Autonomy names the fact not that artworks are free from external circumstances, but that precisely those external circumstances are actively taken up by works of art in ways that are irreducibly normative.
Action Time
Helen Petrovsky
Although I most certainly belong to the unfortunate category of “other Spinozists” that are cheerfully dismissed in the Introduction of Autonomy as those whom the book does not address, I will venture nonetheless to sketch out some of my doubts concerning the concept of autonomy as applied to contemporary works of art. Autonomy is indeed the central issue of the book. And its author, Nicholas Brown, appears to be a Jamesonian. I do not see how and why, all of a sudden, art that has long since lost its autonomy in every possible sense (Fredric Jameson writes about the lost autonomy of culture) can reclaim that status once again. The problem with autonomy, the way I see it, is not that it allows to seek and perhaps to finally obtain freedom from the market, but that it is a nickname for a conceptual frame and a perceptual practice that do not do justice to the changes taking place in contemporary mass societies. For let’s be absolutely clear: the subject—or rather the agent—of such societies is nothing other than the mass, whose dynamic (including what has been liberally called its aesthetics) should be examined in terms other than those of the individual. And autonomy is always about individuality.
So here is my first doubt regarding autonomy. Autonomy is on the side of individuals, whereas we, as citizens and cultural critics, belong to mass societies. Our functioning and intellectual well-being is mediated through the masses. I think that here, at this point, there would not be much disagreement between myself and the author of Autonomy who is undoubtedly a Marxist. I may not be one in the technical sense (although Capital was on our high school curriculum), but I do respect Marx’s vision of society as a dynamic of social relations. And it is precisely this vision that I would like to emphasize, including the ways in which it impacts his understanding of commodity exchange and circulation. Albeit I am not an expert in the field, I think that with the advent of financial capital in particular and corporate capitalism in general the old schemas, such as Commodity—Money—Commodity or even Money—Commodity—Money, undergo an essential transformation. Which is to say that the functioning of money is no longer tied to commodities per se, but demonstrates a logic of its own. And works of art are turned into forms of investment rather than remaining good old luxurious objects. I appreciate the ambiguity and/or candidness of the following remark by Damien Hirst, one of the richest living artists: “I really believe art is the most powerful currency in the world.”
But again, here Nicholas Brown and I seem to be in accord with each other about the market becoming something that the work of art cannot bypass. And I do agree with Nicholas when he states that “the concept of medium or material support must be expanded to include the commodity character of the work” (pp. 22–23). However, when he reintroduces the definition of a work of art on the basis of its immanent purposiveness, which is a direct reference to Kant’s third Critique, the following question arises: where is the place of the transcendental subject in today’s reality? The aesthetic judgment is not just any judgment, to be sure, but one that is integrated into an elaborately complex philosophical system. But how precisely does it meet our current needs (and here I return to the book), besides providing us with the happy thought that art is made with no extraneous purpose in mind, that it is, so to speak, disinterested? Another way of saying the same thing is that art is made for the pure enjoyment of making (which is reflected in Duchamp’s pun on the “impossibilité du fer,” the impossibility of making, that is, of art serving instrumental goals). Yes, we can certainly retain this definition, but, with the transcendental subject removed from the picture, how can it account for the present state of affairs? More generally speaking, I don’t see a place for such an isolated, prescribing, and ultimately condescending position in the society we live in today.
Which brings us back to the masses. How does autonomy correlate with the masses? If it is backed up with categories such as intention, normative meaning (the meaning of a work of art to be gained through its interpretation – the privilege of a chosen few), and, finally, a “restricted field” of the work’s application, in what way then does it translate the needs and desires of those masses? I’m afraid that reaffirming autonomy under the present conditions is not unlike insisting on the comeback of the Benjaminian aura, which, to follow Benjamin’s own logic, is apprehended by us only at the moment of its historical disappearance. It would seem that both of these moves point to a certain nostalgia, the nostalgia for something that has disappeared for good. The lost object is nothing other than the value of a work of art. Works of art (yes, the definition itself is problematic and outdated) have lost their value in contemporary culture, and we have to learn to live with that. They are marketable commodities, no doubt. But economic circulation is at the same time communication: the mass societies we are a part of are also highly technological (although the distribution of wealth, technological wealth included, is becoming rampantly unequal). So once again: who is the subject of perception? Apparently not a contemplating subject, one that would nicely fit into Kant’s definition of art. It is not an “I” but a “we,” something that Benjamin recognized in the early days of technical reproducibility. And as such this “we,” the new subject of aesthetic judgment (this is where Jameson’s cognitive mapping steps in), calls for revised methods of analysis. Indeed, the transcendental perspective—transcendence itself—no longer holds for the masses.
This is not the place to develop an alternative approach. Suffice it to mention the crisis of representation on both the political and purely philosophical levels, which has immediate implications for the work of art. In this perspective, which is essentially that of the masses, a work of art is no longer object but process. Not a self-legislating entity where “the logic of the whole subsumes the logic of its parts” (p. 112), but what I would call a dynamic sign, for lack of a better definition. This sign is a configuration of various forces, including those that transform or even deform the artwork itself. Going back to Marx, we might think of a work as a set of relations. In other words, there has to be a way of doing justice to what Raymond Williams defines as “structures of feeling,” regarding them as an expression of the social dynamic itself. (I will only briefly mention that for him they are “pre-formations,” indicating social experiences “in solution,” that is, in a nascent or vibrating state. The feeling and thinking that he is implying is both social and material, however each being “in an embryonic phase” and thus preceding what he calls “fully articulate and defined exchange.” But exchange is already in place, and neither “world-view” nor “ideology,” these overarching Marxian concepts, can account for the social as it is actually practiced and lived.) The problem with representation then – and also with the work of art as an internally balanced object – is that it always comes too late: we tend to concentrate on the shell, endowing it with value in whatever sense, instead of unraveling the social energies—but not yet meanings!—which it imperfectly conveys.
So, I will repeat: the work of art is an echo of a process, the movement of social matter itself. Social movements in general are about equality and justice, whereas autonomy is not. I would even daresay that autonomy produces inequality. The days of the vanguard are gone, be it the historical avant-garde or the party as the vanguard of the proletariat (I well remember, again from high school, Lenin’s idea of inculcating consciousness in the workers from the outside, a tribute to the Party’s and/or intelligentsia’s supremacy). Today’s social movements display an obvious lack of leadership—they are acephalic—as well as discernible patterns of action. They teach us to be distrustful of each and every value, including those that are most dear to us politically. Indeed, the Kiev Maidan (2013–2014) is often referred to as a Revolution of Dignity, and yet dignity in this case is not an individual virtue, but an irreducibly collective gain. It is the ethos of action itself, action that is necessarily collective. This may sound rather far-fetched, however it is my deep conviction that art today cannot be viewed independently from the global movements that we witness in different parts of the world. And when I mention the masses, I am insisting on this very dynamic which escapes the logic of closure and representation, which, in other words, is relational. Even photography is not a representation, but a network of relations, something that is very difficult to grasp (no wonder: we are used to dealing with images and to reading them as texts). Photography is just a graphic example of the concrete universal. But if Jeff Wall cannot be understood without Heidegger (a suggestion that initially comes from Michael Fried), well, then I am really sorry for Jeff Wall. For photography itself is no less instructive than Heidegger’s philosophy.
But, of course, Wall is full of allusions and that’s why he tricks the critic into entering the stuffy world of intertextuality. Cindy Sherman, on the other hand, is much more democratic. I will not expand on my own interpretation of her work (I have had a chance to analyze it in terms of a dynamic fetish and its displacements), but I will point out one specific detail: her series are not only untitled (which invites but also rules out various interpretations), they are likewise always addressed to a broad, i.e., non-professional, audience. And the response that they elicit from such viewers is a long way from the ascription of any kind of meaning to her works. Which is to say that before any meaning takes shape, the response is already there (again a “pre-formation”): viewers of her “Untitled Film Stills” responded right away with recognition (a fact that was mentioned by Rosalind Krauss). They recognized something that they had never seen before, namely, stills from non-existent movies. So what is all this about? Recognition of this kind points to the existence of a shared affective space, that of fantasies and dreams (in Sherman’s case they are fantasies of recent history). Its fabric is illusory and fuzzy. But dreams, just like ideas, can well be material forces, implying a dimension of social being that is nothing other than being-together which actualizes itself in this or that specific mode. This space has nothing to do with the true and the false (to be more exact, it is always about the workings of the false), yet somehow it has to do with Kant’s aesthetic judgment, if we remember that it is “universality in abeyance” (universalité en souffrance), to use Jean-François Lyotard’s definition. Indeed, the aesthetic judgment (in its capacity of sensus communis) remains an indeterminate norm, but one that takes account of the mode of representation of all the other men and women. In short, communication as opposed to meaning or, rather, meaning that arises from connectedness itself.
Predictably enough, I would like to support popular entertainment that Nicholas Brown is so scornful of. What the endless TV shows tell us (irrespective of their artistic quality) is that we as viewers belong to a certain environment, and this environment has largely been created by the cinema. In order to understand this new situation, where the viewer—any viewer—completely loses his or her autonomy, it is worthwhile recollecting the French entomologist Roger Caillois and his concept of fascination, i.e., an obsession with space. Analyzing mimicry in the natural world, Caillois makes the following rather stunning observation: some living organisms are tempted by space to such an extent that they lose their individuality, becoming an integral part of their environment. What occurs, in other words, is the obliteration of boundaries between the self and its surroundings. This is just a helpful tip that makes us better understand how cinema produces a new form of sensibility that cannot be overlooked if we still choose to speak of aesthetics. In the same way, sampling in contemporary music, a technological offshoot of bricolage, invites one to consider samples, these specific building blocks, as units of a collective sensibility. (Which, by the way, allows us to apply the conception of the ready-made to a wide gamut of cultural practices.) Generally speaking, the most powerful forms of culture industry (photography, film, popular literature, music, etc.) can be used as instruments for analyzing the present state of affairs, namely, our place and functioning in the global technological community. Provided we give up transcendence, of course.
So, to finish my remarks. I am grateful to Brown for initiating this debate, even if it wasn’t his explicit aim to do so. Here is how I would briefly summarize the differences in our approaches: relationality versus autonomy; collectivity versus individuality; equality versus inequality; action versus contemplation (or interpretation). Today is the time of action. And you, on your side of the globe, certainly know it better than anybody else.
The Compulsion of Sedimented Form: Aesthetic Autonomy and Culture Industry
Marina Vishmidt
For Adorno, the market existence of an artwork was extraneous; it always came second, analytically speaking. For Nicholas Brown, it is simply an unavoidable parameter, forming its condition of legibility as an artwork; thus, institutional definitions cease to have traction. This is why Brown can pursue an inquiry wholly indebted to Adorno, Kant and Hegel and discuss figures such as Ben Lerner, The Wire, and the White Stripes, a trajectory he has been working on for several years through essays published in this journal and elsewhere. As with those philosophies of the aesthetic, for Brown the stakes of autonomy as a social ontology of art lies nearly exclusively on the side of reception, not production; or, perhaps more to the point, in the nature of the artwork that mediates reception and production. Thus the book juxtaposes one form of immanence with another: the historically unprecedented immanence of the market to artworks may be confronted or suspended when works succeed in realizing an immanent purposiveness, and thereby make their claims to aesthetic autonomy. One of the primary vehicles for this claim, in Brown’s account, is genre, and the significant discussion on this is found in the chapters cited above.
Brown may not be talking about visual art as his referent for “art,” but this is not only to demonstrate that autonomy can extend to artefacts of popular culture, but so can the category of “art,” underlining Burger’s thesis that art and autonomy in modernity are different names for the same thing. Autonomy is the ideological (de-historicized and essentialised) social fact of an exemption from the relations of capitalist production. Precisely because it is a social fact, or, more strongly, a social ontology, it cannot be transcended ethically, strategically or through any variant of “critical practice.” This is a state of affairs whose disavowal has become consensual in contemporary art. But if the modernist commitment to autonomy is revealed as aesthetic ideology, i.e. an imaginary relationship to the real conditions of existence, that doesn’t bring a contemporary commitment to heteronomy any closer to truth. Like modernist autonomy, it’s a productive ideology, with autonomy ever ritually slain by those constituencies of the institution of art that are committed to extending art’s capacities beyond its walls, or re-situating it as yet another managerial “competence” useful in any manner of predicaments. In this regard, it’s to be noted that the emphasis on experience and interaction in art that tends towards “social practice,” as has been critiqued by Claire Bishop and others in recent years, as well as the spectacle economy of “mirror rooms” and ice cream museums, is taken up by Brown as an equation of experience with the heteronomy of the market, with “external contingent compulsion” rather than internally generated meaning – a meaning which is excess to the medium or the institutions that condition it.
One of the more fascinating turns in the argument is its foray into a value-form theory spin on the determination of the artwork’s autonomy as internal law vs external demand. This is sketched out early on in the introduction although not developed elsewhere. Specifically, it is intended as the response to a question that paraphrases, as it were, the question of autonomy: why is the social ontology of art different from the social ontology of all other commodities? The difference is surprisingly simple. Using Marx’s circuits of c-m-c’ and m-c-m’, Brown shows us that in the first circuit, the commodity is an end in itself and its exchange is mediated by money; this corresponds to use-value. In the second, the telos is money, mediated by the commodity, and this corresponds to exchange-value. The difference, however, is set out in affective terms: “What we have arrived at is an entity that embodies, and must seek to compel, conviction and an entity that seeks to provoke interest in its beholder—or, perhaps, all kinds of different interest from different beholders.” (p. 6) Although the gulf here is seen to be an ontological one, the two circuits can also be seen, as they are in Marx, as different moments of the same process, or, as Brown puts it, the same process considered from different standpoints. Such dialectical agility shows the mediating hand of the “systematic dialectic” and the return to Hegel that has pervaded some corners of Anglophone Marxist theory since discussion and translation of the wertkritik publications started to emerge in roughly the past decade, a project that Brown has also been dedicated to (Brown, Larsen, Nilges, Robinson, 2014). What it also does is give a potentially solid Marxist theoretical footing to the book’s orthodoxy vis-à-vis the thinkers of aesthetic autonomy, which is to say, the insistence that the question transpires purely on the side of circulation.
The close readings that comprise the substantive part of the book are each persuasive exercises in “reading for autonomy” as the tracking of internal coherence in art works, whether in the visual arts, novels, television series, or albums, with respect to their participation in the social, historical and formal conditions of their “genre.” The innovativeness of the approach, at heart a classical one, is in the possibilities thrown up by bringing the autonomy thesis out from the hothouse of high modernist art into a much wider field and into the present. Autonomy is thus concerned to show there much life yet in the category and the problems it identifies. At the same time, there is a moment in the epilogue, which vies with the introduction in density and abundance of conceptual energy, where an opening towards a differently articulated notion of autonomy is made. This is the discussion of “purposiveness without purpose” as it reflects on Roberto Schwarz’s renowned essay on Kafka’s Cares of a Family Man, and its uncanny homunculus, the spool-person Odradek. While the character may represent the impossible, phantom underside of the “bourgeois order,” what is more interesting, according to Brown, is its evacuation of the punitive structures of that order: “a lumpenproletariat without hunger and without fear of the police.” (p. 181) As such, the figure of Odradek is an analogue to the “internal, unemphatic other” (Brown) of the artwork, in its purposelessness and its vague menace to all right-thinking. But what if its excess, its negativity were to be followed as worklessness, as the negativity of labour? Neither the dimension of labour as internal negativity to capitalist valorisation, nor the art-adjacent psychology of “human capital” formation, are broached in the version of autonomy as strictly artwork-immanent here. But neither the immanence of the contemporary artwork to the cultural market nor its institutionally underwritten internal coherence can really be grasped when neither producers or consumers—the subjects for such objects—come into the picture. Can an object be autonomous when autonomy as a disposition or a relation becomes unavailable to its viewers, to take up Brown’s contention that market saturation has now engulfed pretty much everything? As Catherine Rottenberg notes, “Human beings are remade as specks of capital so that our relationship to ourselves and others becomes one of capital appreciation. Our relationships are perceived as forms of capital that need to be invested wisely in order to enhance the self’s overall value.” It could be argued that if there is no space left for an autonomy of the subject, the autonomy of the object becomes something akin to a Zen koan. The internal, unemphatic other to capitalist values becomes a talisman of another civilization or spacetime, not ours.
Positioning Autonomy
Fabio Akcelrud Durão
The publication of Autonomy is more important than it may seem at a first sight. Even a superficial reading of it can discern at least two merits, which in and by themselves would already justify attention. The way the book combines theoretical sophistication (at last a literary critic who understands Hegel!) with inventive and rigorous textual analyses is a rarity indeed in our critical climate, marked as it is by that curious division of labor which separates those who theorize but can’t read and those who read but can’t theorize. To this, one should add Nicholas Brown’s astonishing dexterity in not only handling different artistic genres according to their own peculiarities by utilizing the metalanguage they require, but also in putting them in dialogue with each other as they respond to the same interpretative questions; in fact, one of the achievements of the text waiting for further development is to outline a contemporary mini-system of the arts.1 Impressive as they are, however, these qualities don’t touch what is really crucial about the work, namely that autonomy here is not just a topic, theme or subject, but rather something which allows us to delimit a determinate position in the current debate in literary and aesthetic theory. As such it paves the way for promising future elaborations, at the same time that it invites a reconstruction of the recent past as we search for filiations and precursors. In order to avoid any misunderstanding, let’s call this position, not Marxist aesthetics, but Marxist aestheticism: a concern not with what artworks contain, but with what (and how) they are.
When affirmed bluntly, Marxist aestheticism’s main tenet surely sounds like a truism; as an isolated statement, to say that artworks are intransitive entities, that they should be dealt with as objects on their own right and as a result should be considered on their own terms, according to the internal laws they themselves propose—to say all this seems irrefutable enough, but when one goes in the other direction and tries to extract the underlying premises from the sea of contemporary criticism nothing could appear more remote. Without emphasizing it, Brown stages a fight against the whole heritage of structuralism in what it has of most basic, as can be seen in his association of intention with meaning. Each concept deserves to be taken separately: intention has become a swearword and a straw man in literary theory since the New Critics on; it is commonly regarded as a vehicle of presence and metaphysics, but it may very well be that metaphysics actually resides in the eye of the beholder as she situates intention in some impalpable and ethereal real. As Brown observes, “[i]ntention as an event in the mind is inaccessible even to the mind in which it ostensibly occurs. Intention in the current sense, as we shall see in a moment, can be ascribed only by means of close attention to the matter in hand.” (p. 12) It is in the object (as is the attention needed for reading); it need not refer to a preexisting immaterial plan, but can designate the process whereby the author witnesses her work acquiring a life of its own. It is the opposite of imposing signification on the material: a fundamental thrust of intention is to perceive where the work wants to go and allow for it.
As for meaning, it logically derives from the claim to self-legislation. Autonomy as a theoretical position can only make sense in relation to artifacts intended to stand on their own; for those products directed to the market, aiming to sell, interpretation on aesthetics grounds is futile; as Brown points out, they can be studied sociologically or anthropologically, but not as artworks.2 The insistence in the opening chapter of Autonomy that cultural items produced for the market are devoid of meaning will certainly meet fierce opposition from several quarters, for it goes against one of the strongest commonplaces both in academia and the culture sphere at large today, that meaning is itself something available and abundant. Meaning may be hard to be attained, or it may even resist signification in the ineffable etc., but never be simply lacking, just nothing to find there: the frustration is the same as when the consumer feels cheated of a product she acquired. Again, this is a case of de te fabula narrator, because the belief in the ubiquity of meaning, deriving as it does from a semiotic model, either dual as in Saussure or tripartite as in Peirce, not only degrades the concept, levelling down what meaning is and thus foreclosing the differentiation between emphatic and redundant meaning; it also places the interpreter in a quantitative realm (the more meaning the better), inserting her in capitalist mindset of accumulation. In Autonomy, the word “meaning” carries some of the weight of the German Sinn and is reserved for special cases where there is the appearance of something qualitatively different, something unexpected and which is capable of generating new knowledge. Short of that, it’s business as usual.
Another point that goes very much against today’s critical doxa and which is likely to surprise readers is Brown’s defense of the institutions of art in general, but first and foremost of museums. In Autonomy, they are not believed to be neutral or transparent entities, but they are not simply repressive places either. In them one can surely find all kinds of injustice, personal favoring, veiled group discrimination etc., but for all that they represent in the present the only alternative to the logic of the market, notwithstanding all the pressure it exerts. Even for the most questionable decisions concrete grounds must be furnished, at least a relative consensus in the interpretative community must be reached, a minimum of accountability can be expected. As for the obvious role money plays in the art world, an a priori suspicion against institutions helps blur the struggle between public access and privatization forces underlying institutions’ policies. Foucault and Althusser have had harmful influence in this regard, indirectly promoting the market by fostering a general skepticism vis-à-vis institutions.
As an original way of characterizing literature and the arts Marxist aestheticism can be distinguished from current trends in theory today. Let’s take four of them into consideration. The first one, Autonomy’s main target, is expressed by the belief that artworks are commodities like any other. Sometime ago this may have had the flavor of ideological unveiling, but now it is just a commonplace that occasions embarrassing contradictions. If really defended, it would probably result in the closing down of museums and other art institutions, including literature departments, which would lose any basis for legitimation; the fact that this doesn’t happen shows that the equation of the world of art to that of commodities tends to be expressed through an impure belief, an uncomfortable position of “yes, but” or “even so.” The alternative to this—if one doesn’t want to appeal to something external and contingent, as one’s identity traits or traumatic experiences—would be for critics to fully acknowledge art’s commodification and to champion it as cultural or symbolic capital. Again, while the concept might have had some use in the past as it was imported from French sociology, in our current situation it just legitimizes social privilege. In this regard Brown turns the question around and offers an important argument that is useful for the perennial debates on cultural capital, the canon etc.: “The claim of elitism, for example—the class stratification of aesthetic response—accrues to the claim of universal heteronomy rather than to autonomous art. If nothing essential distinguishes between art and nonart, the only distinction left—and some distinction is necessary for the word “art” to have any referent, not mention to populate the institutions that still exist to preserve, transmit and consecrate it—is between expensive art and cheap art, or art whose means of appropriation are expensive or cheap to acquire.” (p. 32) In other words, assuming that art is just cultural capital already situates the person espousing this view in the non- or anti-aesthetic field. De te fabula narratur again: it may very well be that you are more obsessed with money than (with) the work.
The second and third positions can be approached together, for in their contradictoriness they ironically support each other. Politicizers of art need conservative humanists to provide the kind of resistance allowing them to justify their fight, while the latter take advantage of the attacks they suffer as a smoke screen so as not to contrast the values the arts are supposed to embody to what the world has become in reality. The belief that all art is political can also be considered commonplace today, but the perspective of autonomy not only asks if this is the best arena for mobilization and agitation (the revolution starting at the Guggenheim), also maintains that the focus on the message or content of a given artifact necessarily and unavoidably reduces its artifactual character. It is undeniable that works produce all kinds of effects, and that political ones are among the most relevant, but any imputation of finality already establishes a particular kind of reading lenses that subtracts from the work what it can be. Brown’s self-discipline in not taking such potential political effects into consideration (even mentioning that he shouldn’t address them) is remarkable. On the other hand, against conservative humanists, today clearly residual but available for resurrection at any moment, Marxist aestheticism argues that the perspective of autonomy does not refer to a world of values ahistorical or not, but rather is only tenable on the background of the universalization of the commodity form. The same argument can be used to distinguish Marxist aestheticism from North-American deconstruction, which espouses the view that literature and art in the end are only about themselves and about their own impossibility of being understood. Again, autonomy in Brown’s book is firmly grounded in the historical predicament of the total universalization and imposition of the commodity form.3 There is nothing ontological about this: in the past, art’s only imperfect subsumption to the market affected its relation to institutions and the public; in a more equitable world its communicability would change drastically. In sum, now we can see how truly dialectical is Brown’s definition of art as the non-emphatic other of capital: for those considering it sheer merchandise, you have the “other,” while for those demanding political effectiveness, the “non-emphatic.”
As Autonomy points out in its very last page, “[a]rt that wishes to confront capitalism directly, as an opposing force, turns instead into a consumable sign of opposition” (p. 182); this doesn’t mean, however, that art evades politics, only that it has its own peculiar one. Discussing Kafka’s “Worries of a family man” and spurred by Roberto Schwarz’s reading of it, Brown remarks that “[t]he work of art is only a work of art; its self-determination only holds within its own boundaries. It has no emphatic form. But when Kafka brings purposiveness without purpose, the Kantian schema for the work of art, into emphatic non-artistic experience—as can happen only in a work of art—it begins to look like something that threatens the entire edifice on which the family man stands. Odradek threatens not through violence, but through its mere existence: a lumpenproletariat without hunger and without fear of the police.” (p. 181) This passage is exemplary by the way it shows how starting with the assumption of autonomy politics manifests itself in unforeseen manner. It’s an oblique logic, which can already be detected in the claim for art’s “mere existence”: by insisting in being for-itself it calls attention indirectly to the fact that under capitalism the right to exist seems to be dependent on the for-other of the market. Much of the discomfort and the projective effects generated by the assertion of autonomy come from this.
The book presents and develops several interpretative gestures based on the assumption of autonomy. In the first chapter, which treats photography and film, we find “the thematization of narrative as a site of struggle” through “successful attempts to fold the appropriative line from artwork to audience into the immanent structure of the work.” (p. 45) This then is transformed into a question of standpoints, of class positions which a work like Morning Cleaning subsumes into its own form. The second chapter handles the question of experience in literature as it is subjected to a defensive kind of irony, “a structure, in giving experience meaning, undercuts its character as experience”; the novels interpreted “producing the market internally as a risk to be courted, understand the problem of experience as a version of the problem of the market.” (p. 82) Dealing with music, the third chapter discusses the figure of “citation or framing a preexisting text to create a unit of meaning that will be relativized by the ‘objective dynamic of the whole’” (p. 122), for “[c]ited, forms assume meaning as gestures.” (p. 127) Finally, Autonomy closes with an analysis of how genres can be aestheticized on TV; the series The Wire, for instance, “understands genre as a certain structure within which one can move, not as a kind of surface that can be simulated.” (p. 169) These brilliant interpretations are indeed successful inasmuch as they cogently expose and describe compositional procedures whereby artifacts appear as self-determining entities. Yet some questions emerge in the process, which would be worth pursuing:
And to conclude, a few words on filiation. The three most important precursors to Autonomy are Adorno, Jameson and Roberto Schwarz. The book profits from the work of each of them, while at the same time adding some new and fresh element. From Adorno, who himself draws on a long Marxist tradition, Brown adapts the opposition of art and the commodity; his writing may be not so dialectically dense as Adorno’s, but his malleability, his capacity to speak from the objects is invigorating vis-à-vis a certain Adornian tendency to utilize the same concepts for the reading of different artefacts. From Jameson, Brown inherits an openness to art in a broad horizon, which disdains the separation between high and mass culture as a priori categories, as labels. Some of the insights offered in Autonomy may not be as inventive as Jameson’s, but Brown’s reasoning is more direct and his attachment to an idea of form, more rigorous. This he may have learned from Schwarz, who reads a work as a dog gnaws a bone, but unlike the Brazilian critic Brown is willing to engage in metacommentary and metatheory, contrasting Marxist aestheticism with other critical approaches. At stake in this quite tentative map of influences is less a matter of who does what than how such authors interact in such a way as to make visible a field of thinking, one capable of empowering art in an age when the limits to commodification seem to have disappeared.
Notes
Things Recognized Without Having Been Seen
Nicholas Brown
In 1894, after Stephen Crane self-published the first version of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (but before publishing the 1896 revised version, preceded by an “Appreciation” by William Dean Howells), and after he published the serialized version (but not yet the book form) of The Red Badge of Courage, there appeared in the New York Times, under Crane’s byline, a peculiar “Interesting Talk with William Dean Howells,” in which Howells’s interlocutor, who cannot be other than Crane if the piece is to be understood as nonfiction, is named simply as “the other man”—which nudges the piece into the register of fiction, and which introduces a degree of ironic distance between Crane and this “other man”’s literary opinions, or perhaps between Crane and this other man’s ambivalent but clearly subaltern relationship to Howells.1 The kinds of questions Crane provokes and means to provoke with this simple shift, questions about why certain words are on the page and not others—the kinds of questions that art has always provoked and despite routine claims to the contrary continues to provoke—cannot arise in the universe that Helen Petrovsky so energetically, and almost coherently, proposes in her critique of Autonomy.
In the ensuing brief dialogue, Crane sets up a series of tactical oppositions between “Howells” and the “other man,” which generates a tension among four terms, one of whose significance is largely implicit. On one side stands Howells’s “realism.” “It is the business of the novel to picture the daily life in the most exact terms possible, with an absolute and clear sense of proportion.” The emphasis is on this last phrase, which insists it is the artist’s duty to “preserve the balances,” to introduce a sense of proportion into lives that lack the proper perspective. On the other side stand genre and the art market. For Howells, genre (in this case, the love story) destroys proportion: “Life began when the hero saw a certain girl, and it ended abruptly when he married her. Love and courtship was not an incident, a part of life—it was the whole of it. […] Do you see the false proportion?” Meanwhile, for the other man but not for Howells, the market is understood to be hostile to Howellsian “realism.” “’I suppose that when a man tries to write “what the people want”—when he tries to reflect the popular desire, it is a bad quarter of an hour for the laws of proportion.’” Finally, Crane’s own writing stands in tension with both sides of this opposition. The market, hospitable to genre, is explicitly where, for the other man, new ambitious work, always dependent on a “man of business” for its circulation, fails to provide “a profitable investment” owing to culture-capitalists’ “divine misapprehension of art” as a commodity. But the alternative involves gatekeepers like Howells, whose hygienic “realism” is directly but implicitly opposed by Crane’s own literary practice, which programmatically dispenses with Howells’s stable, authorial “sense of proportion.” The “other man” appears to worry about a predicted “counter-wave, a flood of [realism’s] other.” But in the terms offered in the dialogue, the counter-wave is Crane.
It is significant, then, that Crane’s next full-length work is a love story, The Third Violet. In it love and courtship form almost the whole of life, but not quite, because the protagonist is a painter on the verge of acquiring a reputation, and in this way vignettes involving his less-successful colleagues and competitors can be interspersed among the chapters. In one of them, as the protagonist conducts some romantico-artistic business down the hall, a colleague known as Grief lampoons the scene he imagines is taking place in the protagonist’s studio. Adopting
a descriptive manner, … with his forefinger [he] indicated various spaces of the wall. “Here is a little thing I did in Brittany. Peasant woman in sabots. This brown spot here is the peasant woman, and those two white things are the sabots. Peasant woman in sabots, don’t you see? Women in Brittany, of course, all wear sabots, you understand. Convenience of the painters. I see you are looking at that little thing I did in Morocco. Ah, you admire it? Well, not so bad—not so bad. Arab smoking pipe, squatting in doorway. This long streak here is the pipe. Clever, you say? Oh, thanks! You are too kind. Well, all Arabs do that, you know. Sole occupation. Convenience of the painters. Now, this little thing here I did in Venice. Grand Canal, you now. Gondolier leaning on his oar. Convenience of the painters.”2
This is what Petrovsky’s “communication as opposed to meaning” looks like: an ideological closed circuit or representational echo chamber, beyond true and false—the painter painting what the beholder expects to see, the beholder understanding the painting because what is depicted there is what was expected. It is an obsessive theme of Crane’s. The Red Badge of Courage is an account of war written entirely out of other accounts of war, and in that sense a version of Grief’s imaginary paintings. But unlike Grief’s imaginary paintings, Red Badge of Courage relentlessly thematizes precisely this fact, and once you become aware that the protagonist is not so much making his way around a theater of war as bouncing around a series of tableaux, Red Badge is surely one of the strangest and anti-realist narratives in the English language. It is not so much beyond true and false as, again in Petrovsky’s words, “about the workings of the false.” This, as we shall see, is something altogether different.
Grief’s ideological closed circuit perfectly describes art that is, once again in Petrovsky’s words, an “echo”—I take it she means her metaphor seriously—of “the movement of social matter itself.3 In societies like ours, what it means to be fully immanent to the movement of social matter itself is to be a commodity; what it means to be a commodity is to respond to a real or imagined demand; what it means to respond to a demand is to produce a pseudo-meaning that is, in Fabio Durão’s terms, “redundant” to, an echo of, the social order itself. “The work of art,” says Petrovsky, “is the echo of a process” or “the configuration of various forces.” So is literally everything else, from tennis balls to sports cars. (It is one of the early insights of the first volume of Capital that a commodity is not a self-evident thing but “a network of relations.”) If a qualitative difference is ruled out, there is perhaps a quantitative difference between Cindy Sherman photographs and tennis balls. But that doesn’t hold water either: commodities that need (like sports cars) to activate existing semiological pathways in order to sell themselves are in that regard no different than cultural commodities, and are probably richer in terms of what they reveal of the “social energies” in play than artworks, which, in trying to produce a meaning that is, however manifold and ambiguous, determinate, are generally less promiscuous in this regard. Crane understood, perhaps not explicitly but perfectly well, the dynamic relating semiotic redundancy to the market. The protagonist’s artist cronies in The Third Violet have colorful names like Grief and Wrinkles. The protagonist himself doesn’t need a nickname, because his name is Hawker.
This detour through Crane suggests that a certain “crisis of representation” pertaining to an understanding of the commodity-character of the artwork is not a new thing associated only with the end of modernist illusions. The ambitious literature that preceded modernism was, as Michael Fried has recently shown, obsessed with the dumb, material aspects of writing, its immanence to “the movement of social matter itself.”4 The explicit awareness of the problem posed by the commodity-character of the artwork is rather the exception than the rule—which does not exclude the possibility of its being the determining instance. But the point I wish to make here is that while the postmodern era clearly registers shifts in both aesthetic and political ideologies of the market—the market and the commodity-form have achieved a hegemony they certainly did not have at the turn of the twentieth century—the end of modernism appears more like the end of a special, brief period when modernist institutions lent artistic production limited protection from the anonymous market, than the world-historical end of art. In The Third Violet, Crane bypasses “realist” gatekeepers like Howells by risking the market. But we have seen that Crane is aware that the market poses its own problems, which he attempts to turn aside by making the love-story genre over into a solution to its own problem in a way that may not have been wholly successful, but will be familiar to readers of Autonomy.
No sensible person would deny that art is immanent “to the movement of social matter itself.” This is what Adorno means by his insistent references to art as a “fait social.”5 But for Adorno (and for me), art has a dual character [Doppelcharakter]: at once brute social fact, and autonomous from all social facts. How can Adorno (or I) sustain this extravagant paradox? It is not difficult. For Adorno, but not for Petrovsky, the work of art is not only a fragment of empirical society, but also “takes up as its object its own relation, as an object, to empirical society.”6 This is not astonishing. To assert “I am a mere speck of capital” is manifestly different from simply being a mere speck of capital. This is what Adorno means (and what I mean) by autonomy. Autonomy is best thought of then as the translation into the aesthetic domain of what Hegel originally meant by “negativity”: the fact not that artworks are free from external circumstances, but that precisely those external circumstances are actively taken up by works of art in ways that are irreducibly normative: in ways, that is, that can be adequate to the matter in hand, or not: right or wrong, just or unjust, plausible or implausible, coherent or incoherent, but not usefully understood as immanent effects of external circumstances, which cannot be subject to judgment.
And I suspect that when push comes to shove—that is, when confronted with an actual work of art—Petrovsky is, like every sensible person, as committed to autonomy as I am. In a particularly dense passage, one in which the categories of truth and falsity appear to be both in play and not, she suggests that people respond to Cindy Sherman’s untitled film stills because in them they “recognize something they had never seen.” This is absolutely right. (I should say briefly that as I was reading Helen’s response I suddenly realized I owed her an unacknowledged, until then forgotten, debt of gratitude: Helen introduced me to Cindy Sherman’s film stills, and convinced me of their greatness, when we taught together twenty years ago). But to recognize something one has never seen is just as much an intentional state as to recognize something that one has seen. It is precisely what happens in aesthetic judgment: it is what the great Brazilian critic Antonio Candido called the “feeling of reality” that sometimes accompanies works of art that are not of an obviously realist type: a recognition of something never before seen that Robert Pippin calls a “sensible-affective marker of truth.”7 Petrovsky would likely disagree strongly with Pippin’s characterization of aesthetic intuition, preferring that the sensible-affective domain remain quarantined from cognitive, intentional operations. But this quarantine cannot be maintained, not even by Petrovsky. Of this sensible-affective space in which things can be recognized without having been seen, Petrovsky remarks, “it is always about the workings of the false.” What could she mean by “about”? An echo is not about what it echoes. To be about something is to take it up in a particular way: to produce a meaning. Crane’s painters’-scene and Cindy Sherman’s untitled film stills are both about the workings of the false, and therein lies their dual character, their moment of autonomy from the false.
At one point Petrovsky claims flatly, as though it were self-evident, that “autonomy is always about individuality.” But autonomy is always, on the contrary, immediately social. Again: merely being a speck of capital is not subject to judgment, but the claim “I am a speck of capital” solicits judgment about whether the claim is true or false, and this distinction is a paraphrase of what is meant by autonomy. When circumstances are actively taken up by consciousness (as they always are), this taking-up becomes subject to judgment. Because such taking-up is active, not a mere registration of circumstances, it could be wrong; because autonomy means an active taking-up, it directly implies a normative field.
What does this look like? Consider a musician studying a page of music. That single page presents hundreds of decisions: subtle shifts in tempo; volume; tone; attack; decay; articulation; intonation; depth, speed, and intensity of vibrato; relation to preceding and succeeding notes; where phrases begin and end and how to make this apparent to a listener; and so on. Many of these her training will make for her so that they aren’t experienced as decisions. Other decisions will be made more or less spontaneously given her prior understanding of the composer, the period, the genre, and the piece. More interesting ones will be resolved after reflection—architectural relationships, for example, might be recognized and means found to emphasize them. Some options, perhaps more interesting still, will simply have to be tested against each other: some will work better than others for reasons that are difficult to express—recognized without having been heard. Some of them won’t work with others that seem more essential, and will have to be considered all over again. All of these look, at a certain purely immediate level, “individual”: our performer is, let’s say, alone with her instrument and a sheet of music in a practice room. But they are at no level individual. Every decision made is an assertion of the rightness of a particular way of playing the piece; every decision rejects other options that are, for reasons that are understood more or less clearly, wrong, or less right. Right and wrong are terms that only have any meaning within a normative field; every decision, then, already posits, as its ground, a normative field. The musician alone in her studio is already a social universe, and that is true of every artist. (And everyone else, too). The claim to autonomy is not the assertion of individuality, but almost the opposite. What looks like “individuality” only has any meaning on the basis of a normative ground, and is therefore always already social.
In the world that Autonomy describes—the one we live in—the accusation of elitism or condescension can get no traction. I don’t know what Petrovsky means by mass society unless it is a euphemism for the market, but the societies we live in are stratified by class, and the reception of artworks—like the reception of everything else—is likewise stratified. But the value of art is no more disqualified by its stratified reception than the value of science is disqualified by its stratified reception. (It is rather class society itself that is disqualified by the stratified reception of art, of science, and of everything else). Insofar as a work of art is just a social fact (the aspect of the artwork’s dual character that Petrovsky acknowledges) then to judge not the stratification itself, but where a work falls on it—what level of cultural commodity it represents, who might buy it or aspire to buying it—is simple snobbery, which can work in any direction but is nothing more than an impotent expression of class hatred. I imagine Petrovsky and I agree on this. But since no work of art can escape its status as a social fact, there can be no prior division of the waters into cultural commodities and artworks. Kitsch, says Adorno, is “a poison that contaminates all art”: no art is immune to a cynical, deflationary interpretation, its reduction to the mere fait social that it also undoubtedly is.8 This being the case, it is the work of interpretation, not class, to uncover the forms by which cultural commodities take up their social world in a substantial way. Condescension lies rather in the idea, counterintuitive to say the least, that interpretation is “the privilege of a chosen few.” Interpretation is simply one of the many things that people do with artworks—and the only of those things that pertains specifically to art. Does Petrovsky really believe, with Schoenberg, that if a work of art is popular it cannot have been understood?
There is much else that I would take issue with in Petrovsky’s characterization of my argument. My scorn for popular culture is clearly nonexistent, and my point was not that you need to understand Heidegger to appreciate Jeff Wall, it was rather that for those who are, contingently but not implausibly for readers of books like Autonomy, familiar with Heidegger and Marx, Wall’s representation of labor looks more Marxist than Heideggerian. (Meanwhile even Heidegger has more to say about absorption and rapture than do bats and crickets). I hope the Crane example makes clear that there was never a question of autonomy’s sudden historical return. Rather, what is at issue is art’s continuing ability, under ever more adverse conditions, to contest the theoretical and ideological assertion of total immanence to commodity culture that is a hallmark of contemporary market absolutism and the source of its hidden identity with post-1968 theory generally—a contestation that recent scholarship is beginning to discover in high postmodernism itself. (This discovery complicates, but does not contradict, the Jamesonian thesis about postmodernism as an aesthetic ideology). But since nobody but me cares about how my book is read, I will conclude my discussion of Petrovsky by turning to the idea that frames her essay, namely the idea that “today is the time of action.”
Petrovksy is surely referring to the nationwide paroxysm of despair, anger, resistance, and reaction that followed the killing at the hands of the police of George Floyd, yet another black man who had committed no crime. The acephalous nature of the protests has not been a strength, as the genuine militants among the protesters quickly came to lament their loss of control over a narrative that by design they never controlled in the first place.9 On the cultural front, the attraction of directly political art was almost too great to resist. Certainly the cultural pages of the mainstream press—and this should already give us pause—could talk of nothing else, even if some of this talk was in bad faith and almost immediately began to hedge its bets. But the urgency of the political moment does not give us permission to stop thinking. The thousands of column-inches in the mainstream and liberal press dutifully explaining to us that the art we need now is the art that pats us on the back for dutifully attending to the art we need now are the precise analog of Grief’s imaginary paintings.10 If the work of art is a commodity like any other—and once again, in societies like ours this claim is entailed in any version of the deflation of art’s “double character”—then there is strictly no difference between a piece of art that decries white privilege and an ad for soap that does the same. They both exist to move product. No doubt consumers of these products feel that their political convictions are ratified in them, but this feeling is just the product being sold. This is not to suggest that works of art can’t take up race in ways that produce new insights into the “workings of the false.” They can and do. But these, by actively taking up the given, conform to the definition of autonomy defended here. The work would have to hold up as a taking-up of the matter of race, and this will be a matter of judgment and therefore disagreement. (Mongane Serote’s Gods of Our Time and Zöe Wicomb’s David’s Story, both brilliant novels, do just this, in the context of the last days of apartheid. But their accounts of the relationship between race and politics don’t just differ; however genially, they contradict each other). The autonomy that art insists on is, in its own realm, the capacity to convert external conditions into matters subject to antagonistic judgments. The autonomy that art insists on is, in the last instance, the same autonomy that makes politics possible: the capacity to take up the present as a field of struggle.
It is on precisely this point that Marina Vischmidt and I perhaps disagree. Vischmidt’s response is admirably lucid about the argument of Autonomy. Whether or not we disagree, other than over quibbles that for the most part will be of no interest to others, is less clear. If her final “if” is meant as a conditional, then there is no disagreement, since the logic she sets out is not only correct but precisely the logic that governs my reading of Ben Lerner’s 10:04. If there is “no space left for an autonomy of the subject,” then the work of art only “becomes a talisman of another civilization or spacetime, not ours.” In that chapter I call this logic “postmodern stoicism,” and suggest that its primary ideological attraction, the rejection of the present—of actually existing interests, constituencies, and institutions—as a field of struggle, characterizes a great deal of contemporary leftish discourse. But Vischmidt’s is a big “if,” and if she intends it to set a boundary condition that pertains to the world we live in, then we disagree. I would then find the origin of our disagreement earlier, in what is otherwise a mere quibble about Vischmidt’s reading of Adorno. Vischmidt suggests that for Adorno “the market existence of an artwork was extraneous; it always came second, analytically speaking.” This suggests that my difference from Adorno is conceptual rather than historical, that for me the commodity character of the artwork is an “unavoidable parameter” rather than a secondary aspect. But as far as the ontology of the artwork is concerned, I think there is very little space between Autonomy and Aesthetic Theory. For both, the work of art is the “determinate negation” of a society saturated with the commodity form.11 For Adorno the autonomous work, “formed according to its own immanent law… silently denounces… a state of affairs that tends toward a society characterized entirely by exchange, in which everything serves some heteronomous purpose [literally, ‘everything is merely for another’: in ihr ist alles nur für anderes].”12 In this regard, Adorno is prescient: the “total exchange-society” that Adorno saw as the secret tendency of societies like ours is, today, the openly avowed ideology of the now-teetering center-right consensus.13 Unlike party activity or union organizing or even voting, the tacit opposition to commodity society represented by the claim to aesthetic autonomy is unemphatic: artworks solicit our judgment as manifold truth claims, but they cannot claim any direct political effect; that is, they cannot claim any political effect that bypasses their submission to our judgment as manifold truth claims. Nevertheless, artworks’ tacit otherness to the commodity has, in societies remade in the image of market absolutism, a far more definite political valence than it did in Adorno’s time. The point of (possible) disagreement with Vischmidt would then be that while I think we agree that the remaking of the subject as a site of capital accumulation is the ideological core of neoliberalism, I think capital accumulation is not a plausible substitution for consciousness, and that as long as something recognizable as consciousness exists, negativity or autonomy will be the basis of whatever meaning, art, and politics there is. This is not to say that claims to total heteronomy don’t make a certain sense in a world where a declining rate of profit forces capital to search out opportunities for exploitation in every nook and cranny of human experience; it is rather to say that as an ideological adjustment to such a world, claims to total heteronomy make sense only as an alibi for complacency, resignation, or for a conformism peculiar to our historical moment: a triumphant defeatism that recasts total capitulation to the logic of capital as the leading edge of enlightened thought.
Fabio Durão’s essay is broadly sympathetic, but perhaps for that reason the most challenging of the three responses. His second, third, and first questions—having to do with aesthetic development, genre, and interpretation—I will regretfully set aside after giving only the briefest sketch of possible answers before trying to respond to his fourth question at more length.
As was suggested above in my response to Petrovsky, the claim to autonomy involves the claim that the ground of judgment is normative. Artworks are not contingently judged and interpreted; they rather solicit judgment and interpretation. That is, they presume a normative field. But this goes all the way down. Normative fields themselves are not reified, fully institutionalized forms, unitary or static facts. Major artistic interventions can render existing modes of judgment obsolete and call for entirely new ones; major critical interventions can reorient a normative field (and less exalted exchanges like this one are, because the participants agree or disagree rather than being similar or different, just as much struggles over what kinds of norms and judgments apply); technical and social developments play a role as well, though one that is always mediated by critical and artistic judgments. As long as (but only as long as) there is relative stability in the kinds of norms and judgments that apply, we can speak of a direction for formal development.
One of my favorite examples, coincidentally arising in Durão’s hometown of Rio de Janeiro, was the neoconcretist movement in Brazil. Its brief, explosive development is understood by its principals to be a proving ground for a set of questions playing out among competing movements in constructivist art about what kind of aesthetic developments count. It is precisely because neoconcretism begins from a stable sense of the questions it responds to that its answers assume, over the course of a decade or so, elegantly dialectical form. The investigation and elaboration of the tonal system obviously takes place not over a decade but over hundreds of years, a period over which momentous changes in the normative grounds on which those developments come to count as significant take place. My sense, however—but Durão is better placed to say than I am—is that there is not even a partial consensus among contemporary composers and critics of erudite music that the tonal system is currently an urgent problem, or even that music is or should be characterized by urgent problems. This ought to be liberating, but my sense is that it is stultifying.
With popular music things stand differently. Genre is relevant to popular music considered as a fait social because popular music is unavoidably mediated by the market, and the market is subdivided by genre. But genre is relevant artistically only because artists have made it so. Let me put it in a deliberately extravagant way. Mahler’s greatest works are, in one way or another, about the antagonism between music as a social, physical, and biological fact—the fact that music is more literally than the other arts a movement of social matter—and music as a source of meaning. Mahler’s setting of “About Beauty,” for example, forces the alto to stumble over her consonants, reminding us that like the inarticulate ape from “The Drinking Song of Earthly Misery,” she is just making noise with her body, earth speaking to earth; that is, not really speaking at all, merely being a speck of earth rather than claiming to be a speck of earth. But this is just what The Song of the Earth is about: by producing a meaning from an impediment to meaning, Mahler turns an admission of physical limitation into the overcoming of it. Mahler’s means are extraordinary, the pinnacle of a certain sequence of historical and musical development. The White Stripes’ means are deliberately ordinary. But what the White Stripes and Mahler share is a certain cunning that is perhaps the better part of genius. You can’t do away with the material determinations of music any more than you can do away with gravity. But you can use gravity to secure a keystone: as Hegel says somewhere in his preliminary attempts at a systematic work, “the broadside of force is turned back by the fine point of cunning.” For the White Stripes, the material determination of music is represented by genre. The White Stripes’ most successful music is inescapably about genre, and in asserting its aboutness abolishes genre as a determining instance, just as through the ruse of the keystone the fact of gravity, which determines the shape of a pile of stones, ceases to determine the cathedral. The availability of genre as a resource for popular music anxious to turn aside the pressure of the commodity-form is contingent on the cunning of artistically ambitious musicians and what they encounter, also contingently, in their exploration of the state of their art—not a fact that is necessarily given in the ontology of music itself.
Now I think I may be in a position to make a useful gesture toward Durão’s first question, about the role of the critic in producing meaning. Strictly speaking, interpretation cannot produce forms, it can only unveil them. But practically speaking this hardly limits the critic at all. If normativity goes all the way down, then there’s not a standard to measure interpretation against, not even when we have supposedly authoritative statements by the artist herself. All we have to measure the interpretation against is what is interpreted, namely the work. It is more or less obvious that authoritative statements are themselves interpretations and can’t be used as a standard for other interpretations. But that’s not the main point, which is that meaning doesn’t lie in the artist, but in the artwork. This gets into thorny questions in the philosophy of action, and I can refer readers elsewhere in this journal for a thorough exploration of the intricacies involved. Stanley Cavell’s solution in “A Matter of Meaning It” is to endorse a picture of intentional action in which intention (and therefore meaning) is immanent to the action; it is a way of describing what the action is, not something that exists outside or prior to the action. So when, as occasionally happens, a really powerful interpretation comes along and revives interest in a work that has been ignored or misunderstood for a hundred years or more, in a certain sense the critic has produced those forms, since nobody else had noticed them before—maybe, in the limit case, not even the artist. (We would have to say then that the artist intended them without noticing them, which seems paradoxical but is in fact completely ordinary—our musician interpreting a page of music will not register every decision as a decision, and neither do we as we go about our lives). But if we are convinced by the critic’s interpretation, what we are convinced of is precisely that she did not produce the forms she outlines, but rather discovered them. We can only agree that an interpretation is powerful (or not) because we have come to see (or have not come to see) what the critic has tried to show us in the work.
This brings us to Durão’s most difficult and interesting question, which bears directly on Petrovsky’s category of what can be recognized without having been seen. This question is underthematized in Autonomy, which is keyed to the Adornian question of the relation of art as such to capitalism. But the Lukácsian side of the question of the being of art—what is it that interpretation reveals?—is just as important, though I only realized it late in the writing of the book. (Here I owe another debt, not only to Fabio but also to his students, including Tauan Tinti, Mariana Toledo, Erivoneide Barros, Elisa Pagan, and Camila Peruchi, who have pressed me on this question and others).
When Hegel proclaimed “end of art,” he meant by it two specific but slightly different things. One is a version of the Hegelian enabling fantasy that emerging bourgeois institutions would, tendentially, render society transparent to itself, and thereby render art superfluous. This didn’t happen and cannot happen in capitalist societies, for which exploitation is not a contingent problem but a constitutive feature. On this level it is clear that Hegel’s end of art falls to the ground along with the fantasy that sustains it. Robert Pippin’s After the Beautiful makes a forceful version of this argument.
But Hegel simultaneously presents a second version of this argument, less emphatically thematized by Pippin, that is also more difficult to dismiss. “If a truth is to be an appropriate matter for art, its own specific character must allow it to be sensuously expressible, and moreover to be, in sensuous form, adequate to itself.”14 The second demand is more stringent than the first. Some mathematical truths can be expressed in sensuous form, but in that form they are not, strictly speaking, mathematical; they are not, in sensuous form, “adequate to themselves” as mathematical truths. For art to have a vocation at all, in other words, it must correspond to some form of knowledge that is not expressed more adequately otherwise. This is why “for artistic interest as much as for artistic production itself, we generally require a kind of liveliness wherein the universal is not available as law and maxim, but rather gives the impression of being inseparable from feeling and sensuous experience.”15
The sentiment is virtually the same one that Lukács expresses a century later, wherein a work “becomes compelling… when it appears… as something not invented [by the artist], but merely discovered”: not, in other words, as an illustration of something already existing in the mind of the artist, but as revealing something present but not yet seen in sensuous experience itself.16 We don’t have Hegel’s exact words, but the closer we look at the words we have, the less certain we are precisely what Hegel means. For example, what I translated as “gives the impression” is the verb wirken, maybe more literally something like “works as,” “does for,” or “passes as.” But is this impression merely an impression, or are certain meanings indeed inseparable from feeling and sensuous experience? Are we dealing with a rhetoric or a form of truth? The whole sense of these pages is that art is for Hegel a mode of presentation, but does not correspond to a mode of truth. The impression of being bound up with sensuous appearances is only, on one hand, an artistic effect or, on the other, a deficit in explicit knowledge. There is, I think, an implicit “yet” in Hegel’s criterion: art has a place where “the universal is not [yet] available as law and maxim.” That is, artistic meaning only attains its highest vocation when, for whatever reason, systematic knowledge of the material has not been attained. Otherwise, the artist merely produces the impression that a certain kind of truth claim emerges from her material rather than from outside it. (Certainly artists strive for this effect, but Hegel’s suggestion seems to be that in the modern period such effects are merely effects and not, as Pippin has it, potentially “sensible-affective markers of truth”). On one hand, systematic knowledge has not yet been achieved, and the aesthetically acquired knowledge will be, eventually if not today, rendered obsolete and merely illustrative by some systematic discipline. On the other, already existing systematic knowledge will have been bypassed in favor of sensuous representation, and we are left with something like a propaedeutic. Neither of these possibilities is, from the standpoint of art’s cognitive dignity, satisfactory.
The problem Hegel alerts us to, one that clearly remains germane today, is that of the normative form taken by knowledge in societies like ours. There is a family resemblance here to the fantasy of Absolute Spirit, but I think not an identity with it. It is not that, in an age that rightly prizes systematic knowledge, the artist is thereby “tempted to bring more thoughts into his work.”
Rather, our whole spiritual formation is such that the artist himself stands within a world thus characterized by reflection, with all that entails. No artist could, merely by resoluteness and force of will, abstract himself from it.17
Art will no doubt continue as decoration, stimulant, soporific, timewaster, and so on; that was never in doubt and was never of any interest. More than this, it will continue to preserve some cognitive dignity as propaedeutic and prolegomenon to systematic knowledge. But as long as systematic knowledge remains our horizon—and let’s hope it does—art’s “highest vocation” would appear to be at an end.
But certain kinds of knowledge are, without being mysteriously untranslatable into systematic knowledge, only directly accessible to us in embodied form. Musical intervals are all simply ratios—expressible as simple, mathematical relationships. When you hear an octave, you might know you are hearing the ratio 2:1, but you do not hear the ratio 2:1. Someone who knows how to recognize an octave can train someone who doesn’t in a minute or two. Neither of them needs to know that they are hearing the ratio 2:1. Crucially: such knowledge is not even helpful to their project of teaching and learning what an octave sounds like.
Beethoven’s violin concerto in D begins with the tympani announcing the key—five beats on D—and the next eight measures center emphatically on D major. But in the tenth measure (about twenty seconds in) the first violins, quiet but exposed, play four beats on D-sharp, echoing the rhythm of the tympani but, apparently, in a completely unrelated key.18 In short order (measure twelve), the violas join the violins in their insistence on D-sharp. The first time you hear the passage (and the later times too) the effect is astonishing; it takes nothing more than the habitual training we all have from living in a world saturated with the western tonal system to recognize that the D-sharp “doesn’t fit,” that it “comes out of nowhere,” or at least from another century—that it seems very distant from the key of D major. After this enigmatic presentation of D-sharp, the orchestra settles comfortably into D, passing dramatically but briefly into D minor (m. 28-42), returning to D major to repeat the theme, then subjecting the theme itself to a parallel modulation into D minor (m. 51-56), with a lovely deceptive cadence that leads, twice, briefly to F (the relative major of D minor) before returning quickly both times to D minor (57-63). In other words, we are for the next emphatically related to the key of D. But in measure 65 (something over two minutes in), the D-sharp pattern returns unexpectedly though not without anticipation in the violins, with the rest of the strings supplying part of a diminished chord underneath it and emerging from the D-sharp pattern to form a chord (an inverted and therefore somewhat veiled A7) that is strongly related to D major—effectively hinting at a place for D-sharp in D major. Over the next five bars, in a dramatic crescendo, Beethoven teaches us where D-sharp fits into D major, first hammering on the D-sharp—the violins literally spelling out the diminished chord it anchors—and then leading us climactically and naturally through an inverted E minor to A7 to D major.19
Now, one can sit down with the score and puzzle all this out, as I have just done, to arrive at a technical understanding of how Beethoven ties D-sharp to D major. But what I want to suggest is that this technical explanation is true, but not—as people who have read the previous paragraph are bound to agree—convincing. “You can bring D-sharp into D major by passing through the related key of E minor” is, on the evidence, true. You can put it in a textbook and use it in other compositions. But the evidence is what you hear, and no amount of technical elaboration would render its translation into propositional language plausible (or for that matter implausible), even though this translation is faithful and in its own way complete. By the time we hear the D-sharp pattern again, accompanying the soloist in measure 111, it sounds almost natural: not because our ears have gotten used to it (the D-sharps in measure ten will sound audacious on subsequent listenings) but because by measure 111 we have been shown what it means and have a sense of where it might be going, even if that knowledge and that sense are things that, in the listening, we do not and perhaps cannot pose explicitly to ourselves. The relationship Beethoven produces between D-sharp and the key of D is of the order of truth that can be, for Petrovsky, recognized without having been seen or heard, or, for Hegel, “in sensuous form, adequate to itself”: the order of truth that pertains to art. Such truths are illegible to a conventionally Spinozist world-view. But not to people who think they subscribe to it—luckily for them.20
Demonstrations of such truth—artworks—call on our knowledge as embodied, worlded, self-positing, social, linguistic, temporal (and so on ad infinitum—in this case, habitually tonal) beings. Such truth claims cannot be made persuasive in propositional form, even though their translation into propositional form need not pose any tremendous problems. Of Romeo and Juliet, Adorno claims that the longing to lose oneself in relation to another stands opposed to social rigidities, a truth “over which to this day the centuries have been powerless.”21 But in propositional form, it is kitsch. Sensuous presentation is in such cases neither prolegomenon nor propaedeutic. Hegel is wrong that, as a universal proposition, “thought and reflection have soared beyond fine art.”22 The “poetry of sensuous representation [Vorstellung]” cannot be universally superseded by “the prose of thinking.”23
Deflationary accounts of art, from the sociology of culture to conventional Spinozism, can only tell us in ever minuter detail or ever more grandiose rhetoric what we knew already, which is that art is a fait social. But what pertains specifically to art is not its social facticity but its active taking-up of social facticity, an activity that stands implicitly against the contemporary ideology of total heteronomy, of the supposed immanence of art to the movement of social matter. Only on the basis of its autonomy can a work of art hold up as presenting something adequate to itself in sensuous form; only on the basis of its autonomy can a work of art bring us to recognize what we have never seen or heard. What is vital in the study of the arts today is “a sort of a counter-wave, a flood of [Spinozism’s] other”: namely the inseparable moments of interpretation and judgment.
Notes
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
Demands to defund, dismantle, or even abolish police departments have leapt from the bullhorns of protesters, to the pages of the New York Times and even into the policy platforms of national Democratic Party figures. The demand, and the protest activity behind it, are informed by an assumption that the use of deadly force by the police is a fundamental and foundational part of policing. In this view, reforming the police is impossible. The only way to reduce the use of lethal force, argues Mariame Kaba, is to reduce policing itself: she advocates cutting the number of police officers in half nationwide.1
Much of the popular narrative also assumes that the primary cause of police violence is simple and readily apparent: racism. It is true that black Americans are far more likely to be shot and killed by the police than white Americans. And it is true that racial prejudice held by police officers plays a role. Yet to address the problem of police violence, we need to understand the scope, magnitude, and patterns of the problem. This requires a much wider lens than the focus on racism allows.
I fear many are getting the conversation around policing entirely wrong. And if mistaken analysis leads to bad policy, the results could be fatal. Starting with the proposition that that racism is intrinsic to policing, it may seem intuitive that reducing the footprint of the police would reduce the prevalence of police brutality – and especially the use of lethal force. Less cops, less cop violence. Yet a sober look at the evidence suggests otherwise. To get the politics of policing right we need to understand what drives the problem of police lethality in the first place.
The Police Kill the Poor
The racial disparities in police killings are almost always the first statistics marshalled in defense of calls to abolish, dismantle or defund the police. But the focus on racial disparities can confuse as much as it clarifies. Consider the oft quoted statistic that black Americans make up 24% of the victims of police killings despite only accounting for 13% of the population.2 Without context, this suggests that black Americans are indiscriminately murdered by the police, regardless of where they fall on the ladder of economic inequality or even where they live.
Jeff Bezos recently quipped: “I have a 20-year-old son, and I simply don’t worry that he might be choked to death while being detained one day. […] Black parents can’t say the same.” Are we to believe that the reason the Bezos children are not likely to be killed by the police is because they were born white, or might being the children of the world’s wealthiest man have something to do with it? Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier has declared that George Floyd “could have been me,” but do we really think that black multimillionaires are more likely to be murdered by the police than poor whites?3 In truth, this corporate brand of anti-racism—now present in the statements of major multinational companies, featured on the splash pages of all major streaming services, and prominent in most national papers—has sought to make invisible the most significant features of American society linked to police violence: inequality and austerity.
Though we don’t have comparable statistics at the individual level, there is much evidence to suggest a startling disparity in the pattern of police violence by class. According to one analysis, a person in the poorest quintile of census tracts is 3.5 times more likely to be killed by the police than a person in the wealthiest quintile. Of all the police killings in the United States about 60% take place in census tracts falling in the two quintiles with the highest levels of poverty – despite these tracts accounting for only 39% of the population. A full 35% of all police killings occurred in the census tract quintile with the highest concentration of poverty.4
And because this data is based on the place of killing, rather than the identity or residence of the victim, these numbers are very likely underselling the degree to which the poor suffer from police brutality. For instance, it is almost certainly true that many of the individuals killed by the police in relatively wealthy census tracts were themselves poor. Consider that in the real-world, patrolling relatively wealthy neighborhoods, like Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, consists of haranguing any ‘trespassers’ from neighboring high-poverty areas like Red Hook.
The truth is police lethality is a problem almost exclusively experienced by the poor. And when we limit our analysis to this population alone we see that racial disparities in police killings are greatly diminished.5 In one study, Roland Fryer Jr. found that (despite robust evidence for racial discrimination, and startling disparities in the frequency and use of force) there was no statistically significant racial disparity in the use of lethal force.6 A 2019 study provided further confirmation, finding “no overall evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities in fatal shootings.” 7
Of course, a lack of racial disparities does not mean a lack of racism, it could be the case that the use of lethal force for one group is driven by prejudice, while for others it is driven by different factors. But then, the inverse is also true: the presence of a racial disparity does not mean that racism is the cause. In reality poverty is driving much more of the story than CEOs like Bezos and Frazier would like to admit. While it no longer surprises people to learn that black Americans are 24% of the total victims of police murder, it might surprise many that they also make up 23% of the total population living under the poverty line in this country. And while white Americans make up around 41% of the poor, they actually account for 46% of the victims of police killings. The takeaway here is that the racial breakdown of those killed by the police almost exactly matches the racial demography of the poor.
None of these facts excuse the problem of racism in American police departments. Yet racial prejudice cannot explain why white Americans are so much more likely to be killed by the police than Europeans of any race. Nor can racism effectively explain why police lethality is greatest in the states with the smallest black populations.8 Solving the problem of violent policing in America requires recognizing these complex dynamics and tailoring solutions that address the political and economic foundations which gave rise to it in the first place. Yet no such approach is apparent in the contemporary calls to abolish, dismantle, or defund the police. In fact, the evidence suggests that “defunding” police departments and cutting the number of officers is among the worst solutions, indeed it may even exacerbate brutality.
Budgetary Brutality
A comparison between Philadelphia and Phoenix might help illustrate the complexity of American police violence. The two cities are roughly the same size and capture roughly the same level of GDP, but this is where the similarities end. Philadelphia is about 44% black, whereas Phoenix is only 7% black. The City of Brotherly Love is among the poorest cities in the country, with nearly 26% of the population living in poverty; while Phoenix is also very poor, only 18% of its residents suffer under the crush of want. Notably, Philadelphia has about 42 police officers per 10,000 residents, compared to 17 per 10,000 in Phoenix.
Given the prevailing narratives, we should expect that Philly would be a hotbed of police lethality: after all, it’s a poor black city with lots of cops and an allegedly bloated police budget. But the truth is that in Phoenix, an average of 11.0 people are killed by police each year, while in Philadelphia that number is just 3.1. Phoenix, then, with less than half the number of police officers as Philadelphia, has 3.5 times the rate of police killings.9
Once you start to look, such apparently surprising results become visible all over the map. Montana is a very rural and overwhelmingly white state, with a relatively small police presence—just 17 police officers per 10,000 residents—but it is rife with police violence. Montanans are 1.4 times more likely to be killed by the police than Georgians, a state whose population is 30% black, and which employs 27 police officers per 10,000 residents.
Similarly, West Virginia, another lily-white state with relatively few police officers (just 14.9 per 10,000 residents), has a major problem with police killings. Its average rate is over 2.5 times as high as its more diverse and wealthier neighbor, Virginia, which employs 21.5 officers per 10,000 residents.10
These comparisons are not outliers: if we go down the list of cities and states that top the charts in police violence, we see a striking pattern: fewer officers often correlates with greater police lethality. If the examples here are any indication, cutting the number of police officers in half nationwide could result in a three-fold increase in police killings in some areas.
Police lethality also happens to be concentrated in states with lax gun laws; among populations with easy access to cheap weapons. Western and Mountain region states have nearly triple the rate of police murders compared to Northeastern states.11 It seems, then, that in areas with easy access to guns, high levels of poverty, and few police, the cops kill more people. This is no less true for mostly white cities like Colorado Springs or Spokane, than it is for majority-minority cities like Los Angeles or Stockton. Further, as police lethality in cities has decreased by an average rate of 5.32% per year over the past six years, just the opposite has happened in rural areas, which have witnessed an increase in incidences of police lethality by a nearly identical average rate of 5.14% per year.
Convincing causal explanations for the patterns and trends described here are available, but they require us to question the analysis and solutions offered by activists. Defunding police budgets, far from a solution, could in fact be one of the major causes of police violence. Cash-strapped departments seem to have both fewer officers overall and more incidences of the use of lethal force. This makes some sense. Firstly, the lack of cash in a given department is usually an expression of the level of poverty in the district they serve and, as we’ve seen, cops tend to shoot, choke, and kill poor people. But a more direct relationship is also evident: municipal austerity affects police behavior. Fewer cops means longer hours and shrinking budgets means lower pay. The result is overworked and underqualified officers.12
Returning to Phoenix, a 2015 study found that when officers were expected to work 13 hour and 20 minute shifts, as opposed to 10 hours, their work performance significantly declined.13 And a similar study in 2018 showed that police fatigue resulted in more citizen complaints about police behavior.14 Everyone acknowledges that medical professionals—nurses, surgeons, and EMT’s—are more likely to make life threatening mistakes when they are overworked, though no one would advocate cutting hospital budgets as a solution to fatigue.
A lack of funds also means lack of training and accountability. Consider the situation in Dolton, Illinois. This small Chicago suburb is home to a particularly violent police force. However, the trouble with reforming the department has been attributed to an inability to spend money on training and hiring qualified officers. Disgraced officers from larger urban districts often find their way to places like Dolton where their formal experience and their willingness to work for less make them attractive recruits. So, in the rare event that officers are disciplined for their behavior, violent cops tend to bounce around underfunded departments. In another Chicagoland example, Robbins, Illinois pays an all part-time force $10.50 an hour—similar wages were found in Ferguson, Missouri’s department in 2015.15 Low wages in policing are hardly a rare occurrence, across the country officers are expected to work for less and do more. It doesn’t take a social scientist to predict what might happen when you combine poverty wages with a job that requires you to carry a gun. In much of America we pay police officers McDonald’s wages to patrol Walmart’s workforce.
Austerity Allocations Aren’t Enough
All of this is to say that we cannot solve the problem of police violence by avoiding the problem of poverty. Yet this is exactly what the “defund” solution threatens to do. In a remarkable twist, liberal militants have embraced austerity as a solution for local government. Slashing police budgets has been so widely accepted on the Left that criticism of it—on welfarist grounds, policy implementation, or simple political commonsense—has been labeled reactionary or racist. The reality, as I have tried to show, is that if defunding the police were to result in fewer beat cops, more poverty wages for officers in already poor districts, less police training and effectively no change in the presence of guns or the rate of poverty, then the defunding “solution”—for all its radical rhetoric—would likely result in more, not fewer, incidences of police lethality. We cannot be afraid to say what is true: defunding the police is wrong because it will result in more people dying.
The response to this charge might be to claim that we could reallocate municipal funds to other social goods and offset the need for policing altogether. Yet slashing police budgets to zero would do almost nothing to stem the tide of municipal bankruptcies and solve the public funding crisis. That’s because, as Adaner Usmani and John Clegg have shown, it’s significantly cheaper to police the problems associated with joblessness and poverty than to solve them.16 Many activists point to what seem like high dollar amounts for police budgets as evidence that money could be better spread around. Instead of demanding that the federal government tax the wealthy and their corporations to fund public goods and eliminate joblessness, activists seem to believe that city governments have no choice but to rob Peter to pay Paul. Though if we took the $150 million Los Angeles recently cut from their police budget and redirected it to housing stipends for the entire poverty population, it would buy everyone no more than a couple weeks’ rent in LA’s cheapest neighborhoods.
Indeed, when looking at any major city budgets the big story is not eye-popping police spending but shockingly low investment across the board. Today, no city can afford to fund public provisions to adequately address the upstream causes of police violence. Therefore, no city can effectively use the public purse to reduce the demand for police in poor, violent neighborhoods. The reallocation argument fails on these terms. And without addressing poverty and unemployment, the human costs of removing the police would be staggering. When Baltimore reformed its department after the death of Freddie Gray, a move that involved removing dozens of officers from their beats and changing methods to avoid police contact with citizens, homicides increased in that city a full 63% in a single year. 93% of the murder victims were black.17
It is no wonder, then, that the demand to defund the police is deeply unpopular, no matter how it is phrased, among black and white voters alike. Truthfully, I can’t think of a better way to repel working people of any race (the very group that liberals and progressives have increasingly struggled to mobilize) than to accept that austerity is permanent and to insist that concerns about crime are inconsequential.
Bayard Rustin once warned about activists’ psychic inability to fend off leftwing slogans which result in rightwing policy. That difficulty persists today. Not only do calls to “defund” fail to address the problems of police violence, racism, public safety or poverty, they also risk missing the clear opportunity to unite a constituency around ending the complementary problems of police brutality, gun violence, municipal austerity, and economic inequality. Each of these problems are widely felt concerns among working people. And advocacy around popular solutions like massive increases in federal social spending on public goods to eliminate unemployment, raising the minimum wage to a living wage, and federal gun reform, would go a long way to reducing police violence.
Slashing budgets has never been a solution fit to rectify the failures of any institution of government. In fact, it’s the exact policy approach, which has failed to provide high-wages and a broad range of public goods from health care to education. And if miserable low-wages and the lack of any stable economic life are a major cause of our uniquely violent police force, then it is necessary to insist that the federal government be held responsible and reverse course. To return to Rustin, when he campaigned for the “Freedom Budget for All Americans”, he was roundly ignored by the youth-dominated activist Left and the new militancy around the rising Black Power movement. Rustin, in warning against the lure of a new ethnic politics, understood that “dignity and self-respect must spring from the economic and social position which you hold in the society and cannot be mythologically and viscerally created […] where the objective situation indeed makes dignity impossible.”
Similarly, black lives can only truly matter in this society when we provide adequate jobs, housing, education, health care and so on, to everyone. If we want to end police violence, we must seek to end the economic violence visited upon nearly all victims of police brutality long before anyone calls 911.
Notes
But where do these racial disparities actually take place?
Amidst this moment of reckoning the South, cast as the cradle of racism, seems to come in for special criticism. Antebellum Southern slave patrols are regularly name-checked as an origin of American policing. Confederate monuments are toppling, as they should. NASCAR banned the Confederate flag. A Nation writer decried “stupid” Southerners for flouting social distancing at a bacchanalian redneck vehicle jamboree on the beaches of Galveston, Texas. A Washington Post columnist asked rhetorically if Donald Trump wasn’t actually the last president of the Confederacy. And, let’s admit it, most of the country thinks of the South as profoundly backward.
Given this vibe one might be surprised by the actual regional demographics of police killings. What follows is a very preliminary, incomplete, back-of-the-napkin sketch of data on police killings. My main source on police killings is the Guardian’s Counted Project. Economic and demographic data come from the U.S. Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and the Kaiser Family Foundation. I am rounding numbers with decimals up and down. For a discussion of the sources used see the first two footnotes.2
The South
Let’s start with Tennessee, the state that gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan. It seems reasonable to assume that the cops in Tennessee kill African Americans at a disproportionately high rate.
In 2016, police in Tennessee killed 25 people. Of these, nineteen, or 76 percent of the total, were white. Meanwhile, whites were 78 percent of the state’s total population. Tennessee police killed three black people, which was 12 percent of the total. However, African Americans were 17 percent of the state’s total population.
In other words, African Americans were, relative to their proportion of the state’s total population, actually 29 percent “underrepresented” in the stats on police killings. White people were 2 percent underrepresented in the police homicide stats.
Thus, Tennessee cops actually killed whites at a higher rate than they killed black people even as both whites and blacks were “underrepresented” in the police homicide stats. Latinos and Pacific Islanders each suffered one police homicide, and because they make up small percentages of the state’s population, were “overrepresented” in the police stats.
In Kentucky the cops killed 22 people. Of this total nineteen, or 86 percent, were white. The state’s population, as a whole, was 87 percent white. Two of the Kentuckians killed by cops that year were black, meaning they were 9 percent of the casualties. Meanwhile, African Americans were 8 percent of the state’s total population. One of the victims of Kentucky police homicide was Latino.
This means white people were slightly underrepresented among those killed by police while Latinos and African Americans were overrepresented relative to their proportion of the state’s population. But the black victims of police homicide in Kentucky were 12 percent overrepresented, not 100 percent overrepresented as they are in the national stats.
What about the Deep South where a greater percentage of the population is black? For example, take Mississippi—it doesn’t get any more “Deep South” than Mississippi.
In 2016, cops in Mississippi killed eleven people: six, or 55 percent, of these were white and five, or 45 percent, were black. The state’s population was 59 percent white and 37 percent black. This means Mississippi cops killed black people at a rate 49 percent higher than their prevalence in the state’s total population. Thus, we can say Mississippi displays a racist pattern as regards police killings. But it is only half as racist as the national numbers.
In Louisiana, cops also killed black people at disproportionately higher rates than they kill white people. African Americans were twelve of the 22 people killed by police. They were 32 percent of Louisiana’s population but were 54 percent of those killed by police in 2016. That ratio gets closer, but is not all the way, to the national aggregate numbers.
Florida is also closer to, but not at, the national average. In the Sunshine State African Americans were 16 percent of the population yet constituted 25 percent of those killed by cops in 2016. Cops in Florida thus killed African Americans at a rate that was 56 percent greater than the African-American percentage of the state population.
In Georgia cops killed thirty people in 2016. African Americans, being 17 of these victims but only 31 percent of the population, were 19 percent overrepresented. Latinos were 17 percent of police homicide victims but only 9 percent of the population and were thus almost 100 percent overrepresented. Whites on the other hand were 28 percent underrepresented in such stats, being only 43 percent of those killed by cops despite constituting 60 percent of the state population.
However, if we cross the Savannah River into South Carolina, the state that started the Civil War, the patterns change. In 2016 Palmetto State cops killed eighteen people. Of this total, four (or 22 percent) were African American even as they constituted 28 percent of the state population. This meant black people were 27 percent underrepresented in the police homicide stats. White victims of police homicide numbered fourteen (or 78 percent of the total) even as whites were only 67 percent of South Carolina’s population.
In other words, white South Carolinians were 16 percent overrepresented in the police homicide stats and they were significantly more likely to be killed by cops than were black South Carolinians.
I could go on with similarly weird and counterintuitive Southern examples but I will spare readers the jumble of numbers.
So then, where do cops kill black people most disproportionately?
Yankeedom
One of the worst offenders as regards the disproportionate killing of black people—that is to say, the state with some of the most anti-black cops in the country—is liberal Massachusetts.
The Bay State—which during the Civil War produced the ultra-heroic, all-black 54th Regiment about which the fantastic film Glory was made—has police that kill black people at five times, or 500 percent the rate at which black people appear in the state’s total population. No wonder people joke about “up South in Boston.”
In 2016, police in Massachusetts killed fourteen people: five were white, five were black, and four were Latino.
White people are 79 percent of the population but only 35 percent of those killed by cops, and were thus 56 percent underrepresented in the police homicide stats.
Massachusetts police also kill Latinos at a very high rate. Latinos were 11 percent of the state population in 2016, but they were 28 percent of those killed by police. Thus, Massachusetts Latinos showed up in the police killing stats at a rate of 254 percent their proportion of the state’s total population, or 154 percent greater than the Latino share of the population.
The key number, however, is this: Only 7 percent of Massachusetts’s residents are black, yet they constituted 35 percent of people killed by cops. African Americans therefore appear in Massachusetts police homicide stats at five times the rate, or with 400 percent greater frequency, than do they appear in the state’s total population count. Now we are beginning to see where the national average comes from.
Illinois has a similar profile. In 2016 Illinois cops killed 29 people: nine of them (or 31 percent of the total) were white, while 61 percent of the state’s total population was white. Latinos were 27 percent of those killed by cops despite being only 17 percent of the state’s population.
Illinois cops also killed seventeen black people, (or 58 percent of the total) even as black people were only 14 percent of the state’s total population. In other words, during 2016 Illinois cops killed African Americans at a rate four times (or 314 percent greater than) the black percentage of the population.
Similarly, in Minnesota, cops kill black people at three times their prevalence in the state’s total population: 6 percent of the population versus 21 percent of those killed by cops. In New York police kill black people at three times their proportion of the population: they are only 16 percent of the population but constitute 48 percent of those killed by cops. In Michigan police kill African Americans at a rate about 2.5 times their share of the state population; they are 14 percent of the population but 37 percent of those killed by cops.
Moving west, the cops show anti-black racism in their patterns of killing but not to the level of what we see in the Northeast and Midwest. California fits the northern pattern. Cops killed black people at more than three times their share of the population. But Western police racism, expressed as lethal violence, falls most heavily on Latinos and Native Americans. Measured on a per capita basis no other racial or ethnic group comes near experiencing the appalling level of police violence meted out to Native Americans.
To be fair to the police of Greater Yankeedom, in general, they kill less often than do Southern or Western cops.
The Racialization of Poverty North and South
Why is Northern policing so disproportionately racist? In 1831 Tocqueville noted the peculiar vehemence of Yankee racism: “slavery recedes, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary…. prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known.”3
This Northern prejudice often produced state constitutions that simultaneously outlawed slavery and prohibited African Americans settlement. Ohio, for example, outlawed slavery in its original 1802 constitution. But it also aggressively barred black immigration and enforced the ban with mob violence.
Northern tier states were also the first to pass eugenic forced-sterilization laws. By 1926 most Northern states had such laws but none of the Southern states did.
I suspect that modern patterns of “racialized” poverty, which is to say the racial demographics of poverty, does much to explain Northern police racism. Keep in mind, much of what police do is harass the visibly and “disorderly” poor. Disorderly frequently comes down to doing things in public that, if you had more money, you would do in private: drinking, smoking, buying and selling, yelling, arguing, disrobing, sitting down, and sleeping.4
The racism of Northern police also has something to do with the more “racialized” nature of poverty in the North as compared to the South. In the North, people of color tend to be heavily overrepresented in the ranks of the poor, whereas in the South there are higher rates of poverty and more of the white population is very poor. One crude way we see this is comparing the relative gap between white and black poverty rates in the North and South.
In the South the black poverty rate is typically about twice as high as the white poverty rate. But in most of the northern-tier states the black poverty rate is three times as high as the white poverty rate.5 This is not because black people are necessarily wealthier in the South, though the highest black poverty rates do cluster in the north, but rather because there are more poor white people in the South.6
The U.S. Census defines four major regions: Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. Of these, the South has the lowest median household income; it also has “the largest share of counties with high income inequality.” The South remains the region with the lowest median wages,7 has “maintained the highest rates of poverty over the past 40 years,” and has “the largest share of Americans living in poverty of all regions.” Food insecurity is highest in the South. It has the highest adult and infant mortality rates and the greatest prevalence of illnesses like cardiovascular disease, obesity, and HIV/AIDS. Southerners suffer higher occurrences of occupational fatalities, and the South has many of the highest rates of incarceration.8
The Political Economy of North and South
The South, from the settling of Jamestown onward, has always been home to a large population of poor whites. The South was intentionally designed to be a land of gentlemen and servants. This plan, if you will, shaped southern land distribution. Huge lots were given to rich men, while very little was made available to the common classes. The Yankee north, despite its many faults, pursued an intentionally more equal distribution of land. These divergent sectional settlement patterns had profound and long-term consequences for later economic development.
This sectional difference in land disposal patterns meant that the South never developed a large class of independent small farmers, whereas that class predominated in the North. As Charles Post has shown in his book The American Road to Capitalism, it was from this stratum of family farmers that American industrial capitalism emerged. During the nineteenth century, these small farmers, increasingly subject to market competition and price signals, began specializing and mechanizing. As subsistence production declined, production for sale increased. As it did, consumption increasingly depended on purchasing commodities with money in markets. Through it all the capitalist division of labor deepened, commodification and what Marx called “real subsumption” spread. With class struggle, in the form of growing unionization and then with the New Deal, the wealth produced by Northern industrialization, even as it made robber barons rich, also helped reenforce older Northern patterns of a more widespread, if modest, prosperity.
In the Slave South, several factors blunted this process. The extremely uneven land holding of the South limited the rise of a class of innovating, increasingly market-oriented small farmers. Uneven land distribution also translated into a lower population density and fewer cities, which meant smaller, less competitive markets. And as John Majewski explains in Modernizing a Slave Economy, weak and acidic soils, which are easily depleted by mono-cropping, encouraged the use of “shifting cultivation,” which in turn further reenforced the pattern of large land holdings, low population density, and class inequality.
Slavery also hindered economic development and industrialization because slaves were a fixed cost that had to be utilized even when not working on the cash crops. Because slaves could not be fired like free workers, slave owners needed to maximize their use of slave labor. This disincentivized and undermined the use of labor-saving equipment, resupply through markets, and the outsourcing of tasks to commercial specialists (like blacksmiths or carpenters). Put simply, instead of buying cheap, well produced bacon on emerging commercial markets supplied by small innovating farmers, slaveowners were incentivized to make their slaves raise hogs when they were not raising cotton. Thus even as slaves produced cash crops for export and plantations ran with capitalistic tools of efficiency, like modern account books, the fixed costs of slavery also encouraged nonmonetized production for use. This meant that in the South a smaller portion of production was governed by the law of value, and what Joseph Schumpeter called capitalism’s “gales of creative destruction.”
With large parts of the population (slaves) consuming little and producing much of what they consumed in a nonmonetized, production-for-use fashion, even small yeoman farmers who might have innovated and mechanized along capitalist lines, were for lack of markets effectively held back and stuck in a twilight economy that was capitalist but still heavily governed by the slow logic of production for use. Thus southern industrialization and capitalist “expanded reproduction” were thwarted.
In Slavery and Freedom, James Oakes summarized how slavery underdeveloped the South as follows: “Slavery hindered technological innovation even where its profitability depended on the latest techniques for processing and transportation. It slowed the growth of cities and industry, hampered the growth of a consumer market, reduced the flow of savings, and promoted soil exhaustion and demographic instability by dampening interest in long-term improvements on the land.”9
In the South the pattern of economic development was about cash-crop exports and later also resource extraction. This pattern of economic development reenforced the region’s tremendous class inequality. In the words of the Southern chronicler J.W. Cash, this made the South a society of “Big Men and Little Men, with strict reference to property, power, and the claim to gentility.”10
As a result of the South’s tremendous class inequality, the region’s demographics of poverty have long been less racially skewed than in the North.
In her fine book Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, Keri Leigh Merritt shows that poor, landless whites constituted a full third (some have said one half) of the population of the U.S. South!11 To be clear these were not the hardscrabble small farmers. Rather these were a semi-itinerate, rural Lumpenproletariat, who owned no land and instead lived by occasional day labor, grazing hogs, gathering herbs, cutting wood for sale, stealing, poaching, making and selling liquor, fencing stolen goods, and prostitution. Prone to binge drinking, violence and cavorting with both free and enslaved African Americans (even as they were known for their loudly professed hostility to black people), these poor whites were by most accounts often genuinely dangerous. The planter class hated them. So too, it seems, did much of the smallholding yeomanry.
Prior to emancipation, slavery being the system that controlled most African Americans in the South, both extrajudicial mob violence and formal criminal justice were largely targeted at controlling this class of poor white Southerners.
Even today, in most Southern states the demographic distribution of poverty more closely tracks the overall demographic profile of the state than do poverty rates in the North.12 Of the states with the top ten highest white poverty rates all except for Idaho and New Mexico had been part of the Confederacy.
Making of the Yankee Ghetto
Concentrations of black poverty in the Northern states that once banned black settlement is the result of the racist articulation of deindustrialization and urban renewal. The Great Migration, that is the large-scale relocation of African Americans from the rural South to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West, began with the industrial boom of World War I. Pulled north by the lure of jobs, higher wages, and greater freedom, the migrants were also pushed north by the hard times brought on by the increasing mechanization of Southern agriculture, and by the despotism of Jim Crow segregation and lynch-law terror. Roughly six million black people moved north before the migration subsided around 1970.
The greatest part of this wave happened from World War II until 1970. But African Americans arrived in the land of industrial democracy and upward mobility just as that political economy began a process of radical restructuring driven by automation and then industrial relocation. Almost as soon as African Americans established themselves in Northern industrial occupations and cities, deindustrialization and racist slum clearance began.
As Thomas Sugrue shows in The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, industrial employment in Motor City actually peaked in 1950, a full three decades before “deindustrialization” became a sociological watchword. As unionized industrial employment shrank, so too did the service sectors. According to Sugrue, black workers actually continued to move up the wage and skill ladder even as deindustrialization took hold. But this hardly made up for a shrinking regional economy and rising class inequality at a national scale.
Just as industrial employment was peaking, federally subsidized “slum clearance” and highway construction programs began reshaping Northern and Western cities. Coupled with suburbanization along racist lines, these developments increasingly forced black people into de facto segregated and underinvested communities. As businesses and middle-class whites left the urban core, municipal tax bases shrank, services and employment suffered, and concentrations of black poverty became defining features of the Northern-tier rustbelt.
The rustbelt geography became that of the doughnut city, with the African Americans’ deindustrialized core surrounded by autonomous, and for a long time de facto white, segregated suburbs.
The Modern Low-Wage South
Meanwhile, poverty in the U.S. South remained and remains widespread. This is revealed in the disproportionally high percentage of its population working for low wages. In 2016 the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the “states with the highest percentages of hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage” were: Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and (one western outlier) Idaho.13
That year saw 2.2 million Americans working for wages at or below the federal minimum. Fully 49 percent of these workers worked in the South. These low-wage workers were predominately women. White women and people of color of all genders were (and still are) disproportionately represented in low-wage work. However, in absolute numbers, low-paid workers as a whole, were and are predominately white. The BLS reports that 74 percent of workers making wages “at or below the federal minimum” are white. (About 10 percent of that number are likely white Latinos but the BLS does not disaggregate in that fashion.) Thus white people work low-wage jobs in proportion to their share of the population. African Americans, at 18 percent of this workforce, are overrepresented. Latinos and Asians are each slightly underrepresented among low-wage workers. Thus for every African American working for the federal minimum wage or less there are four white workers in the same position, and, although the BLS does not offer numbers for race and region together, we can assume that most of both groups are in the South.14 In other words there are lots of poor white people in the South, and this probably helps explain why white people are killed at a higher rate in the south than in the north, and that, in turn, helps explain why black people so disproportionally show up in the northern police killing stats.
Conclusion
One clear takeaway from all these numbers is that Northern liberals—after all, they run most Northern city governments—should not feel too terribly smug when surveying the South, or applauding symbolic victories over racism, because very material forms of racism unfold up North on their watch and these are rooted not only in police prejudice but regional political economy and industrial policy. Transforming those “root causes” would be a massive though not impossible task. It would require challenging the prerogatives of capital; that is, confronting actual capitalists, i.e., campaign donors. That is a daunting prospect. And so, the liberal political class prefers progressive cultural change, renaming and redecorating, to the harder job of progressive economic change. Because, in the grand scheme of things, symbols are cheap.
Notes
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If we think that these maladies are invariable and immutable expressions of an American system founded on settler colonialism and slavery, or if we believe on principle that coercion is bad and that the state has no “right” to coerce compliance with laws, then our course of action will be clear: we should steel ourselves with moral zeal and take up the cause to defund, dismantle, and abolish policing.18 But if we understand that these collective disorders represent a contingent fact of history—a modern shift of institutional logics that was gestated in the turmoil of the 1960s, born in the political retrenchment of the 1970s, and persists, albeit in increasingly attenuated modalities, today19—then we might begin the work of unpacking the bundle of associations, of bringing American law enforcement practices into alignment with constitutional protections, evolving international human rights norms, and rising standards of accountability.
The latter approach offers a richer and subtler view of history, to say nothing of having the advantage of being informed by a coherent comparative sociology. Policing, which exists in every modern society, can scarcely be traced to the slave patrols lore commonly circulated among abolitionists. Although it has plural (and often bloodstained) roots in the protection of private property, strikebreaking, sexual regulation, and the maintenance of race, ethnic, and class hierarchies, policing’s modern implantment in rationales of public safety represents a civilizational advance over private protection rackets and archaic forms of communal violence including lynch mobs, kinship-based self-defense, feuds, vendettas, and so on. It is part of an apparatus that inserts delays, rules, and deliberations in between accusation, apprehension, adjudication, and penalty. Its means of coercion are not intrinsically unjust or abusive. A socialist ought to be able to hold these opposed thoughts in his or her head at the same time.
Calls to defund, shrink, and ultimately abolish20 the police misdiagnose the problem with American policing and prescribe a course likely to make things worse, not better.
Bernie Sanders’ recent refusal to embrace demands to defund and abolish policing (demands that tacitly accept the limits of austerity budgets) has drawn hoots and catcalls from the cancel culture activists of Twitterverse and Leftbook. Accustomed to circulating arcane terms amongst small groups of insiders, some have couched their counsel in inventive definitions of what the term “defund” might mean. Libertarians, at least, are honest about words and understand what they’re saying when they call for defunding: they want to privatize policing and put all security arrangements on the marketplace. Bernie’s position, by contrast, views security as a public good. This approach has the advantage of aligning with public opinion, which acknowledges racist enforcement, supports reform, and—across all race/ethnic groups—strongly opposes defunding. It also resonates with Colin Kaepernick’s point about underfunding and undertraining: “You can become a cop in six months and don’t have to have the same amount of training as a cosmetologist. That’s insane.” (By contrast, Northern European police typically receive 2 to 3 years of training, including extensive coursework in social sciences, human relations, and psychology—with emphasis on conflict resolution and crisis management.)
Embracing the urgent need for radical reform, Sanders also makes his commitment to a welfarist version of public security clear: “Do I think we should not have police departments in America? No, I don’t. There’s no city in the world that does not have police departments.” The democratic socialist elaborates: “I called for police departments that have well-educated, well-trained, well-paid professionals. And, too often around this country right now, you have police officers who take the job at very low payment, don’t have much education, don’t have much training—and I want to change that.” He continues, envisioning a much wider role for social services, as distinct from policing: “[M]any police departments and cops deal every day with issues of mental illness, deal with issues of addiction, and all kinds of issues which should be dealt with by mental health professionals or others, and not just by police officers.”
The call to defund or abolish the police is a gift to the right. We need instead a series of radical reforms along with enhanced training, closer supervision, and democratic accountability. We should be looking to models that work rather than engaging in fantasies about civil patrols and communal policing, which will ultimately mean an expansion of private guard labor and private policing, unaccountable to public oversight.
Notes
What the bill doesn’t address is the structural funding needed for these measures and more. A yearly $100 or even $250 million appropriation through a Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) is a wholly inadequate means of remedying training for the over 800,000 law enforcement officers, updating antiquated systems in order to provide more uniform reporting, or creating the Misconduct Registry, not to mention the other reforms. A JAG, while one of the leading sources for federal justice funding for state and local governments, is an impermanent grant that cannot address the need for a steady source of reliable funding for systemic change.
My research suggests that in response to the lack of a national funding strategy for public safety and policing, local and state governments use fines, fees, and surcharges to garner funds for their large budgets. In this process, many localities squeeze mostly poor folks for money. This reliance on the poor for law enforcement funding is a definite contributor to the dismal relations between some communities and law enforcement. Increased patrols, traffic stops, and searches aid a culture of mistrust and terror surrounding law enforcement interactions.
Piling on fines and fees for things like parking tickets or expired registration, and charging for jail stays and probation fees, leads many poor people into cycles of debt to courts and law enforcement agencies. Entering into payment plans can lead to continuous forms of supervision, as people cycle through probation and incarceration.
For example, we already know that in the 2014 Department of Justice investigation into Ferguson, Missouri following the death of Michael Brown, frivolous traffic stops and quotas tied to promotions were part of the culture of policing in Ferguson, which had little to do with public safety and more to do with filling a budget gap. For years in nearby Pagedale, Missouri, residents were ticketed for too high grass, mismatched blinds, or BBQing on their front porches, putting mostly poor residents through trumped up ticketing and incarceration over unpaid fines. The Institute of Justice found in 2013 that the city’s municipal court, which met twice a month, “heard 5,781 cases, or an average of 241 cases per night.” A successful lawsuit has curbed the practice, but public safety still makes up 75 percent of Pagedale’s over $2 million dollar budget with real estate taxes not even coming close to covering a quarter of the City’s budget. It is clear that in the absence of a federal mandate, many local governments with small budgets are weighed down by public safety expenditures and have been reluctant to institute increases in local taxes.
What I have found through my research is that at both local and state levels, fines/fees and surcharges have acted as a predatory tax system in the absence of real structural reforms for justice funding. Ohio and Florida are two states that have over 100 justice-related charges, and North Carolina is an example of a state that has had almost yearly rises in justice fees since 2003, with a seatbelt violation fee of $25 in the 1980s ballooning over 644 percent to around $180 with the addition of court fees. Accounting for inflation, this is still a 190 percent increase.
The movement to #defund police and redirect funds into education, youth, mental healthcare, and other social services has gained traction as we see local legislators begin to slash budgets across the country in New York, Oregon, and Minnesota, for example. However, #defund does not address the foundational problems of the model of public safety and law enforcement in the U.S., which can be traced not only to a racialized system and anti-blackness, but to a dearth in sustainable infrastructure around safety funding.
Using an amalgamation of federal and local grants and varying degrees of real estate and property taxation often falls short. For example, in South Carolina, 42 percent of the police training budget comes from traffic fines and fees and court filings, and with the covid-19 epidemic, that source of funding has been even lower with less drivers on the road. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously back in 2019 that states cannot impose “excessive” fines, fees, and forfeitures, but just what is “excessive” hasn’t been explicitly defined.
Without a federal infrastructure for centralized and stable funding for law enforcement and courts in the U.S., problems will persist.
And yes, it is correct that law enforcement and the nation’s courts have been tasked with the impossible job of policing social problems. One of the most unfortunate cases I witnessed was in a New Orleans courthouse where a mother and daughter sat in maroon jumpsuits in Magistrate court inches away from each other after an argument; they had spent the night in jail, and the judge ordered them to “have no contact” with one another. Homelessness, domestic violence, and mental health issues are but a few of the communal issues that would be better suited for counseling and health advisors rather than criminalization.
Fortunately, there are models to learn from on law enforcement restructuring. Several countries throughout Europe, including Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Scotland have embarked on large scale system reform. There are many mistakes to learn from, but the Netherlands example is a particularly worthy case study.
The Netherlands model of decriminalization of certain minor infractions, nationalization of the police force to include centralized training, funding, and fine payments as well as providing strong national backing for public defenders has created a less antagonistic relationship between citizens and law enforcement; it has also led to the closing of several prisons. In addition, a diversification of responses to social problems along with increased use of technology, specifically in traffic situations, has led to less of a need for traffic stops.
While smaller than the U.S., the Netherlands has a slightly higher number of police officers per capita–295 per 100,000 versus the U.S., which has 238 per 100,000. It has some of the most punitive and highest fines in Europe (a Category 6 offense comes with a 890,000 Euro fine) and yet, it continues to close prisons with just 63 incarcerated people per 100,000 compared to the U.S. with 655 per 100,000. By decriminalizing infractions and settling them with fines or transactie (transactions), they have been able to lower police interactions and create a less volatile policing presence in Dutch cities.
For example, as the government explains: “Someone who travels by train without a ticket is fined € 90, someone found to be drunk and disorderly is fined € 90, and someone who urinates in public is fined € 140. These fines are dealt with administratively, which means that the courts are not involved.”
In the U.S., depending on the city and location, these same behaviors could lead to arrest and incarceration, and a poor person who committed the infraction could face numerous days in jail if unable to afford money bail or if they happen to get caught on the wrong day of the week. The Dutch handle over 60 percent of infractions in a non-punitive way with either a fine or transaction, and up to 90 percent of all offenses could be handled this way.
Payments are all processed at one centralized Bureau, the Central Fines Collection Agency or CJIB. Instead of imprisonment, those who cannot afford the payments can make arrangements.
A centralized system also allows for better training. Rather than a few weeks of learning, Dutch officers receive vocational, college, and university training at the Dutch Police Academy over several years, which includes specialized learning. The move to the national system was borne partly out of frustration with fragmentation and the delays in effectiveness, something the U.S. with over 18,000 law enforcement agencies is rife with.
Of course, the Dutch system is not without problems and the national implementation process has not been entirely smooth as Terpstra and Fyfe discuss. And as the need for more officers has become apparent, a slick recruitment video narrated by a black policeman is indicative of an interest in a public perception of diversity. Studies demonstrate some negative attitudes towards police from immigrant communities exist, and in my own fieldwork, I did encounter mostly immigrants experiencing difficulties paying fines and fees; however, the Dutch police seem to have a less overtly negative perception from the public.
While the U.S. has been focused on micro-level reforms in individual officer conduct, the creation of a U.S. law enforcement initiative through a payroll tax would streamline funding. In the same way the Social Security Act and Medicare have brought effective systems for care and assistance, a nationalized service would allow for better police training and oversight. By decriminalizing minor infractions and offering alternatives to police interactions, including utilizing technology to overcome unnecessary, unsafe, and costly traffic stops, the U.S. could improve safety outcomes. Instead of a call to #defund law enforcement, let’s question where funding comes from in order to restructure it and create a better public safety infrastructure.
]]>But it’s a mistake to believe that these things come from police unions, against the wishes of kinder-hearted mayors and governors, or that getting rid of police unions would eliminate a lot of the problems of police brutality. Police are banned from striking, so anything in their contracts is either negotiated with management or decided by a neutral arbitrator. And while they have some political power, the money of the police union is not enough to elect someone to office, so they don’t control who the mayor or city council is. These things exist primarily because they’re rational for maintaining the social order of our economic system.
As others here have said, the primary function of the police is to protect property rather than people. More specifically, it is to contain and repress the anxiety and anger caused by economic desperation. It is also to clear out low-income areas for gentrification, and broadly to police the borders between higher-income and poor parts of town. As the economy gets more unequal and a growing proportion of people fall into increasingly desperate economic straits, more and/or more aggressive policing is needed to accomplish this goal. There are definitely things that bad police unions add to the equation that are terrible and should be undone. But it’s important to understand what is ultimately driving the hyper-policing we’re seeing.
Understanding this also means looking at police violence not as the result of individual or cultural racism that needs to be undone by education or deep introspection, but as a product of the economic order we’re living in. So, for instance, someone working in the real estate industry can either think “those cops are racist assholes, but I’m committed to anti-racist education” or can think “when I help ‘turn around’ ‘up-and-coming’ neighborhoods, my work is helping create the need for police violence.”
One way to think about the power of police unions is to imagine a counter-factual. Suppose, somehow, there was a very progressive police union in some big city, and in their contract negotiations they proposed that their work should be based on protecting people regardless of income, which would mean they would spend a lot of time making sure that housing projects and trailer parks are safe for the people who live there, and would pull a lot of resources out of downtown and rich neighborhoods. Does anyone believe that police unions have the power to force a contract like this, one that runs against the logic of economic power?
Beyond hypothetical counterfactuals, one can just look at the numbers. There are five states where it is illegal for police to engage in collective bargaining—Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. But these states are no better than anyplace else in terms of police repression, brutality and murders. In 2013-2019, police in Tennessee killed 4 people for every 100,000 in the general population, and 5.5 per every 100,000 among black people. By comparison, here are the rates for general population and black people in some states with pretty strong collective bargaining: NY 1.1/3.3; Michigan 1.7/4.2; Connecticut 1.4/2.7. In 2014-2018, Memphis saw a 500% increase in police killings, and Charlotte saw a 400% increase; by comparison, Columbus Ohio was 160%; and Annaheim, Denver, and Portland—all collective bargaining states—saw an increase of about 100%. So there is no correlation between the presence of police unions and the incidence of police brutality. Police brutality exists primarily because it is functional for the dominant economic and political class.
Finally, it’s important to note that, while I would be fine with the AFL-CIO kicking the police unions out, a lot of what’s being said on the left now echoes the lines from the right, such as this piece from the umbrella corporate lobby, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which quotes MLK, says government is the source of racism, points to charter schools as a positive example of combatting racism through privatization, and calls for reining in or abolishing police unions. Here the people who oppose minimum wage, sick leave, Medicaid expansion, public transportation, or the right to sue over race or sex discrimination on the job now appear as the champions of the victims of police brutality, in rallying everyone against police unions. Of course the fact that one’s beliefs may be echoed by those on the right for nefarious reasons doesn’t mean they’re wrong—but it’s a cautionary note to think about where we’re putting our political energy in addressing racist police violence.
]]>Why would you take away someone’s ability to talk with their employer about how overtime is doled out because the Supreme Court has decided that a cop need only say they were scared to render themselves untouchable to an arbitrator in brutality cases?
Police get fired all the time, as anyone who follows arbitration reporter services knows. They just don’t get fired for brutality because it’s essentially unreviewable. No arbitrator is interested in upholding a termination knowing they are going to be overturned in court. It’s easier to fire a cop right now for tardiness than it is for beating unarmed black men but that has nothing to do with the contract. I also think it’s a mistake to engage this question as if it turns on what the definition is of the word “worker” and in turn to have that definition turn on someone’s role in the perpetuation of class relations.
It’s 100% true that cops in our society are on what I would say is the wrong side of basically everything politically. But that’s actually true of a lot of occupations. Coal miner’s living depends on extracting carbon from the earth that poisons the entire world, but disproportionately so members of their own class, to enrich a small number of ruthless plunderers. As Marx says in Wage Labor and Capital: “What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race….A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar.” Police under capitalism are what they are not because police in general are this, but because capitalism is what it is.
If bargaining rights are to be treated as a privilege bestowed upon those deemed worthy of the title “worker” and that definition turns on your occupation’s contribution or injury to the rest of their class, police are certainly out. But then again, so are the legions of teachers who treat it as an obligation to pledge allegiance to the world’s foremost emblem of imperialism, as are the social studies teachers who get paid to whitewash the legacy of slavery, aggression, and oppression because their charge is to instill a toxic, nationalist chauvinism into every kid. So are the unionized public sector carpenters who board up the houses of other workers who are unable to make their tax payments.
Of course they have terrible politics and act like assholes. But if the extension of rights is conditioned on someone subscribing to similar politics to the person holding the keys, those are not rights at all. Those are privileges.
At the end of the day, capitalism has a whole hell of a lot of us doing work to perpetuate the current mode of production. It necessarily has to—physical coercion may be the most obvious manifestation of the perpetuation of capitalism and undermining of the interests of the working class but it’s not even the most important piece of the two apparatus that self-perpetuate the system. Capitalism enlists nearly every institution and countless occupations we have in its replication across generations. I feel like it is basic Marxism to understand and acknowledge that all of society reflects the dominant mode of production—good or bad. Capitalism is a system based on oppression, it depends on imperialism, and domination. Thus, even the most sacrosanct of our institutions bear the shameful mark of the economic base on which they exist. To quote Marx again, this time from Critique of Political Economy: “The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
Cubans don’t hate their police because they exist within a different context and therefore don’t exist to oppress workers to defend capital. Acknowledging that means acknowledging that capitalism is the base of the issue, but I kind of thought we all already knew that?
I really think we can do better than these abstract conversations. Going back to the original point I made, all anyone has to do is actually read these contracts to see that there is something else at work. Did we learn nothing from the relentless onslaught against teachers unions that convinced a lot of fence-sitters to join forces with right wingers and misguided liberals to disembowel them because of a bogeyman that anyone could have dispelled the notion of if only they would read the damn contracts and do the research?
]]>Last year, a member of Williams College’s Comparative Literature department, who is also a dean there, gave a talk about museums and culture in the Department of Art and Art History at William & Mary. The conversation turned to Williams’ store of artifacts from nineteenth-century Hawaii. Unsurprisingly, this collection evidences unfortunate historical dealings between members and alumni of the Williams community and the former Kingdom of Hawaii.[i] In the course of discussion, one topic that arose was the convenience of talking about recognizing past injustices at an institution with a $2.75 billion endowment. As if she were speaking from a set of talking points, the guest pointed out that the student body was now very diverse in the most familiar sense—around 40 percent of Williams’ students belong to U.S. nonwhite populations—and even economically diverse—22-percent Pell grant eligibility, as of 2015. The fact that she anticipated a response to the 40 percent figure—which is pretty good, even if black students are still underrepresented (8 percent), etc.—and had an impressive response on Pell grants was quite a surprise. Clearly, administrators have absorbed the lessons of Walter Benn Michaels’ The Trouble with Diversity and responded aggressively over the past dozen years.[ii] (Since median household income in the U.S. in 2018 was about $62,000, and almost all Pell grants go to students from households making $50,000 or less, 22 percent is still a little low, perhaps, but it’s better than the state school where the talk took place, with its 9-percent Pell grant rate.) All of this leads one to wonder, are prestigious institutions like Williams actually using their wealth to address economic (and not only identity-driven) inequalities?
The simple answer is no. The median family income of Williams College students’ families is still $185,800, and 67 percent of them come from families with household income in the top 20 percent of U.S. households.[iii] In fact, Williams’ generous need-based aid helps even solidly upper-middle-class households (see fig. 1). A household making $105,000 annually is in the 75th percentile of U.S. households. Using some reasonable assumptions about the family’s wealth, it turns out that Williams will offer them about $47,500 in financial assistance and expect a contribution of roughly $20,300.[iv] So, while that generous financial aid policy is a boon to upper-middle-class families, it’s a little misleading to represent it as an aggressive attempt to address income inequality. While Williams’ Pell grant rate is around 22 percent, only 5.3 percent of its students come from households in the poorest-paid quintile of the nation.
And even that statistic hides a darker truth. “Over 50 percent of the lower-income black undergraduates who attend elite colleges get there from boarding, day, and preparatory high schools,” as Anthony Abraham Jack has recently pointed out. For lower-income Latino students, it’s about one-third.[v] Jack calls this group the “Privileged Poor,” as opposed to the “Doubly Disadvantaged,” who attend high schools “close to home.” Both groups face serious challenges at elite institutions, but the Privileged Poor fare better in many ways, which means that admission and success at such colleges and universities is entangled with access to other, similarly exclusive and resource-intensive institutions. Diversity at elite schools like Williams is not a story about throwing the doors of America’s aristocracy open to everyone. It’s about the ongoing intensification of resources in privileged institutions. Schools with very large endowments are making inequality worse and putting economic pressures on schools without such advantages.
Which recalls to mind Harvard’s embarrassment at being forced to admit in October 2018, in connection with the lawsuit brought by Asian-American applicants, that—even while it was aggressively pursuing both racial/ethnic diversity and economic diversity—it was even more precisely targeting applicants connected to major donors. Harvard is not special in this respect. Obviously, other schools with similar franchise value are targeting applicants with major giving capacity even as they pursue better Pell grant rates. Williams still draws 2.8 percent of its students form the top 0.1 percent of U.S. households by income. That might not seem like a large percentage, but it’s 2800 percent as many of those students than one would expect in a random sample. (And at least an order of magnitude greater than their representation at William & Mary, which does well with the upper middle class, but poorly with the super-rich.) But Williams is hardly unusual in this respect, either. A quick glance at some similarly elite institutions makes the point: Harvard’s median family income is $168,800. Three percent of its students come from the top 0.1 percent of households, while 67 percent are from the top quintile and only 4.5 percent are from the lowest. Yale’s median family income is $192,600. The top 0.1 percent supplies 3.7 percent of its students; 69 percent come from the top quintile, and 2.1 percent from the bottom quintile. Princeton’s median family income is $186,100. The top 0.1 percent of households supplies 3.1 percent of Princeton’s students, while 72 percent of them come from the top quintile and 2.2 percent from the lowest-earning quintile. It’s not just the Ivy League, either. The median family income of households sending students to USC is $161,400. The top 0.1 percent contributes 2.6 percent of USC’s students, while the top quintile supplies 63 percent and the lowest quintile 4.9 percent.[vi] And so on.
Back to the large endowments. They’re the reason admissions skew toward high-income households and the reason elite schools can afford to support the admission of students who make their demographics look better. Those endowments finance what progressive reforms such schools enact. In Williams’ case, the college’s budget is small in relation to the endowment. For the year ending June 30, 2018, Williams got $113.4 million in tuition and fees and $26.5 million in room and board, gave roughly $55.0 million back in financial aid and used about $110 million of the income from the endowment to support the budget.[vii] Given that the endowment has produced an annualized rate of return over the past five years (as of 2017) of 10.9 percent,[viii] that’s a pretty ordinary payout—applying about 4 percent of the endowment to the budget. Obviously, a considerable part of the growth of the endowment remained in the endowment.
Alumni giving comes on top of all this asset management. Williams’ recently completed “Teach It Forward” campaign received $665 million in donations from 27,294 individual donors.[ix] This is good news because it puts Williams well on the way to another billion. But it’s also success insofar as development specialists rank participation rate right up there with total donations. A lot of small donations are better than a few big ones. Still, that’s $24,364.33 per donor, on average, which shows how well Williams has cultivated giving capacity in its alumni. The same document that links to the Teach It Forward success story—a summary of the January 2019 meeting of the college’s board—celebrates two new named spaces on the campus “in honor of alumni and their philanthropic support.”[x] So there’s still room for the big donors, too. Of course, the Teach It Forward campaign involves other kinds of engagement, including mentoring, and is devoted to fostering the kinds of inclusion and equity we began with.
On the other hand, $665 million is $665 million. Any contribution, no matter the purpose that recruited it, becomes part of the wealth of the college. Even if it is spent immediately on some budget item consistent with its advertised purpose, it frees up other money for other purposes—money that might have been used for the purpose featured in the giving campaign. That is, the connection between the proceeds of the campaign and actual line-items in the budget will surely not be fully determined by the theme of the campaign.
Maybe this would be the place to point out that “endowment” is not technically the right term for the fund colleges and universities set aside and manage in the ways I’ve been discussing. Some of your university’s “endowment” is actually funds that must be held in perpetuity—true endowment—, but a lot of it is also “quasi-endowment,” or funds your university has set aside when it could have spent them. Such funds may be bound to a purpose, but they and their returns can legally be spent. This is important. The term endowment makes accumulation seem like the rightful purpose of the college’s funds. But that is only the case, legally, for true endowment funds; for the rest of the college’s money, accumulation is a choice.
How central is accumulation to the purpose of large endowments? Consider who manages them and how. These funds are managed semi-autonomously. Williams runs its own fund; Yale hires an external asset manager. But from a practical point of view, the difference is minimal. Collette Chilton, who runs the Williams College Investment Office, last served as the Chief Investment Officer and President of Lucent Asset Management Corporation ($40 billion in assets under management). In recent decades, there has been a busy revolving door between endowment management and other sectors of the shadow banking system. Presumably she made the move because it’s a better position than running Lucent Asset Management and the same kind of work. So, one assumes that, logically, from her point of view, Williams is a hedge fund whose investor withdraws its money at a steady rate of around 4 percent—enough to keep the fund growing during good times. Even without new assets from wealthy families with gifted high-school juniors. Seen that way, the economic diversity of the student body is a secondary consideration. That is, from its point of view as an asset management corporation, Williams’ endowment’s contribution to the college’s budget is just part of the cost of doing business (and seeding a new crop of donors). Another way to put this would be to say that, rather than an engine for reducing inequality, such a school is a mechanism for concentrating wealth.
As the New York Times explains, Daniel Markovits, a professor of law at Yale University and the author of The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class and Devours the Elite (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), believes that, “if growth trends continue,”
the 10 richest schools will “own the entire country” by the middle of the 22nd century.
Unless, that is, either populist resentment—or even “societal collapse,” as he ominously puts it—destroys them first.[xi]
Let’s be optimistic and assume that something other than societal collapse can prevent the Ivy League from ruling the world. Markovits is still pointing to a very real problem.
Should something be done about this? There have been periodic calls to deprive university endowments of their tax-free status. Senator Chuck Grassley has been vocal about this.[xii] Some of the very wealthiest universities may now start paying a 1.4-percent tax on their wealth. There may even be a possibility of bi-partisan support for some kind of proposal that connects rising tuition costs to regulation or taxation of endowment income. One widely read study suggests taxing a university’s endowment if it grows while that university’s tuition simultaneously increases.[xiii] What we’ve seen at Williams, however, makes the merits of such a proposal, as attractive as it may seem at first glance, less than clear. If Williams uses its endowment income to render its tuition effectively progressive—middle-class families pay only a fraction of the full ticket while the 0.1-percenters pay the sticker price—maybe, rather than tax the endowment or link such a tax to the nominal tuition, the right thing to do is simply to press the school to get more serious than it already is about recruiting promising students from lower-income households.
A more interesting—certainly more fundamental—question might be, why does it work this way? Or rather, to borrow the title of a 1990 essay by the legal scholar Henry Hansmann, why do universities have endowments?[xiv] The question itself is surprising. Of course universities have endowments! How else would they support their teaching, research, outreach, etc., missions?
Hansmann’s argument was that endowments were managed too conservatively and that rethinking their purpose might help schools with large endowments refocus their approach to investing. Businesses generally turn to debt to finance capital outlays. And universities usually have tremendous assets against which they could borrow (“Why,” 3-5). Huge financial reserves are too inefficient for businesses, so why were they considered indispensable to universities? In fact, since Hansmann’s writing, universities have taken to borrowing against their endowments (both in order to increase gains and to exploit tax and interest advantages that derive from their status as very safe nonprofits). That still doesn’t answer the question, though. Why do they need endowments? The classic answer, offered in 1974 by James Tobin is the concept of “intergenerational equity”:
The trustees of an endowed institution are the guardians of the future against the claims of the present. Their task is to preserve equity among generations. The trustees of an endowed university…assume the institution to be immortal. They want to know, therefore, the rate of consumption from endowment which can be sustained indefinitely. Sustainable consumption is their conception of permanent endowment income. In formal terms, the trustees are supposed to have a zero subjective rate of time preference.
Consuming endowment income so defined means in principle that the existing endowment can continue to support the same set of activities that it is now supporting. This rule says that current consumption should not benefit from the prospects of future gifts to the endowment. Sustainable consumption rises to encompass an enlarged scope of activities when, but not before, capital gifts enlarge the endowment.[xv]
As Hansmann points out, these views are not Tobin’s, but those he attributed to the trustees who actually oversaw the management of the typical university’s endowment. As the bulk of Hansmann’s essay argues, intergenerational equity, whatever the place it holds in the mind of the typical university trustee, cannot explain the actual, historical behavior of universities. One way to see the failure of intergenerational equity as an account of the actual behavior of universities would be to consider what happened during the 2008 financial crisis, when income from endowments was actually suspended: educational institutions slashed budgets to protect endowments. Of course, belt-tightening during a recession sounds like common sense. But what it does not sound like is endowments rushing in during a crisis to “support the same set of activities” that the previous generation of students received.[xvi]
An astounding report by Joshua Humphreys and a team of researchers explains a lot about the transformation of endowments and their relationship to the institutional and civic benefits they are alleged to offer. In fact, Humphreys traces the fallout of the call for more aggressive investment strategies, a phenomenon called the Endowment Model of Investing. Roughly, that means an investing approach based on the insights of Modern Portfolio Theory (in the development of which Tobin was a key figure)—an approach that seeks maximum total returns and diversifies widely to control risk. Hence the leveraging. Assuming that one can invest in a wide array of products the risks of which are minimally correlated, failures in some parts of the portfolio will not produce net losses, even if the portfolio’s holdings are generally aggressive, because those failures won’t imply failures in other holdings—that’s why the low correlation among investments is key. So, beginning in the 1980s, endowments left the 60/40 equities/fixed income approach that had guided them in the past and began leveraging aggressively to invest in unregulated derivatives, hedge funds and other attractions of the shadow-banking world. Endowment portfolios became illiquid (a hedge fund, for example, can prevent investors from withdrawing money to preserve its assets in adverse conditions) and risky. But, to reiterate, such risks are isolated under this approach to investing. At least, they are in theory.
What happened in 2008 shows the weakness of this approach. Big endowments with deep commitments to the Endowment Model lost big—Yale and Harvard lost between a quarter and a third of their money—and the losers were not the investment managers. The losers, Humphreys and his researchers found, were the communities, the schools and their faculty and staff. Big projects were cancelled and workers were laid off, wages were frozen and communities dependent on universities felt the pain. Obviously, these untaxed behemoths might have used their wealth to ensure the stability of their operations during this massive recession. That would serve the interests of intergenerational equity. But they didn’t.
In other words, it’s not that trustees have a “zero subjective rate of time preference”; rather, they positively disadvantage present students and their institutions as a whole in favor of future students. And when those future constituencies become present constituencies, trustee behavior will disadvantage them, too. That’s because it’s not about students at all. It’s about the endowments themselves—about concentrating wealth under the control of a cadre of managers who enrich themselves and answer to weak boards often hobbled by conflicts of interest or a kind of general alignment of sympathies with the investment managers.[xvii]
But isn’t this just the way the world works, and isn’t this the good version of the way the world works because of precisely the sorts of stories we began with? After all there’s the issue we began with, the mission of diversity—economic or otherwise. If a huge endowment like Williams’ is making its very high tuition affordable for students who would otherwise not be able to pay it, is it not doing precisely what an endowment is meant to do? In fact, this is the only scenario in which Hansmann allows that a large endowment actually does what it’s meant to do. He argued that endowments do serve the cause of intergenerational equity when costs increase and demand remains inelastic (i.e., people still want to go to your very expensive school, despite the rising price). And since Williams’ endowment is not just helping the students of today and tomorrow attend a school that is becoming unaffordable (for all but a few), but is making that tuition progressive by linking the student’s share of the costs to his or her family’s resources, the endowment’s contribution is serving not only intergenerational equity but intragenerational equity, too.
Or is it? According to the latest data from the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), 802 U.S. institutions of higher education and affiliated foundations held $617 billion in endowment assets. This represents the better part of a trillion dollars in largely tax-free managed asset funds.[xviii] That does not include the universities’ other assets. Their endowments alone amount to a value somewhere around the market capitalization of Facebook.
But as recently as fiscal year 2015, only 85 universities had endowments of a billion dollars or more, and the top 120 institutions held 74 percent or $405 billion of the U.S. total of $547 billion in endowments funds.[xix] So 15 percent of the schools held three quarters of the endowments assets. On a per-student basis, the concentration is equally remarkable. According to NACUBO data from 2015, Princeton University held $2.809 million in endowment funds per student, followed unsurprisingly by Yale ($2.073 million/student). Williams held $1.141 million in endowment funds for each student.[xx]
Why does this matter? Because this is what subsidizes the total cost of a year at Princeton, Yale and Williams for each student. And other schools feel pressure to keep up and to compete for students. This is a real factor in driving increasing expenditures per full-time-equivalent student, which were $54,200 at private nonprofit schools in 2014-15 and $31,800 at public schools.[xxi] This amounts to powerful pressure on other schools with smaller endowments attempting to remain competitive with their peers with larger endowments. Another way to put that would be to say that it increases competition to enter the richest schools and puts pressure on other schools to maintain enrollments by offering more services and resources while trying to keep price growth under control. So, while large endowments permit wealthy schools to promote equity—intergenerational and intragenerational—for their students, they do precisely the reverse for everybody else, which amounts to the vast majority of students. That is the opposite of equity.
Of course, this means that schools trying to keep up with the peers with large endowments have to increase tuition. But this pressure can have other, insidious effects, such as undermining access for economically disadvantaged students. A recent Washington Post report offers a glimpse of how this plays out. Increasingly, universities and colleges with shrinking state support or little endowment income—tuition-sensitive schools, as they are sometimes called—feel pressure to recruit students who are likely to enroll and even to seek out and privilege applications from students who have the means to pay tuition. The Post report shows that at least 44 public and private schools were engaged in collecting information, working with consultants and using predictive analytics to assess prospective students. This activity ranges from using cookies to track students’ use of university web pages—including those associated with financial aid—to connecting students to ZIP code and other information that can be linked to their consumer behaviors. As the report’s authors explain,
The practices may raise a hidden barrier to a college education for underprivileged students. While colleges have used data for many years to decide which regions and high schools to target their recruiting, the latest tools let administrators build rich profiles on individual students and quickly determine whether they have enough family income to help the school meet revenue goals.[xxii]
Some of the predictive work seems benign—trying to identify students who are interested in areas in which the school specializes—but, clearly, some of the services the consultants offer aim to help the schools address the competitive pressure produced by peers with huge endowments. And doing so can undermine the cause of equality of access to education.
What does it look like, the pressure less rich schools feel to keep up? What kind of mischief does it cause? Take an interview from just a few years ago with Carmen Ambar, published September 1, 2017, on the occasion of her accession to the presidency of Oberlin College. Oberlin sees itself, or Ambar sees it, as a “bellwether” institution—“So goes Oberlin, so goes the rest of higher education.”[xxiii] Another way to say that would be, Oberlin is aware of the stakes of losing its position as a leader among institutions of higher learning. And Ambar was feeling the pressure. She had already conceded that Oberlin would need to find a way to get sagging enrollments back up. But that acknowledgement sat in the midst of a “conundrum.” Getting the kind of students who are a good fit for Oberlin to choose it (over, say, some peer competitor) means attracting them; however, the enrollment pinch means there is less money to finance such efforts in the school’s enrollment-revenue stream, so the institution must also “reduce our expenditures.” The obvious question follows immediately: “how do we do both those things?”
The remarks about Oberlin’s status as a bellwether, in fact, comes near the end of Ambar’s discussion of the challenges facing Oberlin, of the need for the institution’s constituencies to put the institution’s needs first and their particular needs after them. Indeed, she puts this imperative in precisely the terms in which we’ve prepared to hear it:
Here’s what I know is true—that some group of people at Oberlin has to decide to be good stewards of this institution’s resources. When I say good stewards, I mean deciding that we’re gonna make the difficult decisions that we have to make to ensure its long-term sustainability. And when I say “long-term,” I’m talking about how … we make sure it’s here for 400 years, not tomorrow. Oberlin’s gonna be fine. … But we do have a long-term projection that says if we don’t make some changes, then we’re gonna have to start making some choices that we really don’t want to make. (“Off the Cuff”)
So in what terms does Oberlin see itself making its case?
Oberlin is relevant because the types of students that I think we are sending out into the world are the types of students who are going to be changing the world for good and responding to the message that they were trying to deliver at Charlottesville. We are more relevant today than we’ve ever been. Our willingness to make the tough decisions so that we can sustain ourselves for the future is important not just for Oberlin, not just for higher ed, but for the nation, and that’s the reason why I think we will have the will to do it. (“Off the Cuff”)
And we are back to the thesis of this discussion. This is where the deep compatibility of the aims of a certain vision of social justice with the impulse toward institutional accumulation rises nearly to visibility before being obscured by obviousness. The aims of inter- and intragenerational equity are made out to be justifications for protecting an endowment that is in reality treated as the purpose and end in itself.
Within a year or so of Ambar’s remarks, Oberlin’s total endowed funds had risen from $820.3 million as of June 30, 2017, to $887.4 million on June 30, 2018–an increase of $67.1 million. This accompanied a rise in the general investment pool (which comprises almost all of the endowed funds) to $887.0 million from $819.9 over the same period, “the result of changes in the market values of … pooled investments and the many donor- and board-designated gifts received from generous alumni and friends during the fiscal year, offset by the distribution of cumulative investment earnings.”[xxiv] During that year, “net total investment return for the General Investment Pool was 12.4%” (“Assets under Management”). Distributions from the endowment’s earnings to “provide long-term funding for student financial aid, support faculty compensation and fund academic programs” totaled $41.6 million. That’s 5.1% of the general investment pool at the start of the fiscal year—more than Williams spends, but a lot less than the 12.4% rate of return the general investment pool earned over that period. That’s the sort of prudence that stands behind the call to tough decisions.
What kind of tough decisions are we talking about? As of March 5, 2020, Oberlin College planned to “replac[e] 108 unionized dining hall and maintenance workers with lower-paid non-union subcontractors. The cost savings, claimed to total $2 million per year, will primarily come from the fact that Oberlin’s unionized workers currently have decent health care benefits while replacement non-union sub-contractors will have none.”[xxv] This in a small town with a 23.5% poverty rate.[xxvi]
In short, while diversity efforts like Williams’ look like a strong commitment to social justice and equality, the institutions that implement such efforts remain—and remain committed to being—bastions of privilege. Worse still, the same large university endowments that fund these efforts at economic and racial and ethnic diversity are vast and growing concentrations of wealth and are, in fact, major players in the shadow banking system that threatens equality and stability for our society as a whole. Further, while the modest endowments of otherwise tuition-sensitive colleges and universities protect their missions in hard times, the huge endowments held by a few schools do the reverse of fostering equity in higher education. By making inefficient use of surplus capital (and avoiding taxes) in order to support a mission of providing superior educational and social opportunities to the upper 20 percent of the U.S. income structure, they funnel resources upwards and put anticompetitive pressures on more modestly funded institutions. So it’s closer to the truth to say that, while trustees of institutions with large endowments may think they’re guarding intergenerational equity or intragenerational equity (in the form of expanded access in the present), they are really merely mounting vigorous campaigns of wealth accumulation that increase inequality. So why do these universities still have endowments?
All of the above predates the COVID-19 crisis. And the analysis was already damning enough. What happens now? Now, the problem isn’t just small, private liberal arts colleges like Oberlin trying to figure out how to compete with Williams, to be a bellwether and a force for a certain vision of social justice with a fraction of Williams’ endowment. This year’s return on the general investment pool will not be 12.4%—not for Oberlin and likely not for any other university endowment. That means everyone has a choice to make. Tuition-sensitive schools will make cuts, which makes one wonder all over again about the wisdom and the viability of treating post-secondary education as a private good to be supplied by a market in post-secondary degrees.
Schools with big endowments will face choices, too. Joshua Humphreys showed in gory detail what they did when they were last faced with such choices—because the shadow-banking world where university endowments live faced new, unpredictable and destructive interference from hidden patterns of risk exposure, workers and communities bore the pain to protect endowments. Will it go the same way this time? Or will they spend their quasi-endowments to answer the claims of inter- and intragenerational equity? Will they turn their backs on the staff and communities who depend on them or will they shut down operations to protect the endowment? It’s at times like these that schools with heavyweight endowments show us how they answer the question about why they have those endowments. If the answer is simply that they have endowments for the sake of accumulation, they’ll do just exactly what Humphreys et al. found them doing in 2008. In which case, we have to ask ourselves why we tolerate tax-free hedge funds participating in the shadow banking system, reaping windfalls in good times and wreaking havoc in our cities and in our post-secondary educational system when times are hard.
Which direction will the schools with big endowments take? How do they express their understanding of the purpose of their endowments? The response to 2020’s crisis is far from clear at this point. But there are signs.[xxvii] From Peter Salovey, president of Yale University:
Our spending policy seeks to balance two objectives: to provide a steady flow of funding for current operations, and to preserve purchasing power for future generations. Over the course of every five years, we spend about one-quarter of the value of the endowment. This is as much as we can responsibly spend without unfairly taking from those who will come after us. The strength we enjoy today derives from the generosity and care of those who came before us, and we have similar obligations to the future students, faculty, and staff of this university.[xxviii]
Salovey is just reiterating the account, which we’ve seen debunked, that a university’s endowment exists to ensure the provision of the same services to future generations as those enjoyed by present members of the university’s community. To point out that an endowment spends a quarter of its resources every five years is, roughly speaking, to note as we did at the beginning, that a school (like Williams) that spends four percent of its funds every year will consistently—in the long term—end up banking more than that. In other words, Salovey is making the same move we’ve been discussing—treating the endowment as an engine of accumulation while making it look like the tool of social equity.
Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, says something very similar:
Princeton is blessed to have an exceptional endowment, built up through the generosity of our donors, leveraged by the impact of Annual Giving, and sustained over time by the careful stewardship and disciplined spending policies of past generations. That endowment buffers our University from some of the more extreme pressures affecting other institutions of higher education. It helps us to pursue our mission during the crisis and to emerge from it as energetically as possible. But the endowment does not save us from having to make tough choices or exercise financial discipline; indeed, as I have noted already, endowment returns have declined along with the University’s revenue streams.
People sometimes mistakenly regard endowments as though they were savings accounts or “rainy day funds” that can be “tapped” or “dipped into” during hard times. That is an error: endowments are more like lifetime annuities. They must support active operations of the University each year and last as long as the University does.
Our budget model in fact presupposes that we will “tap” or “dip into” our endowment every year. We spend about 5 percent of our endowment each year by design. Put differently, Princeton spends more than $1.3 billion from its endowment every year, including years where endowment returns are negative. We spend at a rate such that, absent growth, the entire endowment would be gone in 20 years.[xxix]
Eisgruber’s version is a little longer than Salovey’s, but it’s well worth the extra attention, if only for the scare quotes. In lots of ways, however, they are remarkably similar. They both invoke a wild counterfactual assumption—twenty years of spending at the current rate, and in an environment that requires spending at the current rate (i.e., with undiminished prices despite zero economic growth), but without giving or returns on investment—to show the extreme precariousness of the university’s position. That’s quite a set of assumptions. It’s much closer to the truth to assume that elite university endowments will continue to grow, on average, far faster than they spend, and that the language of zero subjective rate of time preference will continue to cover for a policy of endless accumulation. This is built into the way we think about university endowments as opposed to other, similarly charitable endowments.[xxx] If the name of the game is to maximize the return on the investment pool in any given year in the future, the preference for future spending will always be positive, and no one’s needs but the pool’s inform that goal. University endowments can be forces for inequality or for equity. It is one or the other. And the current crisis is a crisis for higher education in this country, so this is precisely the moment to recognize the nature of the problem.
I’d like to thank John Stein for his invaluable generosity and help. I do not expect him to accept any feature of my analysis. A number of people have made useful or crucial suggestions, including (but not limited to) Katherine Rader and Marci Smith. Any errors are mine alone.
[ii] Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Picador, 2006).
[iii] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/williams-college; accessed March 7, 2019.
[iv] https://admission.williams.edu/costestimator/
[v] Anthony Abraham Jack, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019), 10-11.
[vi] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/williams-college
[vii] https://controller.williams.edu/files/williams_financial_statement_2018_2.pdf
[viii] https://investment.williams.edu/files/2017_Investment_Report_Final.pdf
[ix] https://teachitforward.williams.edu/
[x] https://president.williams.edu/letters-from-the-president/summary-of-the-january-2019-board-of-trustees-meeting/
[xi][xi] Jennifer Schuessler, “The Meritocrat Who Wants to Unwind the Meritocracy,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 2019, updated Sept. 13, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/arts/meritocracy-trap-daniel-markovits.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage
[xii] https://psmag.com/education/chuck-grassley-crusade-to-tax-university-endowments
[xiii] https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2689&context=lawreview
[xiv] Henry Hansmann, “Why Do Universities Have Endowments?” The Journal of Legal Studies 19, no. 1 (January 1990): 3-42.
[xv] “Why,” 14; citing James Tobin, “What Is Permanent Endowment Income?” American Economic Review 64, no. 2 (May 1974): 427-32. The quotation comes from page 427.
[xvi] “Taxing and Tuition,” 1674; Willie relies in this part of his discussion on Peter Conti-Brown, “Scarcity Amidst Wealth: The Law, Finance, and Culture of Elite University Endowments in Financial Crisis,” Stanford Law Review 63, no. 5 (March 2011): 699-749.
[xvii] Joshua Humphreys, Educational Endowments and the Financial Crisis: Social Costs and Systemic Risks in the Shadow Banking System, a Study of Six New England Schools (Boston, Mass.: Center for Social Philanthropy/Tellus Institute, 2010). https://www.tellus.org/pub/Tellusendowmentcrisis.pdf
[xviii] A new law imposes a 1.4% tax on certain university endowments, but only affects schools with endowments of more than half a million dollars per student—about thirty schools in total. https://www.chronicle.com/article/Final-Tax-Bill-Would-Spare/242075
[xix] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_333.90.asp?referrer=report
[xx] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment, which in turn cites NACUBO’s “2015 NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments” (2015).
[xxi] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/ch_3.asp
“Average total expenditures of institutions per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student in 2014–15—shown in constant 2015–16 dollars throughout this paragraph—varied by institution control and level, as did changes in average total expenditures per FTE student between 2009–10 and 2014–15 (after adjustment for inflation). In 2014–15, average total expenditures per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student at public degree-granting institutions were $31,800 (table 334.10). These 2014–15 total expenditures per FTE student were 10 percent higher than in 2009–10. In 2014–15, public 4-year institutions had average total expenditures per FTE student of $41,100, compared with $14,700 at public 2-year institutions. At private nonprofit institutions, total expenditures per FTE student in 2014–15 were 7 percent higher than in 2009–10 (table 334.30). In 2014–15, total expenditures per FTE student at private nonprofit institutions averaged $54,200 at 4-year institutions and $20,200 at 2-year institutions.”
[xxii] Douglas MacMillan and Nick Anderson, “Student Tracking, Secret Scores: How College Admissions Offices Rank Prospects Before They Apply,” The Washington Post (October 14, 2019). https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/14/colleges-quietly-rank-prospective-students-based-their-personal-data/
[xxiii] Melissa Harris and Christian Bolles, “Off the Cuff: Carmen Ambar, President of Oberlin College,” The Oberlin Review (September 1, 2017). https://oberlinreview.org/13866/news/carmen-ambar-president-of-oberlin-college/
[xxiv] “Assets under Management.” https://www.oberlin.edu/investment/assets
[xxv] Les Leopold, “When Gown Crushes Town: The Corporatization of Oberlin College,” Common Dreams (March 5, 2020). https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/03/05/when-gown-crushes-town-corporatization-oberlin-college
[xxvi] Data USA, “Oberlin, OH,” cited in “When Gown Crushes Town.” https://datausa.io/profile/geo/oberlin-oh/
[xxvii] For an excellent analysis of one elite institution and its message, see an extraordinarily incisive op-ed by Katherine Rader on University of Pennsylvania: https://www.thedp.com/article/2020/04/upenn-budget-colleges-universities-endowment
[xxviii] Peter Salovey, “Yale in the Months Ahead,” Yale News (April 21, 2020), n.p. https://news.yale.edu/2020/04/21/yale-months-ahead?utm_source=YaleToday&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=YT_YaleNews%20-%20Alumni%20From%20Peoplehub_4-22-2020
[xxix] “Message to the Princeton Community from Christopher L. Eisgruber,” The Office of Communications, Princeton University, May 4, 2020. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/05/04/president-eisgruber-writes-princeton-community-about-state-university-and-planning
[xxx] Celia Dallas, “Why Mandatory Spending Limits for College Endowments Could Backfire,” Institutional Investor (September 12, 2015), n.p. https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b14z9wvg7fdzt0/why-mandatory-spending-limits-for-college-endowments-could-backfire: “Unlike foundations, which can cope with a reduction in grant making when investment returns are low, universities cannot modulate spending with such agility. University endowments fund several operations that would be devastated by big cuts to research, compensation and student aid. Therefore, universities seek to maintain predictability in their annual dollar level of spending by paying out a lower percentage of assets when market values rise to compensate for their limited ability to readily cut expenditures when market values fall.”
Again, this means that, when the university’s endowment grows, it must be saved; when it declines, it must be preserved. The contradiction is glaring.
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That Trump is a gauche chauvinist scarcely comes as news. He launched his 2016 campaign with depictions of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, and he laced campaign appearances with sexist taunts. Of course, recent reports of presidential inaction might seem even less flattering than the CureVac brouhaha, at least from the perspective of those who suppose that a president’s first duty is to US citizens and residents: While denying the existence of a crisis, Trump failed to lock down crucial supplies of ventilators, respirators, and protective medical equipment. Through mid-March, US manufacturers were exporting large quantities of these supplies to Germany, Belgium, and Japan. And as the crisis loomed, Trump used neither his bully pulpit nor his executive powers to stimulate emergency production of crucial medical equipment.
So much for America First.
Butler now uses terms that she has largely avoided throughout a long and distinguished career: “market-driven,” “capitalism,” “inequality.” This is good to see. “Capitalism Has its Limits,” her title declares. And yet, the author’s fretting and fidgeting suggests a profound discomfort with these basic terms—and a desire to redefine, domesticate, and pacify them.
The fidgeting is evident on many fronts. It takes a certain amount of intellectual heavy-lifting, for example, to reduce capitalism to one of many -isms that might equally reduce one’s life chances or access to healthcare. (Although not, apparently, as much as you might think, since everyone on the neoliberal left does it all the time.) Butler is thus careful to invoke “nationalism, white supremacy, violence against women, queer, and trans people, and capitalist exploitation” as coequal factors in “radical inequality.” This ritual invocation—plus the pivot from exploitation to discrimination (“The virus alone does not discriminate, but we humans surely do, formed and animated as we are by the interlocking powers of nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and capitalism”)—serves to ward off charges of vulgar Marxism, no doubt, and to keep the narrative securely within the bounds of academic and foundation liberalism. (Establishment liberalism denounces inequalities so long as they can be traced to prejudice and discrimination; about exploitation and class inequalities it has much less to say.)
But in fact, what the ongoing crisis most clearly demonstrates is that class and income weigh more heavily in access to healthcare than do other factors. Indeed, class and income might seem narrowly determinate: either you have adequate health care insurance, or you don’t. Either you have money to pay for medical goods and services, or you don’t. Excepting the experience of that diminishing share of the working class whose interests are represented by strong labor unions (and who thus have secured good healthcare insurance), these are the unvarnished facts.
Butler’s pivot from exploitation to discrimination proved proleptic. Over the week that followed her blog’s publication, journalists at various newspapers and websites have begun parsing racial disparities in COVID-19 infections and morbidity rates, drawing on limited data from a number of cities. We might well be cautious about drawing too many lessons from rapidly-evolving numbers. But it is undeniably true that the weight of economic inequality falls disproportionately on some sectors and subpopulations. It is also true that poverty correlates, generally but not absolutely, with impaired health and shortened life expectancies. And lastly it is true that pandemics throw these inequalities into high relief (although they reveal little about them that wasn’t already known before).
The magic of essentialist thinking today is to turn select forms of disproportionality—which is to say, measures of statistical probabilities—into self-correspondence: identity. Karen Fields and Barbara Fields call this form of self-deception “racecraft” (a play on “witchcraft”); others call it “identitarianism.” This move forecloses questions about who else might share disproportionate risks and why. In fact, many of the disparities that are presented as racial are better correlated to class inequalities. Rates for hypertension, heart failure, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and end-stage kidney disease are all inversely correlated with income, while people living in low-income areas are also less likely to receive treatment for these and other ailments. Whites and blacks with a high school education or less (a statistical proxy for lower-working-class) today have the same life expectancies, and they are considerably less than life expectancies for better-educated (more middle-class) sectors. An adequate accounting for this business, then, would draw out the similarities in life chances and life expectancies between, say, whites in the eastern midlands, African Americans in inner cities, and other low-income populations devastated by decapitalization and deindustrialization. Our liberals abhor this idea and the chain of associations it sets in motion, as it leads the conversation back to class and political economy.
By contrast, the wonderful thing about a socialist perspective is that it doesn’t ask you to show your ID papers, to demonstrate your worthiness, to haul out the testimony of ancestors—or even for that matter to account for proximate causes (like whether you smoke or eat pork or drink alcohol and soft drinks). Socialism doesn’t care how you got those comorbidity factors (diabetes, a heart condition, hypertension, etc.) that play an outsized role in the current health crisis. You’re going to get the healthcare you need because everyone is going to get it. (You’re also going to get help with diet and exercise plus guarantees that healthcare practitioners won’t discriminate against you.)
This is the outcome that Butler desires—coverage for everyone. She even embraces a “socialist imaginary” by the end of the piece, and this comes as a distinct surprise, although she frames it not in terms of the majoritarian interests of the broad working class (which includes all of its race, ethnic, gender, etc. sectors) but in terms of the special precarities of “the homeless, the uninsured, and the poor.” Even so, she seems to postpone socialism to the exigencies of a pandemic during which “none of us can wait.” It is to be an “ideal” which now “must now be kept alive in the social movements that are riveted … [on] the long term struggle that lies ahead of us.”
If I were the powers-that-be, I would be very nervous about Bernie Sanders’ campaign (now suspended), which has repeatedly served express notice on the “billionaire class.” And I’d be very relieved by the ingenuity shown by left intellectuals like Butler in producing a variant of socialism that turns it back into the reassuring tropes of political idealism, charitable philanthropy, means-tested programs, and liberal interest-group politics.
Butler’s intellectual pedigree is on clear display when she tries to come up with a substitute for Sanders’ slogan, “healthcare is a human right.” She proposes instead the language of moral and “social obligation”: aspirants to universal health care “would have to convince the American people that we want to live in a world in which none of us denies health care to any of the rest of us.” The problem with this hortatory reframing—which mirrors the language of French functionalists Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss a century ago when they attempted to recast something like socialism in distinctly nonsocialist terms—is that the moral logic of obligation relegates key questions to the background and leaves social inequality conceptually in place. (Mauss famously imagined a modern social contract in which different classes and sectors would essentially give gifts to each other.) To put matters starkly, what Butler really proposes is a sort of noblesse oblige: No one (with resources) should deny anyone (without resources) access to healthcare.
This is a depoliticized version of the struggle for healthcare. It steers the train of thoughts away from demands for political power and decommodification and invites us all to take the perspective of the “haves” in deciding to be generous to the “have-nots.” And the have-nots can only appear within this intellectual horizon as the most marginal or excluded members of society, not as the expansive working class. At a time when enlightened self-interest and a broad sense of class solidarity has informed the rise of a socialist left in America, Butler strives to keep the conversation in the high-minded realm of liberal pieties and denunciations of selfishness and bigotry.
But perhaps there is a real-world political struggle that Butler keeps in view, after all. Although she tells readers that she voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 California nominating primary, she also suggests to readers—six times in a brief piece—that Elizabeth Warren stood for essentially the same social-democratic healthcare policy as Sanders. Now it takes a lot of embellishment to compare Warren—who still declares herself to be “capitalist to the bone” and who was actually a registered Republican until, at 47, she realized that Bill Clinton’s neoliberalism had made the Democratic Party hospitable for her—with Sanders. It also takes at least a trace of tergiversation to make Warren’s walked-back plan sound like comprehensive healthcare for all. Butler’s assertions notwithstanding, Warren’s retraction invites logical queries: Why did she walk back her commitment to Medicare for All? We may never know, but from the outside, it seems like conciliation to the center’s demand for something more ‘practical’ than universal coverage—something less systematic or comprehensive in its approach, something that does not have to answer for M4A’s ambition. But is this kind of compromise designed to appeal to the American public or to the neoliberal cadre controlling the Democratic Party? Again, we may never know the answer for sure, but Warren’s poll numbers began to tank when she walked back her sketch of a plan to fund Medicare for All, and they never recovered. (Today, as the tide of medical disaster rises, polls suggest that support for M4A is at an all-time high.)
Butler seems to be trying to burnish Warren’s credentials as a leftist, which were so recklessly squandered in events leading up to the candidate’s exit from the presidential primaries. Perhaps in this gesture we catch a glimpse of the sort of mutual aid and solidarity that Butler’s argument really involves, although everything in the piece steadfastly refuses the term “class solidarity.” It is a sense of mutual obligation among upper-upper-middle-class members of the chattering classes, with Berkeley scratching Harvard’s back. It is a politics of the professoriate, as against the proletariat.
The unfolding cataclysm of COVID-19 reveals the woeful inadequacies and brute illogic of our for-profit healthcare system, surely. It also throws into high relief the distribution of economic inequalities. More than that, it invites us to imagine not merely “limits” to capitalism, as Butler’s essay frames matters, but to think about the exploitative and destructive nature of the system itself. Both Butler and Warren seem steadfastly devoted to a politics that refuses this invitation.
]]>Naturally, the contemporary demand for a job guarantee has been dismissed by the business press as “absurd” and unworkable.1 Meanwhile, liberal outfits have urged caution and restraint.2 This sort of hostility is to be expected; after all, a federal job guarantee would cost in excess of $500 billion, and the political ideas that inform such a program have not been up for serious debate since the 1970s.3 To boot, a federal job guarantee would undermine the logic of a ruthless labor market, challenge management’s absolute power over employees and vastly improves workers’ leverage on the job. Elites are justifiably worried, defensive and lashing out.
What is less expected, however, has been the skepticism of the job guarantee idea expressed by some on the political Left. Some claim the program wouldn’t challenge the form of the wage relation itself, or that it would be logistically impossible to administer; that its realization would result in nightmarish work camps or that it would end up looking like Clintonian workfare on steroids. Much of this skepticism comes from those who advocate for, and often prefer, basic income as a solution to the challenges of the contemporary labor market. Ironically, what the business press gets exactly right about a job guarantee is what most skeptics get wrong. Tightening the labor market would ratchet up pressure on private employers to raise wages and massively increase the size of the federally employed workforce. Employment assurance programs have historically evoked elite pearl-clutching precisely because they are among the few political demands that put workers in a position real power. Criticism of a job guarantee, then, reflects a misunderstanding of the political logic of working-class demands, the power that a job guarantee affords workers and finally the central and enduring role of wage labor in socialist strategy.
The Political Prehistory of the Job Guarantee
New Deal programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Works Progress Administration were the first successful American experiments in state-led civilian employment assurance. Of course, these initiatives were designed as relief projects, born of a deep crisis in the state and economy, and their implementation was possible because of the profound weakness of the domestic capitalist class during the Depression. Nonetheless, just as these “relief” programs took hold the labor left tried to deepen President Franklin Roosevelt’s employment initiatives. To transform them from temporary and partial to permanent social programs. Walter Reuther, as early as 1940, advocated for an ill-fated plan to have the federal government transform manufacturing plants for war needs. And while the ‘Reuther Plan’ was sold to policymakers as a wartime necessity, the CIO’s goal was to restructure economic relations, hire workers en masse and insist on the federal government’s heavy intervention in the economy. Similar ideas informed the expansive reports of Roosevelt’s National Resources Planning Board (NRPB). In 1943 the NRPB released—to wide circulation—two reports intended to shape the future of postwar planning: Security, Work, and Relief Policies and After the War—Full Employment. Both reports advocated for expansive and generous social programs to complement extensive jobs programs administered through a proposed Federal Work Agency in order to employ “all who are willing and able to work.” And in his 1944 State of the Union Address, Roosevelt himself called for the recognition of “the right to a useful and remunerative job.” The cumulative fruit of all these plans was James Murray’s Full-Employment Bill of 1945. The bill is arguably the first American attempt at a job guarantee. It would have guaranteed state-led full-employment as a legal right. In particular, it called for a yearly employment budget based on estimates of “the number of jobs needed during the ensuing fiscal year or years to assure continuing full employment” and would have specified that if the private sector was unable to meet that number the federal government would step in. Unfortunately, by this time the capitalist class was recovering from the economic crisis of the 1930s and the war. The business community was reorganizing politically and while the strength of the newly organized industrial working class was unprecedented, it was met by an unparalleled organizing drive among business elites.4
As Micha? Kalecki observed over three-quarters of a century ago, elite resistance to employment assurance is due to fear that “under a regime of permanent full employment, the ‘sack’ would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure.” Accordingly, across industry, workforce and region, business leaders worried that under full employment “[t]he social position of the boss would be undermined and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would grow.”5 In other words, by substantially tightening the labor market workers could be emboldened to strike for higher wages and shorter hours all while capitalists would be compelled to either raise wages or risk losing profits to work stoppages and labor market competition from state industries. The United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the American Farm Bureau Federation all understood this and acted accordingly. Business leaders organized civil society, the courts and Congress in a campaign to sink what they saw as a major threat to their interests (a threat, perhaps, second only to that of socialized medicine). The ruling class won and the pursuit of full employment in the 1940s was sunk.6
By the 1960s a renewed interest in the problems of poverty raised the demand for jobs once again. So great was the demand for a solution to the unemployment problem that it was expressed in what was arguably the principal political demonstration of the decade: the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Yet the ambitious employment assurance programs demanded by the likes of A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin in their Freedom Budget were once again derailed.
This time, in addition to intransigent business opposition, the labor left had a new competitor for the political limelight: liberal advocates of the anti-poverty agenda. These advocates insisted that programs like Community Action would alleviate the crushing effects of poverty, without causing a major intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of private enterprise, and, if successful, these efforts could even ignite a potential new basis for emancipatory politics. Anti-poverty programs were perfectly compatible with the full-employment ideal, they argued, and robust anti-poverty programs could only help pave the way to a politics of full employment. In reality, the Ford Foundation and the nascent layer of Kennedy-era Ivy-educated postwar intellectuals designed ameliorative anti-poverty programs that would be modest enough to attract business support (or at least neutralize their opposition). They built an anti-poverty policy that was perfectly compatible with a new model of commercial Keynesianism. Instead of anti-poverty as a road to employment assurance, liberal elites saw anti-poverty advocacy as an alternative to the demand for jobs and wage hikes.
The Left, for their part, failed to see how an anti-poverty political agenda put them in a back-seat position. The endemically poor, while no less morally deserving of social solidarity than the more economically stable working class, are not easy to organize, and their demands can be mediated through church leaders, nonprofits, and community organizations. Rhetorically, a language of “shoring up the bottom” did little to advance an egalitarian agenda focused on challenging the immense power at the top of society. Instead of “us against them,” anti-poverty moralism relied on a narrative that painted liberal crusaders as heroes of the poor. The War on Poverty became less a means for working-class political power and social solidarity and more a politics of state-administered charity.
Unions saw little upside to an anti-poverty agenda that failed to provide wage gains for the vast majority of craft, trade, and industrial jobs. The popular counterbalance needed to implement a robust anti-poverty agenda never cohered. Anti-poverty demands were isolated from a mass base, primarily supported by the middle-class liberal Left, a band of intellectuals, and foundation giants. It’s not surprising then that the resultant programs of the War on Poverty reflected an elite policy consensus. The major anti-poverty programs targeted the poor with the aim of changing the cultural characteristics of workers, rather than the structure of the economy. And even those programs aimed at the labor force at large—in particular the Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962—quickly transformed into targeted, localized initiatives. President Lyndon Johnson worked closely with business executives to build the National Alliance of Businessmen where executives were given the opportunity to burnish their liberal bonafides while being assured by the government that the anti-poverty initiatives posed no threat to their profits.
Tragically, liberal anti-poverty advocates found themselves in a cross-class coalition and the labor left found itself politically enfeebled and isolated in the pursuit of a more robust agenda. With the added power of the business community liberals sacrificed the jobs agenda. By the end of the decade the vision of “jobs for all” in the United States was again shelved.
In the 1970s the employment demand again gained prominence. With unemployment hovering at a staggering 10 percent, employment policy was politically unavoidable. As such, it is perhaps not surprising that the first efforts to reintroduce employment assurance did not come from the Left but instead through a bipartisan effort. In 1973 the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) was passed by Congress and signed into law by Richard Nixon. CETA was a pale imitation of a public works program. The business community was relatively undisturbed by its passage, assured again that the program would not be inflationary but instead hire only unemployed workers with the intent to retrain them and send them back into the private sector. In a sense, CETA was more a subsidy to business than an employment assurance program for workers. Through a commitment to “job training” CETA alleviated the need for businesses themselves to train new employees, and by limiting eligibility to the unemployed the program did not succeed in raising the wage floor. Worse, because CETA was crafted explicitly as a decentralized and anti-federal solution to the jobs crisis it was beset with problems from the beginning. The lack of centralized control opened the door for local mismanagement and political clientelism. But more importantly, the failure of the program to provide permanent and purposeful work led many to see the program as a symbol of government’s inability to solve the employment crisis. Temporary, countercyclical jobs were effective at reducing unemployment during recessions, and probably somewhat effective at spurring demand, but politically the countercyclical solution was a tough sell.
By the late ’70s CETA was proving inadequate, and even as the campaign for the Humphrey-Hawkins Act kept the question of jobs in the public eye, liberals like President Jimmy Carter were pressured by anxious business leaders to shrink an already inadequate program. Revisions made only the poor eligible for CETA jobs, and by 1978 CETA represented little more than the War on Poverty-era policies of the 1960s. The passage of the largely symbolic Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act the next year did little to counter the declining fortunes of progressive employment policy. The Act, insofar as it was ever taken seriously, limited public employment only to low-skill and low-wage positions so as not to compete with private enterprise. And by the late 1970s the business partners of Great Society liberalism proved fickle. With the election of President Ronald Reagan, the business community abandoned even rhetorical commitment to a jobs agenda.
In the post-war era employment assurance was raised and defeated by a combination of labor weakness, business strength, and liberal triangulation. Liberals in particular played the dangerous role of proposing half-measures and alternative policies that succeeded in drawing attention and resources away from adequate employment policies while orchestrating cross-class political coalitions with business leaders. The repeated attempts by liberals to pull in business as a key partner resulted in either policy weakness or political failure. Avoiding the same fate today will not be easy. Just as in the mid-century, contemporary alternatives to a jobs agenda, most notably the demand for a basic income, are often precisely the kinds of demands that would invite liberals to side with major foundations and corporate sponsors. But despite similarities in the political field, today’s job guarantee proposals do look quite different from their mid-century predecessors.
What Is a Jobs Guarantee Today?
The contemporary interest in a job guarantee, the idea that the state can and should directly employ workers, is certainly a welcome development. However, there has been some debate about whether the phrase “job guarantee” refers to a stable programmatic demand or something more nebulous.
Matt Bruenig criticizes the idea for its lack of clarity.7 He claims that “the flowering of dozens of mutually incompatible proposals that all go under the name ‘job guarantee’” suggests that the proposal is more of a rhetorical move than a policy proposal.8 Bruenig is of course right to notice that there have been multiple policies floating around that go by the name of “job guarantee,” but this only indicates interest and affection for the slogan, not some weakness inherent in the motivating ideas. My own feeling is that the interpretation of any policy by the press, the public and political leaders is more important than the myriad micro-policy mechanisms of any given white-paper. It follows then that defining the phrase “job guarantee” is the business of political campaigners, leaders and advocates, not policy writers alone.9
A survey of contemporary proposals suggests that a “job guarantee” refers to a set of policies that, when combined, are meant to remedy both structural and cyclical unemployment through direct state-led employment. Good proposals do this by combining massive public infrastructure projects—thus creating expanded permanent or semi-permanent public sector employment—with a more flexible solution for cyclical downturns (in Bruenig’s terms, “make-work” jobs). In other words, a robust job guarantee combines the “employer of last resort” (ELR) principle (where the state swells to absorb unemployed workers in periods of recession and contracts during periods of recovery and stability) with an old-fashioned public works program. Good proposals also set a wage floor that is well above the current minimum wage and stem the possibility of downward pressure on wages through prevailing-wage clauses and limitations on redundant jobs. Such a policy also requires the establishment of employment offices and complementary active labor-market policies (to fit job-seekers to jobs).
The combination of the ELR model with a public works program is important if a job guarantee is going to succeed politically and be effective once implemented. The major political weakness of CETA was the liability introduced by so-called “make-work” jobs, which came to be seen as a symbol of liberal government profligacy. But when we combine countercyclical job creation with a major public works program the political implications could be positive. The program could demonstrate that jobs generated by the government are not just meant to absorb surplus labor but they also perform an independent function valuable to the whole society—like building infrastructure, telecommunications, public transit. If implemented, the ramifications of a program like this would be massive. Without exaggeration, a job guarantee of the type described here would partially socialize the labor market. And there is, as yet, no surer way to move us closer to the achievement of a social right to employment.
Economically, the job guarantee would—by providing income to those who currently have none—greatly raise purchasing power and aggregate demand. This would itself be an engine of economic growth. Yet its economic effects could be even greater if planners use the program as a means of reorganizing the industrial structure of the United States. Massive public investments in manufacturing and heavy industry in particular would not only provide permanent or semi-permanent sites of employment, they would also help considerably raise wages across the labor market. Indeed, there is something special about the “secondary sector” as it relates to wages. It’s not a coincidence that maintaining high levels of wage growth depends on significant investments in manufacturing.10 This is largely because, unlike the agricultural and service sectors, manufacturers create durable forward and backward linkages in the economy and, in advanced economies, produce high-value-added goods in firms with large profit margins.11 And while the private sector is unwilling to invest in manufacturing, there is no reason the public sector cannot do so and to great effect.
First Jobs Then (Maybe) Basic Income
Of course, some leftwing skeptics are not in principle against the policy but argue against prioritizing the job guarantee. One version of this critique is to suggest that we can and should have it all: a robust welfare state, a full-employment economy, and a basic income. Pitting any social policy against another is then seen as counterproductive, as David Calnitsky puts it:
Framing the question in narrowly economistic terms, however, posits a false choice between decommodifying labor power and decommodifying services—as if both cannot be pursued at once. In a rich, productive society we ought to be able to afford both a basic income and high-quality public goods.12
Sure, we ought to be able to afford all sorts of social policies, and popular mobilization ought to be able to make progress on securing a broad spectrum of public goods. What a world we would live in if we secured a basic income, a job guarantee, and the decommodification of health care, education and transit, et cetera. Such a society might even qualify as democratic socialist.
Regrettably, focusing largely on the ends of social policies leads Calnitsky (and others) to presume away the messy business of politics.13 He says of both basic income and employment assurance “[w]ere popular forces powerful enough to make progress on one, they very well might be powerful enough to make progress on the other” (“Debating Basic Income”). This is wishful thinking. The “let’s have it all approach” leaps from the obvious truism that we can and should have it all to an assumption that the social forces necessary to attain this basket of public goods are readily available. As we’ve seen above the jobs demand has been routinely derailed by liberals who insist on pursuing anti-poverty policies, balanced budgets and retraining programs (not to mention the immense and overwhelming power of the world’s premier capitalist class). As Alex Gourveitch and Lucas Stancyzk point out, the success of a demand like a meaningful universal basic income—and really any liberatory working-class demand—relies not on the perfection of the policy, or the good intentions of political militants, but on the strength of a workers’ movement equipped with the political and shop-floor power to force concessions from the state and the ruling class.14
We ought to have it all but we need to rebuild dynamic mass organizations of the working class if we want to win anything. Today socialists have precious few resources and our political organizations have tenuous connections (at best) to the working-class majority. Out of necessity, as Nye Bevan put it, “the language of priorities is the religion of Socialism.”15 The operating question, then, is not “why not both?” but “which comes first?”
Political priorities cannot be determined by asking whether and to what extent an array of policies are sufficiently socialist in the abstract. Nor do I think they can be determined by speculating which policy would best serve socialist ends once implemented. Any number of policies might meet these criteria. Focusing only on the ends of social policy neglects an analysis of the political terrain at large. Instead of treating public policy as an endless menu of desirable outcomes or succumbing to the utopian injunction to “have it all,” we should prioritize demands that put workers and their organizations in the driver’s seat not only in their implementation but also through the campaign for their actualization and implementation. This orientation differs from the way that Calnitsky, and others, formulate political priorities. In his response to critics Calnitsky argues “policies that are achievable in the world today may confer power onto people, which facilitates the realization of further policies that again empower them to demand even more” (“Debating Basic Income”). Who could disagree with this? I doubt Gourevitch and Stanczyk would. I know I do not. But this is not really what is up for debate. Again, any given set of policies could theoretically confer power onto people and potentially unlock the virtuous reformist cycle that Calnitsky envisions if—and only if—they are effectively implemented. Therefore, choosing political priorities is how we move from matters of principle to matters of strategy, or how we move from the scientific analysis of policy to the art of politics. For my own part, an analysis of the ends of social policies only informs part of such a strategic assessment. To get the whole picture we must also envision what the political struggle for the fruition of any policy looks like, we need to analyze what kind of agitational campaign would be necessary and what constituency would be needed to realize such reforms. When we do this we can see which policy demands have legs among a working-class base—that is which engender a potentially explosive class mobilization—and which tend to invite the attention and affection of foundation giants and big business.16
Unfortunately, basic income demands—no matter how emancipatory on paper— seem unlikely to engender a majoritarian coalition or working-class political independence. Basic income attracts some of the worst bedfellows socialists could imagine—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and other tech and finance billionaires. As a result the political struggle for basic income immediately invites divergent interests and serious political contradictions. Already, we see how entrepreneurial politicians like Andrew Yang have championed basic income as a solution to the jobs crisis. Yang, for his part, couches his rhetoric in strongly anti-statist, pro-market and pro-business terms. While he borrows from Calnitsky, arguing that his “Freedom Dividend”—a paltry $1000 per month—“increases bargaining power for workers,” he also insists that a basic income is simply good for business, claiming that “UBI encourages people to find work,” “UBI reduces bureaucracy” and “UBI increases entrepreneurship.”17 It’s important also to note that Yang, despite his vaguely workerist rhetoric, does not support Medicare for All or many of the other social programs advocated by Sanders. I don’t suspect this is a coincidence; for many, the basic income solution is not meant to supplement universal social programs but to supplant them. Indeed, Yang himself has boasted of how his plan would help cheapen the overall costs of welfare state administration by defunding more generous social provisions to stabilize the cash transfer scheme. As basic income becomes more and more the preferred solution of millionaire reformers it should be clear that it represents a path least threatening to capital.
What’s more, the presence of elite advocates is only compounded by the labor movement’s decline and the hollowing out of historic working-class political institutions—a weak and embattled labor movement could hardly counterbalance Silicon Valley. Advocating for basic income without a robust labor movement consigns the already weak workers’ movement to the role of junior partners. The technically perfect basic income won’t make it much beyond the magazines of the socialist left.
The Right to Employment or The Workhouse
Still, for other critics the problem of a job guarantee is less a question of strategy and more a question of outcomes. Skeptics worry that the realization of a job guarantee could result in a program that resembles the eighteenth-century English workhouse. Of course, this exaggerated concern is hardly defensible, not least because the Dickensian workhouse was a policy intended to deal with a labor shortage, it was never meant as a solution to unemployment. Other critics, like Bruenig, conflate a job guarantee—the social right to a job should you want one—with a work requirement. Bruenig, and Jonathan Chait, also, compare the potential program with Clintonite workfare.18
Skeptics’ concerns are valid if the job guarantee is narrowly defined solely as a countercyclical employment policy. That is, if policy-makers designed a program built exclusively to hire workers in periods of recession (and some have done just this) the program would likely be a flop. But if a job guarantee means a traditional public works program combined with the countercyclical solution then the workfare and workhouse comparisons make little sense analytically (unless critics consider most public sector workers part of a dismal forced-labor regime). In fact, the most successful predecessors to a program like this—the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps—were hardly the grey work camps of critics’ dystopian imagination.
The guiding principle behind a job guarantee, the affirmation of the social right to employment, does not and would not, impose work on anyone. Just as the guarantee of any particular right almost never means the compulsion to exercise it. The goal of employment assurance is, as ever, to end involuntary unemployment. People unable to perform paid work should still be eligible for unemployment benefits, and they would not be expected to work against their will or ability. And of course, no left-wing advocate for employment assurance (and there really are no other advocates for it) would argue for a program that would force people into soul-crushing jobs.
But there is a stronger point to be made here. Not only is the vision of the workhouse rejected by job guarantee advocates, I don’t think capitalists even find this vision particularly desirable in the long term. Consider that even if a job guarantee resulted in nightmarish working conditions, such conditions have a low likelihood of persisting because a tight labor market with a state guarantee of employment would necessarily lead to greater structural leverage for workers. Workers under a system where employment is guaranteed would have the same “exit option” praised by basic income advocates: they could walk off the job knowing that another job is secure. But they would also have the option to strike. Of course, such options are only political potentials but I think it safe to bet that under the tight labor markets wrought by such an aggressive employment policy workers would be more emboldened to strike.
Further, the workforce itself would grow. Under conditions of state-led employment assurance a twin phenomenon occurs: the wage floor rises and the overall labor force participation rate increases. The simple explanation for why Nordic countries are able to raise wages while expanding their workforce is that active labor market policies and public employment—especially in the care of children and the elderly—allow women and other traditionally disadvantaged workers to enter the job market while sectoral bargaining puts upward pressure on wages across the workforce. (This in turn explains how the labor force participation rate, the rate of wage growth and the levels of social equality for women in these countries far outpace the outcomes of the “free” labor market in the United States.)
The knock-on effects of a job guarantee also bolster the mobilization capacity of the working class by providing new avenues for organizing drives. An invigorated public sector would make mass unionization a possibility again. And given that public-sector unionization and public-sector worker militancy have been less vulnerable to deterioration than their private sector counterparts it’s reasonable to assume that a union drive among millions of new federally employed workers would have legs.
If we understand neoliberalism to mean, as Adolph Reed Jr. and Mark Dudzic usefully defined it, “capitalism that has effectively eliminated working-class opposition,” then our political aims should be to increase the social leverage and class self-assurance and consciousness needed to rebuild that opposition.19 Without the assurance of a perennially tight labor market and with the looming threat of automation many workers rightfully fear that they are disposable. A late-career pink slip could mean you will never work again. A job guarantee could alleviate that crushing fear. It could help facilitate the growth of wages, labor force participation and workplace militancy—the policy could literally grow the working class in size and strength.
Compare this to the potential institutionalization of unwaged earners through a stand-alone basic income scheme. Basic income proponents praise the potential freedom afforded by a no-strings-attached income guarantee. But with a growing low-wage service sector, high rates of secular under- and unemployment and, in the United States, a uniquely weak union movement, it’s unclear how low-waged and unwaged basic income earners would have anything close to the social leverage that workers have through the power of the strike. This is one reason I think some of the super-elite tech and finance gurus are enamored of the basic income solution. While the precaritization of wage work and the growth of the gig economy is often overstated, it seems obvious that a non-waged cash benefit would only help fortify that sector and weaken the potential for collective action among those trapped in low-wage gig jobs or long-term unemployment. How would the unwaged basic income earner flex her muscles? How could a stand-alone basic-income provide the kind of economic environment conducive to workplace organizing? Socialist skeptics of a job guarantee tend to minimize the central position that wage labor plays in capitalism and the potential social power that workers have by virtue of their structural position—indeed some tend to downplay the meaning and significance of work altogether.
In Defense of Work
Hesitation about the appeal of a job guarantee might reflect a deeper political division over the nature, desirability and central position of work itself in socialist strategy. Some basic income advocates do concede that the social right to work is a desirable goal, but they tend to mean this in a rhetorical way. They define “work” not as a form of wage labor or some other compulsory activity in a social division of labor; instead, as Philip Harvey shows, basic income advocates often seek to redefine work as its opposite—work is expanded to encompass nearly all of human activity.20 By expanding the concept of “work” into meaninglessness skeptics can confidently claim that a basic income fulfills the social right to work just as much as a job guarantee does.
On the other end of the spectrum, critics insist that advocates of a job guarantee are hung up on some old-fashioned and romantic notion of a bygone “worker.” Today we live amid infinite precarity, they argue, and as automation dominates more and more of the labor process the social change agents of the future will be the ubiquitous “precariat.” Some go so far as to celebrate a future without work and paint any socialist who clings to wage labor and the primacy of the working class as an anachronism. Yet the fact remains that wage labor informs the daily lives of the majority of adults in the world, and ignoring the aspirations, desires and goals of this group is precisely what the American “Left” has shamefully done over the past half century.
It should be said that advocates for a job guarantee are not cultural workerists—we don’t want to send people into coal mines so they can have big strong muscles and look like Soviet posters. Instead, we see the workplace as foundational because it is in the workplace (and so far only in the workplace) that durable and democratic working-class organizations that cut across race, gender, region, language, ethnic and other divisions have been formed and fortified. Where other social-movement organizations rise and fall, the labor movement remains remarkably consistent in its form and substance even as its institutions have shrunk dramatically.
Finally, these workplace organizations provide more than just shop-floor leverage—in the form of the strike—they also make possible the resources, broad mass base and common political subject necessary for mass working-class politics. I remain unconvinced that such organizations can be built and sustained outside of the shared class grievances that inform workplace organizations. And I’m skeptical of the possibility that non-workplace-based organizations would have anything near the social leverage and political capacity that unions do. Despite the Left’s repeated gamble on “new social movements” this combination of civil-society organizing, mass-media pageantry and protest tactics has never won the breadth and depth of concessions that robust labor movements have.
Few socialists would disagree with the above analysis, but taking it seriously has implications for our political strategy. Some proposed social policies, like basic income sans full employment, put workers and workplace organization in a weaker socio-political position overall. Basic income proponents argue that workers would be free to pursue vocational activities that aren’t found on the job market—think of all the boutique Brooklynite crafts that could be subsidized by a new permanent petty-bourgeoisie—but in practice a basic income would work to subsidize low-wage jobs that are highly profitable. Consider the Uber drivers who would rely on both the state subsidy and their dismal wages.
Policies that seek to minimize the central position of work effectively do rob workers of the power they have in their ability to strike, by curtailing the possibility of building workplace organizations, and importantly by weakening the sense of class solidarity developed through shared class experiences. And here is where a job guarantee—unlike basic income, anti-poverty programs and other solutions to economic deprivation— could fulfill an often under-analyzed social function: organic solidarity.
Individual Consumption or Collective Cooperation?
Waged work, in an advanced capitalist division of labor, is predicated on cooperation among workers. Workplace cooperation is often obscured by the competition workers face on the job market. But the former is just as much a feature of capitalist society as the latter. And cooperation at work is what provides the practical and human foundation of class solidarity. Think of the teamwork needed in a restaurant to ensure that front-of-house staff get orders to the back of house in a timely manner, the reliance each group has on the other and the trust built among relative strangers through a complex division of labor and the external pressure put on workers to perform certain tasks well. It’s no secret to union organizers that workplace leaders are often those who are respected and admired on the basis of this workplace cooperation. The best organizers on the shop floor are those who have won the trust and admiration of the widest group of workers based on their skill and ability to perform their jobs and communicate with the broadest layer of their co-workers.
It’s the kind of solidarity engendered among co-workers that transforms a working-class political program from abstract ideas into concrete demands shared by a collective. In other words, workplace experiences make the thing we call “class interests” a felt reality. It is primarily through work that we get to know, interact, cooperate and bond with people across all sorts of social partitions. The external pressures of a job transform our co-workers into our comrades when dealing with a belligerent manager, during cigarette breaks and at staff meals. Workplace solidarity demonstrates the socialist truism that workers can overcome their narrow personal interests and petty divisions and come together to advance collective aims.
Today, however, work is a dirty word among some socialists who imagine a future free from any and all drudgery. To me, such a future vision seems unlikely in the near term and undesirable in the long term. Work could be, if engineered toward social ends, a rewarding and socially fruitful endeavor, even beyond questions of economic scarcity or productive utility. Anti-work advocates argue that the post-work future is already here and we should accept the permanency of a non-waged class. But this raises yet another challenge to solidarity. Wouldn’t it be entirely rational for wage workers to resent their non-waged counterparts and vice-versa?
Imagine a system where the majority of wage-earners pay a tax into a basic income to support a minority of the permanently non-waged class. Wouldn’t such a system perpetuate conflicts—and potentially exacerbate antagonisms—between better-off workers and worse-off non-workers? A future where only some have access to the labor market seems to only sectionalize and segregate the mass of people that make up the non-elite majority. We are too familiar with worker resentment of supposed “freeloaders,” who receive measly social benefits like Medicaid, by those marginally better-off workers who pay through the nose for their own lousy health insurance. A post-work future seems less likely to facilitate any sort of organic solidarity between these groups.
Post-work utopias are often painted in rosy colors where individuals are free to explore their own drives and desires. But without the bonds and shared class experiences developed through the workplace—and without any institution binding individuals to some larger collective endeavor—alternative forms of mechanical and artificial solidarity are likely to become more, not less, attractive. Nationalism, racism, misogyny and xenophobia all perform a similar function to that of organic solidarity without the potential for class-based unity. We know that people tend to find joy and comfort in collective endeavors. Instead of nation, race or other artificial “imagined communities,” shouldn’t the communal endeavor socialists desire be built on a shared commitment to cooperation? Marx clearly thought so. It’s this desire for a collective and productive society—where each of us contributes and each of us benefits—that inspires the eighth demand in the Manifesto: “equal liability of all to work.”21 If we care about equality in wealth, shouldn’t we care about equality in the distribution of work? The equal liability to work, and the distribution of it, were once considered keystone principles of socialism.
Ironically, some post-work socialists seem to celebrate an individually oriented consumptionist approach to social policy. Unlike earlier traditions that stretch from the early New Deal back to the classical period of prewar European social democracy, contemporary utopians feature visions of luxury and abundance but curiously do not suggest a liability to labor. In fact, work is often thought of in purely negative terms. Socialists don’t need to embrace the misguided traditions of cultural workerism, nor the grueling American work ethic, to acknowledge the benefits that dignified and purposeful work provides. Boredom, isolation and emptiness are the most damning and socially pernicious effects of unemployment and underemployment today. As Joan Robinson had it “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.”22 And even under a system where joblessness was accompanied by a decent “wage” there is no good reason to assume that the misery that accompanies the social isolation of joblessness would cease. And while any good socialist should insist on raising income for wage workers and stimulating aggregate demand, we should also concern ourselves with a vision of society that takes more seriously the restructuring of the labor market to avoid the worst effects of unemployment. That means policies aimed at building a more equitable, productive, and social division of labor.
Toward a Social Labor Market
Frankly, no significant constituency is demanding an end to work itself; rather, most people want the fair distribution of work and wages. And it’s not because most workers prefer being exploited nor because they are dupes of a capitalist ideology, nor because unemployment is particularly high—even under tight labor markets, the demand for jobs has been historically popular. I think to some degree the popularity of the “jobs for all” vision is born out of a commonsense understanding that collective and productive activity is meaningful. By working in purposeful and well-paying jobs we feel we have contributed to society in a real way—think of the joy teachers feels when they finally see the eureka moment in their students’ eyes, or the sense of accomplishment an electrician feels when she finishes wiring a new library, or the pleasure of a nurse when he tells a family good news about a loved one. These are genuinely human experiences and they are made possible because these workers perform socially productive jobs. With a job guarantee we could drastically curtail the feeling of being “left behind” and isolated by a job-light or jobless economy and create meaningful jobs that inspire a broad, organic solidarity and deep class unity that will make it easiest to imagine and bring about workplaces free of capitalist exploitation.
Too often liberals sneer at socially undesirable jobs. They see the jobs at slaughterhouses, sewage treatment plants, and coal mines as tragedies that should be abolished. And while some jobs do serve anti-social ends, the liberal lament of socially undesirable work combined with the omnipresent threat of automation or the potential of being forced onto the state dole comes off as condescending to workers who depend on such jobs and who, believe it or not, often find dignity through them. Scoffing at “make-work” jobs—like much-needed support staff for schools and care facilities or clean-up crews for public parks and neighborhoods—serves a similar function. Socialists need not affirm the necessity for socially isolating and meaningless work, but if we want to end the tyranny and drudgery in our socially unproductive labor market we must endeavor to create jobs that provide both a living wage and a meaningful social function.
The good news is that there is plenty of work to be done—ork that is both socially productive and desirable: the work needed to care for an aging generation, the work needed to teach our children, the work needed to emancipate working families from the thankless and exhausting task of child rearing, the work needed to build monumental infrastructure projects and reinvigorate our mass transit or update our electric grid. All of these jobs have two things in common: first, each could only be created through massive investment and central planning and, second, they are all jobs that capitalists are unwilling or unable to provide.
A robust job guarantee can do all this while inspiring a collective vision of a society and strengthening the leverage that workers have to demand more. After all, the essence of a socialist economy is the regulation of production, distribution and consumption for social ends through democratic means. What better way to foster the tender shoots of a such a system than by democratically regulating the distribution of work? The fruits of such a program would be countless. Not only could we build the self-assurance and class consciousness needed to inspire a renewed labor movement, we would create a robust political base that would help keep the programs around. Once good jobs are provided by the state and once workers see the usefulness in such a massive program good luck trying to take it away.
It’s for these reasons that the demand “jobs for all” is now and always has been wildly popular among working people. It’s time to affirm once again that workers deserve shorter hours, better wages, more freedom and dignity at work, more control over their work lives, and, yes, they deserve the social guarantee that work will be available to them.
Notes
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