Jumbled Associations about Capital

Before I went to graduate school, I was living in Grand Rapids and writing applications with the help of an MSU community library card. It’s bizarre to me that I started working at that institution literally 10 years later. When I taught at a small college in Iowa, our research database access was terrible, and I also had a community library card at the University of Iowa. Access is usually free, and while you don’t have purchasing privileges, usually you have very good access to a level of information beyond the local public library when you have a community card. Currently I just have access to the local library, which is mostly due to never being able to access the university library during working hours to even go get the community card. But that limit to access also presents some interesting knowledge experiences: I had been reading Fraser’s book as an e-Book, but it got recalled. There’s also an audio version, so I switched from text to audio halfway through. Listening is a completely different experience - rather than singular quotations and specific details, listening is a “main idea” style of reading. I rewound the beginning of Chapter 5 three times this morning on a dog walk: there was pooping, there was Big T’s favorite local puppy, there was complete zoning out on a passage of literature review that I REALLY wanted to hear and comprehend. Many of my students were listening to their reading assignments by the time I quit: either they were listening to audio books of the readings or they were using an app like Speechify. It’s not that I mind listening, but I think it’s important to emphasize that only listening is not going to give them the skills they need to be really proficient in writing or parsing details rather than main ideas.

I’ve listened to the past two chapters: one is on nonhuman nature, and the next is on capitalism’s tendency to create and profit from political (politicized?) crisis. Fraser is also slowly developing her argument that the way out of these crises is to develop a strong political force that she calls ecosocialism, and that the reform of capitalism is not possible because of all the evidence she lays out about how capitalism is not just an economic system, but a system for organizing the whole of society in a way that leads to its cannibalization.

One of the threads that she’s been pursuing builds upon the work of David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism. I don’t currently have access to Fraser’s text, so I can’t look up and see if this book is referenced directly, but I’m very familiar with that book and know its arguments. In that text from 2005, Harvey attended to the ways that the shift to neoliberal capitalism - often characterized by the acronym DIP (Deregulation, Individualization, Privatization) - required abandoning the class compromise, where higher taxes on the wealthy funded public goods and programs for the poor. The class compromise was an essential element of social stability in the post-war period, up until around the 1970s, when neoliberal ideas stemming from the Chicago School started to reshape capitalism into its contemporary form as both financialized and globalized.

Fraser takes up this point of the class compromise and expands the historical context, pointing out that while workers in the North were able to pressure government through labor unions to provide the benefits of class compromise, this came at the expense of further degradation and expropriation of the Global South, ultimately stabilizing capitalism rather than disrupting its ability to plunder other sites in nature or other nation-states. The class compromise led to social democracy as a common political form in the North, which also stabilized the capitalist system rather than reworking it.

This point has made me reconsider which distributive processes that mostly take place through taxation that government can and should make possible. Taxation is a known form of redistribution, but what if taxation just permits the continued primacy of global corporate profit-making at other actor’s expense? That’s certainly Fraser’s theoretical argument, and is based on lots of other research on financialized capital and its effect on democratic practices.

Another point Fraser makes is that “politicism” - the desire to reform a political system without taking into account the faulty foundation of capitalism that cannot be reformed because of its inherent tendency toward political crisis and cannibalism - is insufficient. Meaning that tax reform and/or other political, institutional reforms alone - as the social democratic class compromise shows - will fall short in assuring a transecological survival of the human species:

We are currently facing a crisis of democracy. […] Contrary to bien-pensant common sense, it cannot be overcome by restoring civility, cultivating bipartisanship, opposing tribalism, or defending truth-oriented, fact-based discourse. Nor, contra recent democratic theory, can this crisis be resolved by reforming the political realm - not, that is, by strengthening “the democratic ethos,” reactivating “the constituent power,” unleashing the force of “agonism” [what the Germans call Streitkultur, or the supposed “healthy” conflict inherent in politics], or fostering “democratic iterations.” All of these proposals fall prey to an error I call “politicism.” By analogy with economism, politicist thinking overlooks the causal force of extra-political society. Treating the political order as self-determining, it fails to problematize the larger societal matrix that generates its deformations. (Fraser 114-115; Kindle renewal just came in:-))

This last point is interesting because it’s an error similar to the one that is made by free-market fundamentalists, who argue that markets will regulate themselves - but made about politics rather than the market. It further supports Fraser’s argument that we live not under capitalism, but in a capitalist society where capitalism structures every single bit of life.

As the dollar is abandoned these days as the global currency of choice, not only losing value but also no longer being the basis for bank wires and other trading mechanisms due to Chinese workarounds and technological growth, we are watching this process of cannibalization in real time. And that time is speedy: the breakneck pace of D0GE and the Trvmp administration’s ineptitude is wrecking havoc across the globe. The historical context that Fraser offers here also gives insight into the fights within Democratic Party traditionalists and emerging Democratic Socialist candidates: one believes in politicism and capitalism, and the other doesn’t, even if she critiques things like the Green New Deal as ultimately insufficient and still rooted in a capitalist framework. The Left is fracturing much as the Right did two decades earlier between fiscal conservatives, neoliberals, libertarians and right-wing extremists.

While Fraser has yet to look at the application of her historical interpretations in a practical way, one of the things that I find appealing about her writing is that it tries (we could argue whether it succeeds) to resist the call for revolution I find very common among leftists. Calls for revolution often simply privilege certain kinds of praise for activities and movements she calls “favorite practices.” As I try to figure out what kinds of small scale, practical applications could come from this kind of grand-ish theory, it’s very important to resist that personal favoritism. I like gardening, but there is a ton of evidence that says that small gardens, community gardens or farms are often more carbon-intensive than factory farming, even as factory farming done poorly can ruin topsoil by forgoing the possibilities of working with ecological best practices. Where’s the transeco leverage point there? If we hew to our romantic favorites, it’s may work against us if implemented on a large scale.

On the other hand, if politicism - in Fraser’s definition - ultimately cannot rework the flawed society upon which our contemporary daily life is based, then we need a different way of handling politics. Politics will never fully disappear from any human society. Politics is the negotiation of power and there will always be power; hence there will always be politics.

Whatever dreams Fraser is theorizing, none of them will likely become real in my lifetime. While theory gives me a more specific base from which to understand both historical context, the interpretation of that history, and a brief visionary sketch toward the future, it’s important to then pull back and try to think about what small adjustments could lead toward that future. No one builds housing by themselves. No one takes down corporate power by themselves. No one lives in a postcapitalist society. That theoretical romance with 1990s-style understandings of “agency” at least attributed power to small actions. I’m curious to see what Fraser tries to lay out as an applied practice, and whether it will sound like the detached plan of a theorist or the realistic plan of a pragmatist.