitalism, more recent forms of enclosure, and resistance to enclosure.

The presentation works best if you click the “more” button in the lower right hand corner then click “full screen.” If the “more” button doesn’t appear at first then click the arrow icon once. When viewing the presentation, use the arrow icons or the left and right arrows on your keyboard to move forward and backward. You can pause the presentation by clicking on it. You can navigate among the components of the presentation by clicking and dragging the background. You can resume the presentation by pressing the arrow button.

Like I mentioned in my last post, I’ve started blogging at libcom. My thought is that this blog here (the one you’re currently reading) will be for notes and half-formed thoughts, so business as usual around here. I’ll also use this one for self-archiving. The libcom one, I will there aspire to have stuff more finished, like I’ll write a rough draft that’s fully finished then post it there.

So, for self-archiving purposes, I’m pasting below another libcom blog post of mine. If you go read the post at libcom you can see the picture and the links will work.

Occupy Everything, and Everything for Everyone

My dad spent Christmas a few years ago on the phone trying to reach a private prison in Texas so he could send a Merry Christmas wish. Earlier that week my stepmother and stepsisters, age 14 and 7, had been taken into custody by Immigration and Naturalization Services. My stepmother was a legal immigrant from Europe. Her daughters were not. She brought them into the country illegally after she got her work visa for a job as an accountant for a medical technology company.

After my stepmother got caught she showed up to all the hearings as ordered. At the hearing the week of Christmas they were taken into custody at the hearing with no warning. They walked in and were put in handcuffs and separated from my dad. The three of them were sent to the T. Don Hutto Center, a private prison in Texas run by a for-profit company. There’s a documentary out about it that I haven’t watched yet, online here.

The girls were kept there for three or four months. The girls were finally released to my dad, after having missed most of a school year, which they would have to repeat the next year. Five or six months of detention later, my stepmother basically being in limbo, her lawyer said “I feel really confident now that we can get you out, but it might take another year.” This is after about 9 months and about twenty thousand dollars in legal fees. My stepmother said she just couldn’t handle that and said she would prefer to just be deported. She was out deported soon after. It took around three months after that to work out the girls’ travel arrangements. My dad and my stepmother tried to keep it together for the next year but in the end their marriage broke up.

I read an article recently that said that at least 5000 children right now are in foster care because their parents are in detention or have been deported. That’s my family’s experience. There’s another article on this awful stuff here. I know someone will point out that my stepmother broke the law. That’s true. I don’t think that the law is just here. But setting that aside, detention and deportation as punishment is like impounding your car if you’re driving five miles over the speed limit. The punishment is way too harsh for the crime.

99%?
All this was on my mind in part because it’s been the holidays so I remember this stuff. It’s also on my mind because I’ve been talking with friends about all this Occupy stuff. I am excited about it but not as excited as I’d like to be. I’m excited because I’m a part of this 99% of U.S. residents who own very little of the country’s wealth. In the fall someone did a quantitative study of a website tied to the Occupy movement, and found that the biggest issues are student loans, children,unemployment, and health care. These concerns speak very much to me. I owe too much money in student loan debt. I’m a father. I’m employed and insured through health insurance for my family through my job. But I make less than twenty thousand dollars a year and the place I work has very little job security. I have nightmares sometimes about losing my job and losing my child’s insurance. I have been through numerous layoffs and spent several years uninsured. The 99%’s concerns are my concerns, I’m part of the 99%.

So I’m glad to see people standing up against some of the things that are wrong and things that affect me. At the same time, while I care a lot about these issues because they’re such a big deal in my life, the deportation of my family members isn’t as close to the core of the Occupy Wall Street movement as other issues are.

Occupy Wall Street is (and it matters to the degree that it is) a movement for justice. Not that my opinion matters much but I like Occupy Wall Street. In its grievances I can see some of my experience reflected – the sleepless nights because of worrying about money and losing my insurance and being able to provide for my family, the low pay, the past layoffs… I’d like to see more of my experiences reflected there, though, particularly the experience of Christmas a few year ago. What happened to my family was an injustice with terrible consequences. This shouldn’t happen anymore to anyone. What happened to my family has happened to a lot of families. And current estimates show that it will probably happen to 15,000 more children in the next five years. I care a lot more about this than I do about my student loans and my fears of losing my job.

Another reason I raise all this is because of recent conversations I’ve seen about demands for Occupy Wall Street. Like I said, I share the concerns people have over insurance, student loan debt, and unemployment. As such, I’d like it if we got universal healthcare, or forgiveness of all debts (“Debt Jubilee”), or a guaranteed basic income for all. I also work too much and so get less time with my family than I’d like, so I’d like it if we got a four hour workday.

But none of that gets at the deportation of my family. I’d like to see something about borders and deportation too. I like the simple slogan “No Borders.” The Repeal Coalition in Arizona expressed this as saying that all people should have the freedom to live, love, and work anywhere they please, and has called for and end to all anti-immigrant laws. I’m for that. But even that…

I am still angry about what happened to my family, and nothing will undo what happened. There’s no making that better. I don’t want that kind of thing to happen to anyone ever again, and it makes me furious, and very sad, to know that this is actually happening increasingly often, and often in worse ways, and sometimes to people with less of a support system. And like I said, I care more about this than I do about my student loan debt. But I don’t just want an end to deportations. I don’t have to choose between deportation and debt. I’m against them both. And more. I’m against a lot..! And I’m in favor of a lot. I’m against injustice. I’m for freedom.

Boundaries
Where I’m trying to go with this is that I want to say that demands involve a sort of metaphorical boundary. What I mean is, a demand is the thing that people in a movement want. In Occupy there’s no single demand. Often there aren’t expressed demands at all, and different people involve want a range of things. Still, people want specific things. That’s basically a demand. Whether it’s said explicitly or not, the demand is the thing that people want and that, if they got it, they’d be willing to return to business as usual, at least temporarily. People are different, lead different lives, so of course people want different things. I do think it’s notable though that there are more people in Occupy who seem to want student loan forgiveness or foreclosure relief than there are people who want an end to deportations or border policing.

I’m honestly not trying to criticize people for what they do and don’t want. People think with the ideas they have on hand, based on what they’ve experienced. And all of the injustices that are bundled together in Occupy are injustices, and injustice is unacceptable. At the same time… I don’t quite know how to put this… it seems to me that there is a We in Occupy. There are Occupiers. The metaphor of the 99% gets at this. Who Are We? We Are The 99%! Which is to say, who are we? People who aren’t the 1% richest people, people who don’t own most of the wealth. I’m in that group, I feel that. At the same time, you know who else is in the 99%? The people who deported my family members. The people who put the cuffs on them. The people who charged them. The people who guarded their cells in the private prison. So… some of the 99% deport some of the rest of the 99%. I don’t know how else to say this — that’s fucked up.

Some of the 99% do fucked up things to others of the 99%. When they do so, they probably help the 1% keep their position, but either way, doing fucked up things to people, well, it’s fucked up. Which is to say, it’s not enough to be the 99%. The 1% aren’t the only people I’m upset with. The division between the 99% and the 1% isn’t the only injustice. And I’d be more excited about the division between the 99% and the 1% — that is, I would be more excited about Occupy — if there was more attention to immigration issues there.

Let me try this another way. Like I said before, Occupy Wall Street is a movement for justice. That’s important. There’s a collective and individual piece of this. Collectively, Occupy Wall Street and the 99% are the names for a We who suffer injustice. We Are The 99% And We Have Been Wronged. Damn right we have. But like I tried to say, this is not the only injustice. In a way, making it mostly about wealth and making it 99% vs 1% in a narrow way, that involves an implicit ranking of injustices. Economic inequality is unjust. So is deportation and border policing. (So is gaybashing, so is sexual assault, so is police brutality… there’s a very long list of injustices in addition to economic inequality.) I am for fighting economic inequality. I am for Occupy Wall Street. But I want to see it expand. (I wrote a flyer that tried to get at some of this, it’s online here.)

I want to see Occupy Wall Street and the 99% expand not only in the numbers of people doing stuff and talking about all this, but also expand in the sense of having a bigger sense of justice. I want to see the grievances expand, so that the We behind We Are The 99% become bigger than We Are Victims Of Economic Inequality, so that the action of Occupy is bigger than Fight Economic Inequality. I want it to become We Are Victims Of Injustice, I want Occupy to come to mean End All Injustice. That’s the collective side. The individual side, that’s about who people see themselves as, and who they see themselves as part of.

Those of us who identify with the 99% metaphor, we’re people who are like “yes, I’ve been mistreated in terms of the economy. That’s wrong. The injustice done to other people about economic inequality, that’s my fight too.” That’s part of what I guess I’m trying to get at here – it’s my fight too. A much older slogan goes “an injury to one is an injury to all.” As in, an injustice to one person concerns the rest of us. Right now the 99% and Occupy agrees broadly that economic inequality harms all of us. That’s awesome. I want us to come to agree that all injustice harms all of us, including deportation and border policing, but not limited to that. I want us to agree to that collectively, and I want Occupy to become a place where individuals involved get transformed, where people have their moral horizons broadened, so to speak. That is, I want Occupy be something that makes participants find all injustice to anyone unacceptable, rather than economic inequality being the primary injustice. To put it yet another way, I want Occupy to become a movement for total human liberation. Maybe the demand could be Everyone Gets What They Need…

Like I said before, I am really not trying to put down Occupy for not demanding what I want it to demand. Occupy is a positive thing. It’s done a lot of good. It’s changed the questions and issues in the air politically. It’s changed a lot of people’s lives. I’m sure it has expanded people’s sense of their abilities and their sense of who the We is that they are part of. I like all of that. I just think it could go further, and I think it’s good to talk about different ways it could go further as… as a movement for moral transformation which is simultaneously a powerful movement that is fighting against the fucked up things that happen now. I’d like to see all of that continue, that expansion, until Occupy is a movement that believes an injury to one is an injury all (and so it’s not okay for some of the 99% to do fucked up things to other members of the 99%)…

I want this expansion to happen and I don’t really know how to make it happen. If I did, it would have already happened. I do have two thoughts here that I’m trying to work out. In my experience, a key part of people changing and people building relationships is hearing and telling stories. Our lives and our ideas of who we are and our relationships are largely made out of the stories we tell ourselves and each other. So one idea might be to have sessions for people to tell their stories. That We Are The 99% blog is an example of this. We could try to get more types of stories in the mix.

This relates to the second thought I’m trying to get at, which is that I think we could try to shape the meaning of the terms and images and metaphors in the Occupy milieu. I don’t mean argue over what words to use – do we really mean 99%?! – but rather I mean try to change what the words actually mean. We are the 99% is not really about income statistics, and it’s about unjust distributions of wealth. Let’s make the 99% about more injustices than that. My Family Was Deported – I Am The 99%. My Little Brother Was Attacked By A Racist When The Gulf War Broke Out – I Am The 99%.

What I mean is, let’s get more stories in the mix, and let’s own the terms. What does Occupy mean? It means end deportations. What does the 99% mean? It means we oppose all racism. And so much more than that. It means we commit to expanding people’s notions of injustice and expanding the We that people see ourselves belonging to, so that we all start to move toward an injury to one of us being an injury to all of us. So instead of a Robin Hood Tax or even no borders, I guess I’d like to see Occupy occupying as part of the view and the demand that everyone should have everything they need, and what people need above all is freedom.

So yeah, pasted below for self-archival purposes is the inaugural post at Blog 1578. If you check the original post over at libcom you will find links in the text.

*

Workers, the state, and struggle

In 1935 the United States Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). This Act is often credited by progressives with creating incredible new opportunities for the U.S. working class. The NLRA created a new regime of industrial relations in the U.S., but that change was less a matter of creating something new and was more a matter of further spreading practices that already existed. What the NLRA did is throw greater weight of the U.S. government behind a range of forms of workers’ organizing and left room open for unions to define some of the specifics. In an article in the Industrial Worker newspaper, part of a debate about what some of us sometimes call “direct unionism”, I dealt with aspects of this history.

The heart of the NLRA was about bringing to bear state power on employers, in a very limited way, with one main goal: greater stability for capitalism. One argument that supporters of the NLRA made was that state backing of workers organizing would result in redistribution of wealth into the pockets of more workers. This redistribution in turn would make for more consumers able to buy goods, thus encouraging economic activity. Another argument that supporters of the NLRA made was that the act would prevent more disruptive conflicts. In other words, the NLRA would channel and shape workers struggles in a direction that posed less of a problem than other forms of struggle.

Capitalists tend to have a good sense of their interests as employers. These terms aren’t ideal but employer-consciousness arises organically from the social relationship of employment under capitalism. Many readers will be familiar with this but in case anyone isn’t, generally speaking capitalists employ people to create goods or services which the capitalist own. The capitalists sell these goods or services for prices that are higher than the capitalists’ costs. That is, they sell the good/service for more than the cost of the materials and the wages of the people who worked on those materials in order to produce the good/service sold. When workers work on something, we increase its value. We’re not paid the full value of the increase we bring about, the capitalist keeps some or most of it. That difference – between the increase in value we bring about and the share we get in wages – is what Marx called surplus value. This is the heart of the profits capitalists make from workers. This is where capitalists get their wealth; this is what employers live on.

Capitalist employers have a sense that their employees produce surplus value and they act accordingly. If they don’t, they face threats from the rest of the economy – a capitalist who pays higher wages than other capitalists who sell similar goods/services will, all things being equal, fall behind. If they don’t become more competitive, they will go out of business. That’s part of what I meant when I said that employer consciousness arises organically. If capitalist employers don’t get enough surplus value from employees, they face penalties. These penalties help make employers relatively aware of their position as employers.

Awareness of the dynamics of being an employer is not the same thing as being a class conscious capitalist, however. Every capitalist is a capitalist in relation to his or her employees, but not every capitalist acts in ways that are favorable to the capitalist class as a whole or the long term life of the capitalist system. As an analogy, anyone who works for a living is in some way aware of the power relationships involved in being an employee but not all employees are class conscious workers. Workers sometimes act in ways that are bad for other workers or the working class as a whole. Similar things can happen with capitalists. Being a worker doesn’t automatically provide working class consciousness. Likewise, being a capitalist doesn’t automatically make someone a class conscious capitalist.

One of the roles of the state is to help identify needs for the current capitalist system and needs of the long term health of the capitalist system. I began with the National Labor Relations Board; the NLRA was part of an important set of institutional changes in U.S. capitalism. It involved challenges to many currently existing capitalists, and yet the changes were made in order to preserve the long term health of capitalism in the United States. The policymakers and economic planners who pushed for the NLRA opposed many capitalists but they did so in service to capitalism. The NLRA was an attempt to answer some problems within actually existing capitalism and to do so on capitalism’s own terms.

This is part of the role of the state, not only to attempt to identify systemic needs but also to try to get capitalists to act in line with those perceived systemic needs. This can serve to create capitalist class consciousness or at least to discipline capitalists to act in ways that planners believe are good for capitalism. In some cases this can result in long term benefits to actually existing capitalists but in other cases it involves some businesses being put out of business and, eventually, some of them or their descendants being ejected out of the capitalist class. This is part of why capitalists hesitate in the face of state introduction of changes – no capitalist wants to lose. If they do so enough times, they or their children might have to actually work for a living… In the words of the historian of slavery Eugene Genovese, in his book Roll, Jordan, Roll, “the great object of social reform is to prevent a fundamental change in class relations.” This means that reformers “muss fight against those reactionaries who cannot understand the need for secondary, although not necessarily trivial, change in order to prevent deeper change (…) reactionaries will insist that any change, no matter how slight, will set in motion forces of dissolution.” Sometimes capitalists oppose reform because they’re reactionary ideologically; sometimes they do so because they believe that they will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage in the new version of capitalism that will exist after the reform.

The state is in part a mechanism for helping identify problems that are systemic – tied to the interests of the capitalist class as a whole – and a way to work out politically how to respond to the capitalists’ class interests. That is, visionary capitalists and their functionaries in foundations and think tanks can use the state to put forward proposals and communicate them to others to try to win them to this view. If that fails, with enough political support from other capitalists (and some workers, in many cases), particular parts of the capitalist class can get the state to do certain things, to discipline individual capitalists who aren’t acting in line with what is believed to be the capitalist class’s over all interests.

Individual capitalists or fractions of the capitalist class don’t necessarily pursue the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. Often there is disagreement among the fractions of the capitalist class about what is the best course of action to pursue. That a given fraction is dominant does not mean it necessarily does what is best for the capitalist class, but usually the dominant fractions, and those who the state acts in service of, will believe they are doing what’s best for capitalism over all. The dominant fraction can be wrong, though. For example of this is health insurance in the US. The only measure according to which ‘our’ healthcare/health insurance (non)system makes sense is that of the profits of insurers. The current non-system poses public health risks (which can become political and economic problems) – for many people it results in less preventive care, which is cheaper to provide than other forms of healthcare. So it causes worse health outcomes, which cause loss of economic productivity and more expensive health care. This arrangement also raises the costs of the same procedure in the US. By maintaining a very minimal floor – you can always get treatment in a hospital emergency room if you have an immediate healthcare problem – the system results in very large amount of public dollars going to healthcare, in addition the excessively high private healthcare and health insurance costs. These expenditures are inefficient from an over-all social perspective, however, even according capitalist logic, because the high expenditures purchase lower quality healthcare. This is not good for anyone except the insurers making money off of it. Some of the costs are passed onto employers (via unions, via market pressures – need to have a competitive benefits package for certain jobs, and via taxes), as well as causing conflicts with employees that could be avoided. This is a form of highly mediated inter-capitalist conflict with regard to who gets what share of the total surplus wealth extracted from workers (some companies have to pay what would otherwise be profits). Over all it’s not good for US capitalism beyond insurers and a few others. That this arrangement continues demonstrates that changes in these arrangements stuff are not natural or built in to capitalism or predetermined, they’re political. Those politics include the class struggle above all, but also political conflict among the capitalists.

Sometimes an individual capitalist or group of capitalists pursues things that are believed by the dominant capitalists to be detrimental to the capitalist class as a whole and and so they need to be brought in line. To quote Eugene Genovese again, “The most advanced fraction of the slaveholders – those who most clearly perceived interest and needs of the class as a whole – steadily worked to make their class more conscious of its nature, spirit, and destiny. (…) For any such political center, the class as a whole must be brought to a higher understanding of itself – transformed from a class-in-itself, reacting to pressures on its objective position, into a class-for-itself, consciously striving to shape the world in its own image. Only possession of public power can discipline a class as a whole, and through it, the other classes of society. The juridical system may become, then, not merely an expression of class interest, nor even merely an expression of the willingness of the rulers to mediate with the ruled; it may become an instrument by which the advanced section of the ruling class imposes its viewpoint upon the class as a whole and the wider society. The law must discipline the ruling class.” Genovese is overly statist when he writes that “possession of public power” is a requirement, but he is right that state power plays this role in capitalism, in helping the capitalist class guide and discipline itself.

The NLRA brought the power of the U.S. state to bear on U.S. employers as part of bringing capitalists into line with what policymakers and economic planners at the time thought were the interests of the capitalist system. In my article in the Industrial Worker I used these points as part of argument against the IWW pursuing collective bargaining. I suggested that state endorsement of collective bargaining ought to make us pause. At the same time, while collective bargaining was what economic planners preferred, there is another component to the National Labor Relations Act.

In addition to helping spread collective bargaining, the NLRA included language stating “Employees shall have the right of self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in concerted activities, for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.” In the contemporary IWW in the U.S. some of us have advocated form of workplace organizing that go by a variety of names – solidarity unionism, minority unionism, direct unionism… These names track onto differences in practice but what all of these approaches have in common is that they fall into the legal category of “concerted activities.” In the United States there is legal support for attempts to engage in collective bargaining (understood to include a union contract and a single exclusive bargaining agent in the form of a union), but there is also support for workers “self-organization (…) for the purpose of (…) mutual aid.” What this means in practice is that in a non-unionized workplace one worker who complains about work conditions can be fired with impunity (part of a doctrine called at-will employment) but two workers who complain have gained a new sort of legal protection. Two or more
worker who approach management to make changes at work have engaged in protected concerted activity. If an employe retaliates against them, the employees can file a charge with the National Labor Relations Board, a charge called an Unfair Labor Practice. Now, American labor law at this point is weak and enforcement is poor, but the legal power brought to bear in cases of retaliation against two workers self-organizing to demand change at work is the same as that brought to bear in collective bargaining with recognized unions. Direct unionism can be just as legally protected as contractualism.

I can’t speak to the actual historical origins of the legal language protecting some forms of workers’ self-organization, but here are some reasons why I think this protection makes sense. One is about shaping the forms that workers’ struggle take – concerted activity is not protected when it breaks the law: violence isn’t protected, for example, nor is the seizure of employers’ property. Protecting some activity over others is partly a way to encourage or channel workers’ struggles into some forms instead of other forms. In addition, again to quote Genovese, “The law (…) may compel conformity by granting each individual his right of private judgment, but it must deny him the right to take action based on that judgment when in conflict with the general will. (…) It appears mere egotism and antisocial behavior to attempt to go outside the law unless one is prepared to attack the entire legal system and therefore the consensual framework of the body politic.” That is to say, by allowing some measure of redress, labor law helps make workers’ grievances a matter which can potentially be addressed within the capitalist system and under capitalist governments.

More fundamentally, though, I think the protection of concerted activity is about one of the same things that makes the state support collective bargaining: sometimes workers’ struggles can help advanced class conscious capitalists and the state preserve capitalism. The state, by backing workers’ struggles in some cases, bets on the potential power of those struggles to help capitalism. Workers’ struggles can do so by helping discipline capitalists into acting in ways that support capitalism, or by helping identify practices that are particularly prone to creating social friction, and perhaps by helping identify potential solutions to those practices.

None of this is to say that struggle always reinforces capitalism. Nor is this to say that we should reject the call for ‘direct unionism’ because it sometimes fits into activity that the U.S. state recognizes as acceptable (‘protected concerted activity’). Rather, the point is that those of us who are engaged in conversations about the form of workers’ struggles, including so-called direct unionism and other efforts to avoid the traps of collective bargaining and other institutionalized forms of workers’ struggles, we should have further discussion about a few things. One thing I think we should discuss further is the role of explicit, openly revolutionary political perspectives as part of our activity in struggle. (I discussed this to the best of my abilities in a discussion paper called Mottos and Watchwords. I think some of the reflections by Joseph Kay and other comrades in SolFed about what they call political-economic organizations are thought provoking on these themes as well.) Another is the connection between struggle over immediate conditions and the struggle to end capitalism. These are clearly connected, and yet it’s not the case that all victory in any particular struggle over the terms of life and work under capitalism is also a victory that brings us closer to the end of capitalism. The third point is that I think we should talk more about the ways in which workers’ struggles can sometimes be temporarily made to serve as a tool which some capitalists use to get an advantage over others and can sometimes be a source of innovations within capitalist institutions, innovations that strengthen the system and boost profits. Struggles and efforts can play this role even when strongly opposed by actually existing capitalists because capitalists, like workers, don’t always believe in or act in accord with the interests of their class as a whole. That capitalists fight or fought hard in opposing a reform can sometimes make it seem like a given struggle or victory is more radical than it is. Fourth and finally, I think we should discuss what it means if and when we make use of state resources and enforcement provisions. In the United States in IWW campaigns we sometimes make tactical use of filing Unfair Labor Practices charges with the National Labor Relations Board. There is much to be said about problems that can result from this. Among the potential problems one might be that we inadvertently encourage the view that the current system can accommodate workers’ grievances. Use of the NLRB to file ULP charges doesn’t necessarily reinforce capitalism or bad ideas among workers, but it might if we do it wrong. We should discuss better and worse ways to make use of this aspect of state power against employers.

On dispute resolutions. I think we can make a sort of chart of the relationships that groups have toward dispute resolution mechanisms. I’ll try to illustrate this via labor relations stuff but I don’t think the point is limited to waged work issues. Some believe in current mechanisms: file for NLRB elections. Others believe that current mechanisms need to be reinvigorated: file for NLRB elections, and do electoral work to shape who is appointed to the NRLB. Others believe that innovation is needed in current mechanisms in order to make them work better: pass the employee free choice act in order to make the NRLB work. Others believe that new institutions are needed, and sometimes these institutions are actively created: the creation of the NLRB in the first place in the 1930s is one example. Another would be campaigns like those of the UE in North Carolina in the public sector, where the state doesn’t sign contracts so the union has organized itself as a membership and action-based organization. The issue with each of these institutions is how to respond to a grievance. (I expect there’s also some effect here about shaping the form that grievances take in the first place but I have to think more about that.) When a problem develops how can the problem be resolved in order to maintain or restore normalcy.

We’re in a moment where normalcy is up for grabs to some extent; will the old normalcy be restored? Or will a new one be implemented? I mean here a capitalist normalcy of some sort – where accumulation occurs and is predictable. (I also think that the degree of breakdown of capitalist normalcy has been exaggerated, but I don’t know how to support this claim.) Dispute resolution mechanisms are about the restoration of normalcy. Proposals for new dispute resolution mechanisms are either proposals for new ways to maintain or restore old/current normalcy, or they’re proposals tied to a project of creating a new normalcy.

It’s possible for there to be high-friction normalcy. My friend Phinneas told me a story once about a strike in Canada at a plant where a number of workers were immigrant radicals from third world countries. Some of the workers said early on to the union involved something like “we’ve been through this at home, we know how this works, we kill a few of them and they kill a few of us and then we get our demands met.” Whatever else there is to say about this situation, it’s worth noting that dispute resolution mechanisms can involve routinized violence. My friend John O’Reilly has recently recommended to me a book on the Teamsters that talks about this, about use of violence to win contracts in the 1930s. Intensity of conflict alone is not always a problem. It’s the character of conflict, understood in context, that matters, and getting a grasp on that can be tricky. It’s not just a matter of militancy, it’s more a matter of orientation toward dispute and resolution.

I can say less about Adam’s ideas about universals, but the basic point as I understood is about universal justice – who is part of the group that expresses a sense of being wronged, and what the wrong is. This has an element of depth – is the issue economic inequality or is the issue capitalism? is the issue police brutality or is the issue policing and racism as such? is the issue that interest rates are too high or is it that debt is a form of wrong? is the issue overly-aggressive deportation policies or is the issue borders as such? – and it has an element of breadth – who is the grouping who has been wronged, explicitly or implicitly? is it white people, men, the unionized trades, legal immigrants, English speakers…?

Existing institutions of dispute resolution tend to exert pressures that push in the direction of making the struggle less universal in both senses, less deep (debt and inequality and wage raises, not capitalism; deportation not borders; police brutality, not race and police) and less broad, narrowing the We in a struggle (We the tradesmen, we the citizens). Pushes to change (or create new) dispute resolution mechanisms can be tied to efforts to change the degree of universality of a struggle in one of these ways, breadth or depth.

Relatedly, on Adam’s recommendation I read Wallerstein’s short book/long essay Historical Capitalism. It’s very good. Among the points I take from it is that national liberation and vanguardist movements that sought to seize state power were genuinely really important movements for justice, but on their upswing. Wallerstein makes the point that movements to take state power, if they succeed, become the people running state power, they have to govern. And they have to govern within a larger capitalist world system. That larger system and other capitalist powers in the world exert pressures on victorious movements to take the state; the new governors have to governor in a way that fits within the capitalist world system. There will be friction and conflict, of course, but regardless the new governors have to pass some pressure and discipline downward onto those governed. The new state power become part of the mechanism for passing pressures on to the populace, as part of the capitalist system. Wallerstein says explicitly that this makes the seizure of state power a reformist demand.

There’s another point here, not just about state power, which is about what I’ve elsewhere called trajectories of struggle. Struggles are waves. They rise, peak or plateau, then decline. Seizing state power can be an incredibly powerful goal, movements to do so can be very important as movements for justice while on their upswing. Once power is taken, though, that’s the peak or plateau. To use a spatial metaphor, there’s a difference between these efforts while they’re gaining or taking ground and these efforts when they’re holding or defending ground. Holding and defending ground means governing that same territory and passing on disciplinary pressure to those governed. This is true regardless of form, I think, whether it’s state power or a tenant organization or a union. A collective bargaining agreement is a matter of ground taken and defined and held and governed. In my view, for us this means we should orient toward upswings, but more than that obvious point, I think we should build organizations and institutions which will not hold ground, will not govern ground taken, and so will not become instruments of discipline transmitted from the broader context downward. Waves will peak and plateau and decline. The issue is what is the character of that peak, plateau, and decline when institutionalized in our organizations, and how this sets things up for creating or responding to future waves.

In this piece I laid out what I think are five components of organizations and struggles – “vision, goals, strategy, tactics, and logistics. Vision is the ideology and theory of the organization and our ability to assess current reality. Goals are where we want to get to. Strategy is the plan to get there. Tactics are the individual components of the plan. Logistics are the implementation and competency in carrying out tactics.” Oftentimes radicals end up being relative experts in one or two elements and they tend to push that element in their work (someone I know said once “if you have a guillotine, every problem starts to look like a French aristocrat” – people tend react to situations by playing to their strengths and experiences). And often there are needs in struggles with regard to each of these components. For example, I know people who have spent a lot of time in the emerging Occupy movement trying to up its administrative capacity to make it more efficient, essentially out of a worry that administrative or logistical problems will make Occupy’s wave shorter – make the movement not last as long. Others have pushed more militancy – make the peak higher in terms of level of conflict and tactics – while others have pushed on the movements goals in terms of demands. I wrote this thing about the implied We in the milieu – this is part of why Adam’s points on universals speak to me so much – and I know others have worked on trying to circulate ideas in the milieu to improve people’s analysis of the current moment.

Trying to tie these elements together, two final thoughts… One, I look forward to both Scott and Adam writing more on all this, it needs to be expanded and clarified, because I think this stuff offers some points of orientation for radicals in relation to movements. In terms of Adam’s stuff, we should try to work on the level of universality of movements, in their breadth and their depth. In terms of Scott’s stuff, we should also work on how movements orient toward dispute resolution, both current institutions and possible institutions of dispute resolution, and what the dispute is (this overlaps with the stuff on universality). I think this stuff tends to be more a matter of vision/values and goals and to some extent movements’ strategies, more than their tactics and their logistical/administrative side, though I also think that working within movements/struggles’ intellectual life could involve important administrative/logistical and tactical concerns — a reflection discussion that is poorly coordinated so that few people show up is less effective; one that is poorly facilitated so that people find it offputting or come away with worse ideas, such a thing is actively counterproductive. And of course, these ideas must be implemented effectively (Scott has distinguished between technical concerns and political concerns; I think this stuff from him and Adam is political more than technical, but at the same time if our politics are carried out in incompetent or ineffective ways then that doesn’t help anything and can set things back, so there are technical concerns too… there’s no theoretical solution to what to do, those decisions have to be made in context based on the needs in a situation).

Second and final, I don’t mean in any of this to say either “the struggle isn’t universal enough” or “the struggle has the wrong orientation toward dispute resolution” as an excuse to write something off. This isn’t dismissive. We play the hand history deals us. There’s limited use to criticizing movements and struggles for not being what we think they should be; the important bit is how to move things toward or contribute to creating what we want to see. We can mostly only move things via engagement and relationships. Furthermore, I don’t think we can count on a leap toward universality or toward the abandonment of dispute resolutions; people have to go through a process. I’m only going to speak to the dispute resolution side for now – even though I think that creating or maintaining dispute resolution mechanisms is not something we should not primarily orient toward, I also think that these thinks simply exist — compromise and negotiation are social relations and are inescapable, the issue we need to decide on how to act on is what form of compromise, not the fact of compromise; everyone compromises on the day after a dispute ends, because going back to work is a compromise, life under capitalism is a compromise. So at least for now I think it’s not so much rejection of all compromise and negotiation – I mean, yes, let’s dislike all compromise and neogotiation, but a genuine social practice of no compromises and negotiations is not something on the table in all historical moments – it’s a matter of what compromises and negotiations are and are not acceptable. I think it’s probably a positive sign when there are multiple and rapidly varying forms of and proposals for dispute resolution mechanisms, because that means that there’s less hegemony of mechanism and form, and less routinization and stability. I also think that people proceeding through an existing mechanism can be productive because they can come out the other side of it differently – it’s worth follow up on a company’s sexual harassment policies once, in order to be disabused of the notion that it can provide justice, and in order to be able to demonstrate to others that the policy is exhausted. Or, if the policy can work (and when such things work they usually involve a narrowing of some sort as I mentioned above) then it’s important to be aware of that and get a sense of how it works, as part of understanding the terrain we’re operating in.

David Gordon among others has argued that one of the core components of the U.S.’s prosperity after World War Two was a “limited capital-labor accord.” (On Gordon et al see http://books.google.com/books?id=ncgV5-fvEkoC&pg=PA578#v=onepage&q&f=false ) We can understand “limited” here in two senses – the accord could dampen but not alleviate class conflict, and there were limits in that only some of the working class was cut in on the deal. Gordon writes that for those in on the accord, “it provided the carrot of real wage growth, improved job security, and better working conditions in return for acquiescence to complete corporate control of the production process and allocation of the profits from production. For those millions excluded from the accord, by contrast, corporations continued to wield a heavy stick of intensives supervision and the threat of job dismissal – with wages, job security, and working conditions continually falling behind those in the more advantaged structures.”

The limited accord still meant that “corporations explicitly retained absolute control over the essential decisions governing enterprise operations – decisions involving production, technology, plant location, investment, and marketing. This set of corporate prerogatives was codified in the “management rights clauses” of most collective bargaining agreements. In return, unions were accepted as legitimate representatives of workers’ interests. They were expected to bargain on behalf of labor’s immediate economic interests, but not to challenge employer control of enterprises. Unions would help maintain an orderly and disciplined labor force while corporations would reward workers with a share of the income gains made possible by rising productivity, with greater employment security, and with improved working conditions.” (page 55 http://books.google.com/books?id=KIxkVOri1R0C&pg=PA55#v=onepage&q&f=false See also description of the capital-labor accord here http://books.google.com/books?id=vkO8Z_078GoC&pg=PA1054#v=onepage&q&f=false )

Gordon’s term “acquiescence” is unfortunate. I don’t think it’s so much acquiescence as it’s a matter of channeling and forming conflict. That it so say, there was still a tremendous amount of friction. The capital-labor accord didn’t eliminate friction, it reduced it and, even more importantly I think, it shaped the form that it took.

(Note to self, Lichtenstein places the decisive change in the immediate post-war period, I think it goes back much further than that; http://books.google.com/books?id=yd4GqkP5XYgC&pg=PA122#v=onepage&q&f=false )

This is the thing I want to think about – the form of social conflict and the role of social conflict in capitalism. This brings me back to the debate I started with, about collective bargaining and state planning. I’m right in this debate, but that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is that alongside the dominant approach – collective bargaining – was an overtone, or an undercurrent. (As an aside for thinking about later – the rise of a social structure of accumulation requires institutions to develop before they become dominant institutions; the history of collective bargaining via courts prior to the NIRA is one example of institutional evolution, as is the history of contractualism more broadly; this is relevant to the issue of collective bargaining but also more broadly to the evolution of social structures – there has to be some space to allow different experiments which could potentially be sources of future institutional innovation. Dividing up jurisdiction by geography and by section of government helps provide such space.) This overtone was the right to concerted activity outside of collective bargaining. Now, there were limits to this, but the point is that there was legal space created – there were mechanisms created to bring to bear the power of the state in enforcement – for workers’ activity outside of collective bargaining agreements. This means that the polemical association on my part between collective bargaining and economic planning cuts both ways. That is to say, I’m right that collective bargaining formed a core part of U.S. capitalist economic planning, but planners also made room for other forms of conflict: made room for it in the sense of creating state willingness to step in to act in support of it. The ILGWU winning an injunction in the late teens or early 1920s is a good example, prior to the national statutory regime brought in in the 30s.

The point here for now is that collective bargaining or not strikes me as the wrong issue. More important, I think, is that struggles can be pro-systemic sometimes, despite being serious, sincere, and genuinely heated and conflictual against some capitalists or against actually existing capitalism. This is some of what I’ve tried to get at in my couple posts about Marx’s discussion of the English Factory Acts in chapter 10 of Capital v1. This doesn’t mean don’t struggle and is not a matter of pouring water on anything or anyone, rather it seems to me a theoretical problem that we (well, certainly I) don’t have clarity on. Sometimes class conflict is part of the stick that disciplines some of the capitalist class (sometimes including throwing some of their fellow capitalists under the bus in service of their class’s over all interests) and helps force through institutional innovations (or the spreading or making hegemonic of institutional innovations, like collective bargaining). To put it another way, this is partly about return to normal and partly about acceptable levels and forms of friction. These can be quite high but still regularized in such a way that is pro-systemic and relatively stable. Maybe then the key bit is not intensity but variety of form?

[Bit to come back to --
the section "In the name of Humanity and the cause of Reform" http://books.google.com/books?id=eiDv9ag33WgC&pg=PT84 and "The Hegemonic Function of Law"
http://books.google.com/books?id=eiDv9ag33WgC&pg=PT52 ]

Old posts to return to –

http://crashcourse666.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/is-the-role-of-law-in-social-reproduction/

http://crashcourse666.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/is-governance/

http://crashcourse666.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/was-the-most-modern/

http://crashcourse666.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/does-the-progressive-era-say-about-class-composition-analysis/

http://crashcourse666.wordpress.com/2011/03/10/happened-to-all-the-air/

http://crashcourse666.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/is-going-on-in-the-world-recently/

Some of this is a conversation I’m not part of – economists’ fight over general equilibrium theory, recuperation of Keynes, all that. I’m just gonna leave all that sorta stuff out.

Aglietta suggests that neoclassical economics is actually unable to understand the real economy, and (in part because) it’s ahistorical. (9.) It’s basically prescriptive or normative, not explanatory. (10.) It “excludes from its ambit economic phenomena identified from observation of real practice as ‘imperfections’ rather than dialectically transforming its concepts” in response to actual phenomena. (10.) (I met someone once who after getting a degree in economics went on to study finance and said that finance helped him understand the real economy while economics didn’t. )

“To speak of reproduction is to show the processes which permit what exists to go on existing (…) to study the way in which innovation appears in the system.” Understanding the regulation of capitalism involves understanding “hierarchy in the constitutive relationships of the system” – what is most fundamental to capitalism. (12.) Aglietta will indicate repeatedly that for him what’s fundamental is waged labor.

Neoclassical economics involves the assumption “of economic subjects defined by a rational conduct that is alleged to be a characteristic of human nature (…) economic relations are then defined as modes of coordination between the predetermined and unalterable behavior of these subjects.” (13)
(See Oskar Lange, Political Economy v1. 1963)

“The study of capitalist regulation (…) is the study of the transformation of social relations as it creates new forms that are both economic and non-economic, that are organized in structures and themselves reproduce a determinant structure, the mode of production.” (16.) Aglietta asks what makes the system cohere, over time, and what changes we can see in the system’s cohering and in the forces that create (ie, the regulation that produces) systemic coherence.

The first part of the book will be about changes in the wage relation, the second half about changes in how capitalists have related to each other.
(Cites Balibar, “Surplus Value and Social Classes”)

Aglietta argues that recourse to the state is a sign of division between capitalists (19). Crises “ruptures in the continuous reproduction of social relations” but “periods of crisis are periods of intense social creation.” So the rupture can produce capitalst innovation as well as breakdown.

Aglietta periodizes US capitalism as involving “transformation of the labour process without major alteration in the conditions of existence of the wage-earning class” followed by “simultaneous revolutionizing of both the labour process and the conditions of existence of the wage-earning class.” (20.) The key issue for Aglietta is reproduction of capital and the capital relation.

“the antagonism of the wage relation and the competition between capitals that follows from it cannot be regulated simply by the laws of exchange. The organization of the capitalist class within the bourgeois state, and the development of the structural forms in which it is expressed, are indispensable for the expanded reproduction of capital across society as a whole.” (22.)

“Production is always the production of social relations as well as material objects.” (24.)

“the wage relation” has a “dual aspect as both a relation of exchange and a relation of production.”
“labour, as the creation of value, profoundly transforms its concrete characteristics as the creation of objects” – the valorization process subordinates the labor process. (25.)

“labour power in the wage system is absorbed in the production of capital”

“capitalism (…) transformed not only the labour process by also the process of reproduction of labour-power.” (25.)

“the state as a mode of social cohesion required by the relations of production that divide society into conflicting groups with heterogeneous objectives and unequal possibilities of action.” (26.)

Aglietta writes that he shares a concept of the state with Negri, Manuel Castells, Joachim Hirsch, and James O’Connor.

“dogmatism has long sterilized theoretical research” (29)

The “wage relation is not a private transaction that can be interpreted in commodity terms. It denotes the dispossession suffered by a class in a society dominated by private property. This is not a commodity relation. It is the logical contrary to a commodity relation, for it does not involve any exchange of equivalents. It is curious that Marx maintained the classical fiction of labour-power as a commodity in his own conceptual system, even though his decisive pages on primitive accumulation abundantly proved that it was the very opposite.” (31)

“the wage-earning class is involved in a mode of access to labour and a condition of life whose continuity goes far beyond the relations of commodity exchange that are reflected in the costs of reproduction borne by capitalist firms. Without a set of social norms, which are always relative and remoulded by class struggle, the conditions of capitalist accumulation would have no regularity.” (31-32.) Part of what states do is secure conditions for capitalist economic activity.