Blog Self-Critique concluded

This started out as a comment, a sort of anti-critique, on Walker’s post, but as I looked at Walker’s post, I realized that the points that I disagreed with were not actually specific to this post, but were more general claims made over the course of this blog.

The conception of society that the blog tends to claim exists in neoliberalism

The historical specificity of anti-Semitic populist movements


 Connected to the claim that working class politics are identity politics throughout history, is his claim that neoliberalism blocks any possible thought about collectivities. Within this logic, neoliberalism is understood, one-sidedly, as a purely individual ideology of markets and self interest, thus critique comes in the form of the collectivity. It seems to me that there are two separable issues here which are being muddled: a) the role of society within neoliberalism as strictly a theory of political economy and governance and b) the role of society within neoliberalism as the prevailing ideology of a epoch of capitalist accumulation—used in a manner akin to the way Fordism is used. A) I think that claims like Margaret Thatcher’s that “there is no such thing as society” have been taken too much at its word and out of its context. When Thatcher, and others, made this claim, what they were arguing for is the disarticulation of the state from social support. The Thatcherite claim that Britain is a society of shopkeepers is in many ways a harkening to a version of Adam Smith’s self-interested butcher, baker, and brewer. The presumption is that by each of these people acting in their own self-interest, behind their backs, the consequence is a general increase in social wealth and an increasingly interconnected and harmonious society. The invisible hand is a social effect of self-interest. Thatcher objected to the way that the state and the society had been fused in the Fordist epoch and, ironically, she sought to liberate society from the bounds of the state (and the state from the fiscal responsibilities to the society) as opposed to deny its existence. It is not for nothing that the revolutionary groups believed to have toppled eastern European and Soviet – not to mention other autocratic states – were seen as being civil society organizations. Neoliberalism actually reclaimed the category of society from the state and placed back in its classical liberal opposition to the state. B) Within the more general understanding of neoliberalism, society (as Bill Sewell has noted) became essentially synonymous with culture and nation. Concepts of society—and often its impending collapse—populate the critical discourse about neoliberalism, whether this takes the form of christianist critiques of the character of the US state, anarchist cooperative housing, or insurgent sub-nationalisms. I discuss this at length above, but if this blog is going to use neoliberalism the same way as Fordism, then the theory of neoliberalism needs to be capable of accounting for the form of these (partially) critical discourses. The claim that society does not exist in neoliberalism also begs the question of whether it exists in liberalism. The only answer can be an emphatic yes! As Adorno commented in his article “Society,” Society is a category of the Third Estate, in other words, society is a category of the revolutionary liberal bourgeoisie. (Bill Sewell has made much the same point.) Their central claim was that sovereignty lay not with the royalty or the clergy but with society in general. The classical liberal conception of society sees it as the consequence of myriad mediations and as quite difficult to grasp in any one particular moment and requiring a different level of abstraction in analysis. This type of argument runs throughout the Wealth of Nations, for example. Adorno cites two pre-Fordist thinkers Weber and Durkheim in the above mentioned article as exemplifying an antinomy of society within capitalism. Weber remained within the classical liberal tradition described above, while Durkheim subscribed to a vision that saw society as a “social fact” as the ultimate determinant of all social relations. There is no contradiction within Durkheim’s corporate vision of society. I think, though I cannot be sure, it is this version of society that is absent from neoliberalism has in mind. This type of cohesion was uniquely adequate to the Fordist epoch. However, just because one now finds the Smithian/Weberian version of society and not the Durkheimian does not mean that society does not exist or that there are no collectivities. After all, society and nation are both originally liberal categories.

Related to the claim that society and collectivity do not exist in neoliberalism, is Walker’s claim that the anti-Semitic populism characteristic of the National Socialists is historically specific to Fordism. This is a claim that 19^th century anti-Semites would find quite confusing and that runs quite counter to the claims made by Moishe Postone, the author that Walker cites. The categories that Postone uses to derive the particular form of romantic, populist anti-capitalism that is anti-Semitism are not categories that are specific to one period of capitalism. The claim made by Postone is that anti-Semitism can be explained with reference to Marx’s categories of the commodity, capital, production, and circulation all of which are part of all capitalist societies. Furthermore, the if Postone believed that anti-Semitic populism was particular to the Fordist era, then he would not be invoking it to help explain the left’s approach to Palestinian politics, the actions of left-wing terrorists, critiques of neo-conservatism, or critiques of the world bank and IMF during the post-Fordist era. If Walker believes that Postone is wrong and anti-Semitic populism is particular to the Fordist epoch, he needs to actually make that argument.

Finally, this point is somewhat distinct, but I think it is important. Walker argues that we should soft pedal critiques of those that understand themselves as being on the left because our goal is pedagogical and that these politics can change and become more adequate, however by being overly critical or theoretical we can alienate these groups. As evidence, Walker appeals to the authority of Marx’s politics. It is worth, then examining Marx’s a) analyses of the political left and b) the relative abstractness of his prose. A) Among the more “ruthless critiques of everything” Marx wrote were in fact of the left of his day. Whether that it is Proudhon, Bakunin, or the SPD, Marx pulled no punches and understood these people as engaged in politics and not in a life style, therefore able to withstand his criticism and change their minds or leave the stage. He felt no obligation to simplify his arguments against those that he thought were wrong. Doing so betrays a certain Stalinist popular-frontism, as if we were all on the same team, when “we” really are not—when “we” do not even exist. B) Marx believed that his Capital—arguably among the most philosophically complex and dense texts written—had the intended audience of workers in the workers’ movement. As Adorno said of bad forms of political thought, “Solidarity can call on us to subordinate not only individual interests but even our better insight.”