Albena Azmanova: Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.
In both intelligence and experience, Albena Azmanova stands well above the common run of contemporary ‘Leftists’ (and ‘Rightists’). As a young Bulgarian dissident during the Cold War, she had occasion to see the difference regimes can make in the lives of those who live under them. Unlike many of her political friends from that place and time, she has remained steadfast in her commitment not only to democracy but also to the Marxism which animated the regime she opposed. Not really that Marxism, however: rather, the neo-Marxism seen in the writings of the Frankfurt School—Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas (although, thankfully, she does not write with the latter’s turbid verbosity). [1] She wants a much more radically egalitarian form of society worldwide, as against both capitalism and liberal democracy, although in principle she refuses to elaborate on exactly what the regime replacing existing regimes would be. “The current possibility for an exit from capitalism does not demand a guiding theoretical elaboration of postcapitalism.” We’ll work that out when the time comes.
Capitalism today has produced an anxious, insecure world “facing the abyss as an accumulation of ecological, social, and economic problems have put it on edge, if not quite brought it to the edge of existence.” Indeed, throughout its history capitalism has “thriv[ed] through seemingly endless crises,” its death much predicted but never consummated. Azmanova would point her readers toward “easing our way out of capitalism without necessarily embracing socialism” and without “revolution,” by which she means violent regime change. She suggests that the West of the early 2020s may teeter in a way similar to the late-1980s communism she detested—that is, a condition ready for radical but peaceful transformation. Capitalist democracy may be subverted, against those on the ‘Right’ who would stabilize it, those on the radical ‘Left’ (and, one might add, the radical ‘Right’) who would overthrow it, and those on the ‘Center-Left’ who would reform it. To subvert capitalism in this way would be to “strike at the driving force of capitalism,” namely, “the competitive production of profit” which, she contends “is destroying human existence, communities, and our natural environment.”
She calls this “malignant” contemporary capitalism “precarity capitalism,” characterized by “the universalization of insecurity, which is now afflicting the majority of the population, almost irrespective of employment type and income level.” True, “capitalism as an engine of prosperity is doing well.” But capitalism as a spoiler of our ways of life, cutting across the variety of political regimes, has generated “forms of suffering and injustice for which the old lexicon of progressive politics—which saw injustice mainly as a matter of inequalities and exclusion—has no available concepts” and can offer no realistic proposals for “radical transformation.”
Capitalism intertwines with regimes—what Azmanova calls ‘democratic’ or, more precisely, republican political structures in the West, wherein citizens either ‘politicize’ or fail to politicize “society’s afflictions” by presenting or failing to present those afflictions “as issues demanding political attention and policy action.” “As per Marx’s original analysis,” she “views all forms of capitalism as intertwined dynamics of emancipation (that is, alleviation of oppression) and domination.” She intends “to detect progressive tendencies” within contemporary capitalism “while bringing to view the oppressive and exploitative processes at work.” She expects no genuine ‘existential’ crisis to topple capitalism; as seen in the aftermath of the 2008-09 recession and other apparent crises over the centuries, capitalism is a thing of formidable ‘staying power.’ Now as then, there is no “wide consensus among political and intellectual elites on the need to save society from the market,” nor is there any such consensus among non-elites. “There is a general tacit acceptance of the situation: we are taking pride in being resilient.” If anything, “over the past hundred years, the energies of protest have been gradually deflating from revolution to reform, resistance, and now resilience.” Frustrations remain, often powerfully so, but thus far “people have channeled their social frustration” either by hating “the super-rich” or by “xenophobia”—sometimes both. This isn’t a matter of what Marxists call ‘false consciousness’ so much as confusion caused by the recent substitution of one form of capitalism for another; neither elites nor ‘the people’ have caught up with the change.
Before describing that change, and offering her critique of democratic capitalism, Azmanova owes her readers an explanation of how she understands the “social theory” that frames her description and provides her criteria of judgment. With Marx, she rejects ‘idealism’—roughly defined attempting to set up an abstract standard of social justice by which one then evaluates existing conditions. Rejecting “utopian socialism,” she too offers “no detailed account of a post-capitalist society.” For Marx (taking his model from liberal theorists of capitalism, and particularly of markets), “communism is the realization of democracy as spontaneous self-organization of the people”; similarly, Habermas envisions “a public sphere and a lifeworld untainted by the instrumental logics of power and money,” with details to be worked out later. In Azmanova’s own words, “the proper purpose of critique, and of political action guided by it, is emancipation, not justice.” It should be remarked that Marx proposed an intermediate stage between capitalism and communism, namely, socialism, an economic and political condition that proved wide enough to drive ‘totalitarian’ or modern-tyrannical trucks through. Evidently, Azmanova expects “critique” to ward off that threat, partly because the persons offering the critique will have come out of the modern liberal democracies. She is silent on what would come out of, say, China, where ‘democracy’ has remained illiberalism and ‘capitalism’ has, too.
She summarizes “twelve tenets of critical social theory” as propounded by the Frankfurt School. The first is Marx’s: the point is not only to understand the world but to change it—in Marx’s circumstance, to end the “worker exploitation” seen in nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. Second is the practice of “immanent critique,” eschewing any “imaginary ‘independent’ point of reference from which standards of justice are supplied a priori” but instead taking the existing moral commitments of “modern liberal democracies”—generally, “individual autonomy and equality of citizenship within collective self-determination”—and proceeding from these regimes’ “self-understanding and assessment,” “notwithstanding conflicting interpretations of these ideas the inhabitants of these societies might have.” Thirdly, the analyst must be especially alert to those conditions within contemporary conditions that enable the formation of “a just social order” (defined in terms of the second tenet) and specify the processes for attaining it. This is the “deliberative” part of Habermas’s “deliberative democracy.” When examining those conditions themselves, the Frankfurt School emphasizes “the relational nature of [social] practice”; this includes its analysis of economics. Not only markets but all social relations “form a continuum of intersubjective practices invariably imbued with power and containing their own ever-shifting action orientations”—an “economy of practices” throughout society.
The fifth tenet of the Frankfurt School is to understand society as a system, by which Marx meant society not as a “composite of individuals,” as in original modern liberalism, nor as an undifferentiated collective or ‘mass’ but as “a structured form of social relations” wherein, and whereby, individuals follow their power-imbued practices according to pathways laid down in law and in custom. When those pathways cause suffering, Frankfurt Schoolers point to the sixth tenet of their analytical practice, that “we do not need to be certain of what is right to know that something is amiss”; circumventing ‘idealist’ or utopian standards, they offer “a negativistic formula of critique aimed at diminishing domination.” That is, the emphasis on critique seen in the Marxian Left avoids (some might say evades) the question of what justice is, preferring to go with what people within a given society feel to be unjust, what causes them to suffer, very often identifying domination as the cause of that suffering. This blends with the seventh tenet, that “the empirical reference point of critical theory is to be grasped not so much in terms of individual and prepolitical (psychological) experiences of suffering, but ones related to social subordination.” Eighth, “identifying the roots of injustice in terms of peculiarities of the social system paves the road to social transformation rather than simple political reform by erecting edifices against abuse (such as constitutional protections of basic rights), as liberal theory would prescribe.” This more ‘totalistic,’ not to say ‘totalitarian,’ understanding appeals “to fraternity, to fellow-feeling, to sympathetic concern—in a word, to a charitable attitude—and an appeal to make suffering impossible by altering the social conditions that engender that suffering in the first place.” The Frankfurt Schoolers thus share with much of the ‘Left’ a form of secularized Christianity, lending to their thought and practice a sort of atheist churchiness.
The next two tenets emphasize the economistic dimension of Marxism. “Critical theory does not limit itself to addressing distinct grievances of suffering, but traces these to their root in the mechanisms underlying the distribution of social advantage and disadvantage,” finding that “root” in such economic relations as “the political economy of consumerism in the twentieth century.” This is what Marxists mean by “sociostructural sources” of human suffering. Capitalism is “a social formation typical of a society of commodity producers.” The first generation of Frankfurt Schoolers attempted to ‘complexify’ Marxism by conceiving of society as a system wherein not only economic relations but administrative, cultural, and legal systems and subsystems were understood to contribute “to social integration,” each in accordance “with its own rationalities committed to, efficiency according to its own purposes.” “While Marx perceives capitalism as a social system integrated through the overarching imperative of capital accumulation…Habermas reduces its dynamics to the function of the market as one subsystem alongside others.” Azmanova prefers Marxism to neo-Marxism on this point; while “abandoning the structure-superstructure dichotomy Marx employed to describe the relation of political rule to socioeconomic practice”—his claim that the latter determines the former, that capitalism causes political life to be what it is—she denies that the various forms of social relations operate in relatively autonomous spheres. Society is a “system of structured and institutionalized social relations, enacted through everyday practices.” That is, an “institutionalized social order” unifies a social system and a political system—in most Western countries, capitalism and republicanism. In much of this, Azmanova seems to be struggling to reinvent the classical notion of the politeia or regime, which does unite ruling offices, rulers, a way of life, and an overall purpose or set of intentions of a political community.
Finally, the Frankfurt School is historicist, but not in the Hegelian-Marxist sense of a rationally discernible teleological process. It emphasizes “historicity” more simply by insisting that “we must start where we happen to be historically and culturally.” Thus Marx’s iron laws of history, the foundation of his ‘scientific’ socialism, do not apply. But Marxist dialectic remains, with its interest in antinomies or contradictions that constitute “a given form of social relations.” “These antinomies are both sources of suffering and emancipatory openings toward attainable possibilities for a less unjust world.”
Azmanova offers three “adjustments” or revisions of Marxist theory. She identifies three features which, taken together, characterize capitalism: the pursuit of profit through the production of commodities in competition with other economic actors. Of these, competition is “capitalism’s core systemic dynamic, its operative logic.” Competition, along with the initial act of appropriating goods, provides the energy; institutions (e.g. private property) enable the dynamic elements to operate more or less freely. Capitalism profoundly affects the lives of those engaged with it; “they become not only dependent on it but start to value it as the wellspring of their existence.” This dependence on and esteem for the capitalist way of life registers politically, as “the institutions of democratic representation and participation can be expected to give expression to this dependence, as much as they can be used to question and challenge it.” Competition pervades the political system as much as it pervades economic life.
A novel feature of this definition of capitalism comes to light when Azmanova briefly turns to Communist China. She regards it as fundamentally capitalist, even when it had no private property and nothing resembling a free market; the state nonetheless “act[ed] as an entrepreneur in the global economy”; in China as well as in the frankly capitalist countries, “the competitive production of profit shapes perceptions of successful life and accomplished self.” Therefore, “even if we obtain a society in which the means of production and management are in public hands and all members are included and perfectly equal, this does not mean that the society would not be engaged in the competitive production of profit, with all the negative effect this has on human beings and their natural environment.” Having said that, she does not go on to explain how the Chinese way of life would produce a humane regime, were its ‘capitalism’ removed.
Azmanova’s second revision of Marxist theory concerns politics—specifically, “the dynamics of politicization.” By this she means the way in which citizens and governments interact to legitimize political ends and processes. Citizens expect their governments to do certain things, for example, “protect private property, defend territorial integrity, and safeguard order.” A government that fails to do what its citizens expect and demand loses its legitimacy. This also works in the other direction. By successfully enforcing its policies and laws a government reinforces its legitimacy. This “legitimacy deal” has “two characteristics: (1) it is not fixed—it varies according to context and evolves historically; and (2) its content depends on what are held to be both desirable and feasible services public authority is to render society.” And so, for example, if the Afghan government cannot provide certain services to Afghans, the Taliban may intervene, further delegitimizing the government while enhancing their own prestige. “Public authority’s functions are articulated within a symbolic fabric of perception within which they are socially constructed as being legitimate and legitimacy-conferring. The legitimacy deal evolves from within shared views about overarching core values.” Further, there is a “legitimation matrix” within which the legitimacy deal takes place; the matrix “grounds the legitimacy of the whole social order, as it defines the core norms that give it significance and signification,” “spell[ing] out shared life-chances (notions of a successful life and an accomplished self) and their fair distribution in society.” And so, in Afghanistan, the Taliban intend not merely to win favor in delivering goods Afghans want but to redefine what Afghans want. They aim at regime change.
The legitimation matrix extends well belong the mere delivery of physical goods. “Public authority’s functions are articulated within a symbolic fabric of perceptions within which they are socially constructed as being legitimate and legitimacy-conferring”; “the matrix is the mold within an entity originates, develops, and is contained.” The “legitimation matrix” differs from the “legitimacy deal”; the deal defines the relationship between public authority to society but the matrix “grounds the legitimacy of the whole social order, as it defines the core norms that give it significance and signification. In Aristotelian regime terms, the legitimacy deal has to do with rulers and ruling institutions, whereas the legitimation matrix is the telos of the regime. Under the regime of “democratic capitalism,” the matrix combines “two ground rules”: with respect to capitalism, it “stipulates that risks and opportunities be correlated,” that “taking risks should be rewarded with opportunities for improved life-chances”; in liberal democracy, it stipulates “that all members of society should have an equal say over the way in which life-chances are distributed” thanks to the “principle of equality of citizenship, enacted via the mechanisms of political representation and participation.” Capitalism has been transformed by capitalists when they have adjusted the legitimacy deal “in order to safeguard the legitimacy matrix,” which is more fundamental.
Azmanova’s historical relativism, which cohabits uncomfortably with her moral principles, may be seen when she asserts that “the perceptions shaping the legitimation matrix and the legitimacy deal are akin to ideology”—or, to avoid that loaded term, “normative orientations”—understood as “representations specific to a given era.” She intends to distinguish these from the Marxist concept of “false consciousness” (which implies a scientific socialism she, along with other Frankfurt Schoolers, questions) and from the liberal economists’ concept of “rational interest.” Rather, normative orientation “connotes the cognitive and normative orientations regarding views about truth, appropriateness, and acceptability—a societal ‘common sense’ or rationality.” Any idea or proposal inconsistent with this historically-bounded common sense simply “would not even enter public debates,” as it would have no “rational justification” within the legitimation matrix of that time and place.
This notwithstanding, social circumstances in a given time and place provide openings for contestation, for “politicization.” This is especially true in liberal-democratic regimes, where “the channel between civil society and political society (i.e., parties and political institutions) is open.” The dissatisfaction citizens experience as concrete instances of injustice—perceived as unjust within the deal, the matrix, or both—can engage the minds of citizens in ideas and proposals that subvert that deal and/or that matrix.
Azmanova’s third and final revision of Marxism concerns the “forms of domination and types of injustice” seen in capitalism. There are three such “trajectories of domination”: relational, systemic, and structural. Relational domination involves elevating “one group of actors” over “another by force of the unequal distribution of power in society,” whether that “power” is material (wealth) or ideational (knowledge, recognition). Abolishing or at least ameliorating relational domination entails “policies of wealth redistribution and political and cultural inclusion”—what one might describe as socialism plus a democratized form of Hegelianism (minus the rationalism). Systemic domination “subordinates all members of society”—not only ‘the many,’ whether a majority or a minority—to “the constitutive dynamic of the social system,” as citizens, “the winners and the losers” alike, “shape their lives according to” that dynamic “and internalize its operative logic in the form of understanding of social and personal achievement and self-worth.” Under capitalism, the rich, the middle classes, and the poor all act and think and feel in accordance with “the imperative of competitive production of profit,” defining social advantage and disadvantage in terms of the system. The spirit of competition also pervades the democratic political system, whereby “an overarching commitment to popular sovereignty” typically ‘privileges’ “the immediate interests of a particular national community over the interests of future generations, humanity as a whole, and the natural environment.” It might be added that such international competitiveness characterizes non-democratic political systems as well; in this sense, they too partake of the spirit of capitalism. Finally, structural domination “concerns the constraints on judgment and action imposed on actors by the main structures of the social system, the institutions through which the operative logic of the system is enacted.” In capitalism the main institutions are private property, management of the means of production, and the market. In democracy, electoral competition and the electoral franchise, “which together enact the systemic logic of the competitive pursuit of public office” are the main institutions. Structural injustice consists not of inequality and exclusion (“the ambit of relational domination”) but “of the actors’ incapacity to control the institutions through which the constitutive dynamic of the social system is enacted.” Regarding capitalism, this means “the commodification of labor and nature, i.e., treating human beings’ creative capacities as well as our natural environment as goods ‘produced’ exclusively for market exchange”; regarding democracy, this means “the ‘privatization’ of public life and the poor quality of public service,” by which Azmanova apparently means, for example, campaign contributions by private individuals and interest groups.
Given the complexity of these forms of domination and injustice, confusion is easy. Marxism had depended upon simplifying social conflict, sharpening ‘class consciousness’ by exacerbating the divisions between workers and capitalists. Unfortunately for the Left, this rhetorically useful simplicity lends itself to blundering as political activists enmesh themselves in real-world complexities. Fighting against one form of injustice may obscure the others or even “enhance” them. And so, for example, “while feminists struggled against the oppressive structure of patriarchy and fought for equality with men in the labor market, women in fact increased the desirability and, ergo, the legitimacy of the competitive production of profit as a systemic dynamic of capitalism.” To meet this kind of difficulty, Azmanova proposes targeting systemic domination—the spirit and practice of competition for profit in the economic realm and for votes in the political realm. With regard to the moral problems of historical relativism noted earlier, Azmanova argues, somewhat circularly, that such an approach will help citizens discover this “common denominator behind the various, often conflicting grievances” and “to derive normatively generalizable notions of justice that can guide progressive politics as strategies of emancipation befitting the historical circumstances of our times.” ‘Progressivism’ is programmed into the enterprise from the beginning, so the ‘discovery’ of the principles of ‘justice’ is assured.
Accordingly, Azmanova dismisses European concerns with Muslim immigration as a form of xenophobia spurred by fears of cheap labor, “notwithstanding the ethnoreligious terms in which it is voiced.” “Threats of Islamization and terrorism” are merely “alleged,” not serious. The supposed proof of this is that the controversy over Muslims was predated by the controversy over cheap labor coming from the newly liberated Central and Eastern European countries added to the European Union after the dissolution of the Soviet empire. What is really at issue, she insists, is a new form of populism caused by “precarity”: “anxiety triggered by perceptions of physical insecurity, political disorder, cultural estrangement, and employment insecurity resulting from employment flexibilization, job outsourcing, or competition with immigrants for jobs.” That is, Azmanova takes the ‘pull’ of capitalism for cheaper labor from the Middle East and northern Africa as decisive, overlooking the ‘push’ from those suffering under despotic regimes in Muslim-majority countries. This inclination to center her attention almost exclusively on intra-Western economic and political conditions accounts for many of the weaknesses of her analysis generally; competition exists worldwide, not only in the form of economic ‘globalization’ (which she sees clearly enough) but in the form of geopolitics. There is little in the book to account for that. It is as if the Western liberal democracies could reform themselves in isolation from the rest of the world.
Azmanova usefully contrasts the “ideological landscape” of this century with that of the previous century. In the West, the twentieth-century Left stood for redistribution of wealth and political liberalism; the Right stood for the free market and traditionalism (although in the United States, the ‘tradition’ itself was broadly ‘liberal’). Both Left and Right often agreed on “constraining market forces,” although this was “stronger in Europe than in the United States,” as “European conservatism, in contrast to its American counterpart, has preserved the idea of the social vocation of central authority as part of its aristocratic heritage, while U.S. political conservatism, having its pedigree in Protestantism, has always shunned institutionalized authority.” The expansion of the middle class in the aftermath of the Second World War entailed forms of ownership newly available to the middle and working classes (especially investment in stocks via pension funds); simultaneously, there those decades saw the growth of “the management class,” described by James Burnham and others. As a result of these changes within capitalist societies themselves, the capital-labor dialectic of orthodox Marxism became “politically irrelevant.” With economic prosperity, a non-economic set of politically relevant priorities emerged—seen in the agenda of the New Left and neoliberalism, for example. At the same time, Azmanova rightly observes, the establishment of the postwar ‘welfare state’ throughout the West moderated these ideological conflicts by presenting itself as pragmatic and technocratic, an agent of competence replacing the old, much smaller, central governments staffed by political parties.
All of this set up the ideological landscape of the twenty-first century. “The new economy of open borders and technological upheaval engendered both hazards and advantages, with new sets of “winners and losers.” Workers in manufacturing industries “feel threatened by the prospects of companies relocating production abroad or automating” whereas workers in the service industries feel less “exposed to globalization.” Thus, factory workers now vote ‘Right’ while service industry workers still vote ‘Left.’ Generally, those persons who see globalization as a disadvantage to themselves support economic protectionism and national sovereignty (including well-guarded borders against indiscriminate immigration) while those who see it as an advantage to themselves sit happily with foreign trade. “The liberal-versus-traditionalist cultural divide has been replaced by a cosmopolitanism-versus-nationalism dichotomy, fostered by contrasting judgments on the permeability of national borders in the context of globalization and the capacity of societies to cope with that change.” This cuts across divisions of capital and labor, Right and Left. Political parties have scrambled to adapt, with the Rightist parties somewhat quicker to make the needed adjustments. But have no fear: “Progressive forces might still find the language and the policies to give a valiant response to the anxious publics” of our time. “This book is an attempt to offer such an exit from the current impasse,” absent “a helpful crisis of capitalism” and “the crutches of inspiring utopia.”
Azmanova begins the second portion of her book with an account of the four “iterations” of capitalism. “Capitalism is always in flux,” although it remains steady in its “repertoire,” consisting of competitive pursuit of profit and the initial appropriation of goods (often explained by early modern theorists in terms of the ‘state of nature’). These core features of capitalism find institutional reinforcement in private property, management of the means of production, labor contracts, and “the market as a primary mechanism of economic government.” Finally, “the repertoire of capitalism also comprises an ethos: worldviews orienting behavior and giving it the meaning of rational enterprise under individual initiative.” Insofar as risks and opportunities roughly correlate for all those participating in the capitalist economy and “the material inequalities created in this process do not engender social privilege”—a new aristocracy in place of the old, feudal one—political democracy “can endorse the competitive production of profit” as unthreatening to such “institutional logistics of equal citizenship” as “equality before the law” and “universal electoral franchise.”
Upon those foundations the four iterations of capitalism have arisen. The first, liberal or laissez-faire capitalism, was advanced by modern industrial technologies and the “liberal constitutional state,” which protected “autonomy for the individual” by abolishing guilds and the remaining feudal laws, replacing laws solemnizing landlord-peasant fealty with a contractualism that conduced to “labor commodification” insofar as workers now ‘sold’ their labor in exchange for agreed-upon wages and benefits, rather as a farmer sells his vegetables at market. From these arrangements sprung a mindset “valorizing and motivating rational enterprise under individual initiative”—not merely “a norm governing the realm of economic action” but a Zeitgeist, as Azmanova, following Hegel, calls it. Hence the capitalist (if not necessarily Protestant) ‘work ethic.’
The second iteration of capitalism was the aforementioned welfare state. “By the end of the nineteenth century, the free market had allocated considerably more risks to wage laborers and others who had little or no opportunity to make real gains in the economy, while putting them in inhumane, life-threatening conditions.” The “severe legitimacy crisis” caused by this “poverty and precarity” became “politically salient social phenomena,” resulting in the addition of “social rights” (in the U.S., the ‘Four Freedoms’ enunciated by President Franklin Roosevelt) being added to political and civil rights. “The political legitimacy of democratic capitalism after WWII came to rely on a notion of justice surpassing both that of political equality, which is fundamental to democracy, and that of individual entrepreneurship, which is fundamental to capitalism.” States now redistributed wealth in order to secure “the conditions for social justice,” with political parties “competing on a left-right axis of ideological orientation,” a framework that suggests difference primarily of degree, not of kind; in economic life, corporations dominated the landscape—capitalism’s equivalent of centralized authority. “Embedded within and therefore dependent on territorially bounded societies, corporation executives “had no choice but to be constrained by considerations of the public good,” once state regulation became common and the threat of ‘nationalization’ or ‘socialization’ of big firms seemed real. Depending on which way one looked at it, the second form of capitalism could be “celebrated as a triumph of democracy over capitalism” or “vilified as the triumph of corporate interests over society.” Either way, however, “consumerist hedonism” of one sort or another became the ruling ethos of Western liberal democracy.
The 1970s saw the “demise” of welfare capitalism. Government redistribution of wealth and overregulation “allegedly limited capitalism’s opportunities for profit-making and reduced the incentives for risk-taking” on which capitalism “purportedly thrives.” It is unclear whether Azmanova thinks ‘stagflation’ didn’t really happen or whether it was caused by some other other factors than those mentioned, but, at any rate, “democratic capitalism had to be reinvented yet again,” this time as “neoliberal capitalism” introduced by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and termed ‘Reaganomics’ in the United States. Center-left and center-right political parties again coalesced, again “under the guise of ‘meritocracy'” but now combined with “the newly redeemed ethos of individualism which credits achievement through personal merit and in conditions of fair competition.” The Rightist parties opposed the labor unions; the Leftist parties opposed “the oppressive bureaucratization of the economy and political life, “endors[ing] the New Left agenda of progressive politics centered on identity recognition.” Policies included privatization of publicly-controlled firms, deregulation of labor and produce markets, and free trade across national borders. Under neoliberalism, “notions of social justice have shifted from the original concerns with decent working conditions and standards of living secured through a solid and stable salary toward preoccupations with one’s employability and capacity to retain a job—a move from social ‘security’ to ‘resilience'” animated by the slogan, “Work smart, not hard.” The ‘rugged individualism’ and ‘work ethic’ of first-iteration capitalism morphed into a smooth individualism of personal self-fulfillment. Those still ready and willing to take risks, albeit very often with other people’s money, enjoy the “spectacular remuneration” earned on “the open, unruly seas of international finance which itself is celebrated as the wellspring of global capitalism.”
Neoliberal capitalism has produced more risk, less security, than many people prefer to endure. “The active offloading of social risk to society…has created a condition of generalized precarity,” which Azmanova considers the prime “social question of the twenty-first century.” Given “the liberalization of direct foreign investment” in local economies,” governments have rediscovered the importance of competition in a new (or in some ways old, pre-capitalist) form: “competitiveness of national markets.” This form has replaced both the domestic competitiveness valorized by neoliberalism and the striving for economic growth welfare capitalism chased. “The state began taking on the duty to aid specific economic actors,” offloading risks to “the weakest players,” those not so aided. Azmanova blames the rise of precarity capitalism on “the “extreme liberalization of the economy via privatization and deregulation” enacted by ‘globalizing’ neoliberal capitalists—no “allegedly” or “purportedly” about that. She cites the Clinton administration’s negotiations with China to get Qualcomm into the Chinese market as a typical example of choosing a winner and stiffing the losers, although President Clinton was neither the first nor the last to act that way, always under the rationale “that this is the only way to satisfy the imperative for remaining competitive in the global economy.” When the stock market crashed in 2008, governments reacted by judging certain financial corporations too big to be allowed to fail, lest one’s country lose ground in the world market. Since “the recapitalization of financial institutions with public money while the ownership of these institutions remained in private hands violated capitalism’s ground rule of correlating risks and opportunities,” the “legitimation matrix of capitalism was endangered again,” just as it had been by the Great Depression in the 1930s and stagflation in the 1970s.
This time, governments cut funds for what Azmanova regards as “essential social services,” primarily in health and education—funds unlikely to be restored, since the indebtedness incurred by government-controlled central banks will “restrain public spending for a long time, perpetuating austerity—and with that, precarity—as the new normal.” In effect, governments have redistributed public funds “from the weak to the strong,” causing more inequality and poverty. “Far from the expected retreat of the state under the forces of globalization (as per the neoliberal credo), we are facing the new phenomenon of governing bodies possessing increased power and capacity to inflict social harm and decreased responsibility for the social consequences of policy action.” States enjoy greater power regarding economic competitiveness, less power regarding social regulation. Capitalism survives nonetheless, because the “social safety net” is no longer regarded as a “political deliverable”; “economic reason substitutes for political reason” as “the economic logic of markets has penetrated our collective perceptions of fairness and personal visions of self-worth,” thereby “contaminat[ing] statehood, the system of education the courts, even the way we think about and value ourselves and our lives.” What kind of political democracy can there be, if “the demos disintegrates into bits of human capital” and takes this as the right way to live?
But there is unease among that demos. “Desperation is he raw material capitalism now feeds off,” and people dislike being desperate. Neither neoliberalism nor precarity capitalism has shut down democratizing political movements that resist self-commodification—movements for gender and racial parity, for example. “Politics is not dead,” although its scope has “shrunk.” Populisms Left and Right attempt to cut down on state rule, as the Right veers toward anarcho-capitalism and the Left toward “protection of cultural lifestyles within national borders.”. In Azmanova’s opinion, “appeals for ‘more democracy'” in these times “have become part of the problem even as they are presented as radical solutions.” Indeed, the whole panoply of “representative, participatory, or deliberative democracy,” along with the rival ideologies fueling “fragmented resistance, devolution, and poststructuralist ontologies of social empowerment,” must be challenged. “Liberal democracy might be as much part of the problem as it is part of the solution,” inasmuch as it now ‘politicizes’ the wrong issues—immigration and sexual liberation, not capitalist competition. Contra John Dewey, the remedy for the problems of democracy isn’t more democracy. “What we need is less capitalism,” especially since even working-class citizens now invest in stocks.” When “everyone’s (immediate) welfare becomes dependent on the good economic health of capitalism, even when it can no longer ensure improving living standards or fair distribution of life-chances and is rampantly destroying the environment,” the whole “socioeconomic system” must be “transcend[ed].”
This can be done, she hopes, not by offering a vision of a future, just society—utopianism—or even by defining what justice is. Rather, socialists should “seek to identify those antinomies (internal contradictions) of contemporary capitalism that foster historically particular but structurally general experiences of injustice, and from which normatively generalizable notions of justice can be derived, then set political goals accordingly.” This “allows visions of social justice to emerge from the identification of a broad pattern of societal injustice—which she defines as “socially induced suffering”— surpassing “the grievances of particular groups while addressing all of them.” The “visions” will arise out of the real experience of misery—which, as a ‘Marxian,’ Azmanova inclines to locate in economic deprivation of one sort or another. This move enables her to ascribe any given misery to the capitalism as the broadest of the “broad patterns” she targets, and then to appeal not to economics but to social redesign as the way to remove it. So, for example, she reduces “xenophobia” to an economic cause: “loss of livelihood.” (It is noteworthy that her choice of the word “xenophobia” already biases the discussion against those who oppose the introduction of substantial numbers of immigrants into their political communities; the same may be said for almost any term with ‘phobia’ attached to it, consigning the aversion in question to the sphere of irrationality, neurosis, folly, cowardice.)
Azmanova identifies two “structural contradictions” in contemporary precarity capitalism. First, today’s capitalism sees increased opportunities for “labor decommodification” alongside increased pressures for commodification. Labor decommodification occurs when a worker can “exit the labor market without damage to [his or her] well-being.” Such is today’s “portfolio person,” one “without permanent attachment to any particular occupation or organization, whose skills allow for self-reliance in finding paid employment on his or her own terms,” freed from “the bureaucratic constraints and power dynamics of a career path within an organization.” Unfortunately, technological advances have also “widened and increased and widened [the] scope” of commodification” by “turning knowledge and risk into new fictitious commodities,” thereby “increasing the time spent in paid employment.” Making money by tapping on a computer at home may or may not liberate you. Technology has empowered democratization of the means of production by enabling individuals to start their own businesses with minimal capital investment; technology has also increased competitive pressures (the driver of capitalism) among such firms by fostering globalization of markets. As a socialist, Azmanova would address this contradiction by retaining workers’ ability to exit the labor market voluntarily but also by having us understand employment as “a good to be distributed,” a social justice issue rather than an economic one.
The second contradiction consists of neoliberal cuts in social ‘safety nets’ combined with the lack of good jobs due to automation, global competition, and the practice of big corporations to locate their factories wherever in the world labor is cheapest. “Our livelihoods are increasingly reliant on gainful employment” because social welfare spending has decreased, “yet domestic economies are increasingly unable to provide” such employment. We have less free time and find ourselves pressured to use it “building skills for finding a job and remaining employed and employable.”
These contradictions can produce a politically effective alliance against capitalism because they have a “common denominator”: “the acute, widespread sense of insecurity, of precariousness regarding one’s livelihood.” In terms of the “relational” forms of injustice, Azmanova points to increased inequality of wealth coupled with increased equality of social recognition, as seen in the civil rights movements in the United States and elsewhere. If social recognition of previously deprecated groups increases, that might be parleyed into demands for redressing the ‘wealth gap’—of mobilizing 99% of the population against the economic privileges of the super-wealthy 1%. In terms of systemic forms of injustice seen in the competitive pursuit of profit, the (as it were) mobilizable miseries result from capitalism itself, the competitive pursuit of profit, which results in employment precarity across class lines and in environmental degradation. As for structural forms of injustice, they exist in all social institutions “that underpin and enable competitive profit production,” whether the state-owned enterprises of China or the privately held corporations of the “capitalist democracies.” With such institutions, “the big winners are those who can exercise a rent type of control such as a natural monopoly and thus exempt themselves from the pressures of competition,” with money to spare to intervene in political governance, leaving the non-elites to fend for themselves, “exposed to the vagaries of intensified competition.”
Obstacles to radical reform boil down to two. There is no coherent ideology to rally around because there is such a bewildering variety of conflicts in the contemporary world. In the economic sphere, alone, one sees rich versus poor, the global working class versus the national working classes, holders of secure jobs versus perpetual job seekers. Too, environmental issues have long been presented as ‘lifestyle choices,’ economic issues presented as ‘bread-and-butter’ issues; only in recent years has environmentalism been elevated to the level of survival, on a par with economics.
Many socialists have attempted to overcome these difficulties by reformulating the socialist project as an effort to achieve radical democracy. For reasons already stated, Azmanova doubts that this will work, as “the mechanisms of democratic decision-making, even when well deployed, tend to naturally prioritize short-term exigencies of justice (inclusionary growth) rather than the intangible, for many, reality of environmental devastation.” But economic growth has been spurred by consumerism, which often mixes badly with environmental protection, and the fear generated by precarity has “foster[ed] a conservative-to-reactionary political expression (politicization) of grievances,” as seen America’s Trump phenomenon but also in many European countries, such as Le Pen in France, Orban in Hungary.
It is enough to turn a socialist back to Father Marx. “In 1859, Marx remarked that ‘there must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery.’ A century and a half later, the spectacular increase in wealth is accompanied by a spectacular increase in forms of immiseration beyond economic impoverishment that are afflicting the multitude on both sides of the old class divide.” Economic impoverishment in the form of economic insecurity blocks the political efforts needed to achieve reform, “leaving neither space nor energy for engagement in larger battle about the kind of lives we want to live.” To see this can be to raise “not a cry for redistribution,” as in Marx, “but for regaining control,” a cry for “end[ing] a system that thrives on taking control away from ordinary people.” It isn’t a matter of “how life-chances are distributed, but whether what is being pursued as a life-chance is desirable or even acceptable”; “it is the very definition of a life-chance as the successful participation in the competitive production of profit that aggrieves the multitude,” suggesting “that the possibility for a radical, if not revolutionary, change is now more obtainable than ever.” In particular, “the young generation in Western liberal democracies demands a radical alternative” to “the existing system” and “our times are indeed ripe for it,” if neo-Marxists and their allies follow Gramsci’s formula of “passive revolution” rather than the futile course of violent revolution.
To counter the relational contradictions of precarity capitalism, tax the rich in order to end their advantage in political influence; continue the current practice of skill-building education and retraining. To counter the structural contradictions, enact legislation enabling worker and local community participation in corporate governance, thereby diluting private ownership of the means of production; reclaim public ownership of those monopolies needed for survival in the modern world, such as utilities; reform campaign finance. Such legislation will address the “systemic” contradictions of precarity capitalism by refuting the “constitutive logic of capitalism” itself, “the competitive production of profit.” The fear that precarity generates will wane, replaced by a “political economy of trust.” By eliminating competition, profit, and productivism, “the institutionalization of socially significant work as paid labor, deployed in a process of competitive production of profit,” socialists can redirect “economic action and scientific activity…toward the satisfaction of human needs,” away from the demands “create[d]” by capitalism, with its powerful advertising and overall ethos of acquisition as a means of attaining social prestige. Only “policies aiming to counter the competitive production of profit strike at the heart of capitalism, at its very operative logic.”
One must ask, then, who defines “needs”? If it is the people at large, will demands not masquerade as needs? After all, ‘created’ needs are often responses to the findings of market research, i.e., desires. And if socialists take charge of defining needs, why should anyone trust them? Marx’s formula for justice, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” found cold comfort under the rule of the commissars.
This is all the more so since Azmanova resolutely refuses to specify what socialism will look like. “We do not need to define the shape of a postcapitalist society in order to endorse the logic of overcoming capitalism a matter of the ‘politically hopeful’—of what makes sense in terms of tangible social dynamics and specific political demands.” A political economy of trust will take the general “form of a society that can satisfy human needs”—once again—without “devoting all of its energies to the process of needs satisfaction as capitalism does.” With markets and private property gone, “the task of allocating productive inputs and social surplus will pertain not to the market, but to public authority.” But if democratic institutions won’t do, who will wield that public authority other than ‘the few,’ the proud, the socialistic? Why should we trust the rulers of the political economy of trust, especially since democracy is held up as suspect?
More concretely, Azmanova believes that the worldwide political economy of trust can be achieved by recasting both global and domestic economies. International law must be rewritten to implement “high standards of employment and remuneration, consumer protection, and care for the environment.” She confidently asserts that “the rest of the world will have no choice but to follow” this model, if the Western countries adopt it under “strong political leadership,” and if the rest of the world “values access to the Euro-Atlantic economic space.” But, one must ask, what if China values the construction of a pan-Asian economic sphere more than access to American and European markets, simultaneously pushing into the Middle East, Africa, and South America in pursuit of raw materials?
In the domestic economies, Azmanova advocates laws establishing secure sources of livelihood, “allowing everyone to profit from the increased decommodification capacity of advanced modernity” by means of “maximizing voluntary employment flexibility,” a policy of “universal minimum employment” undergirded by a “solid social safety net.” This will be achieved by opening national borders “to allow outsiders to get in” and by regulating the terms of non-standard employment. To accommodate immigrants, the social safety net should be based not on national citizenship but “denizenship, emulating the Scandinavian form of welfare provision.” Thus equality and freedom can finally “be reconciled as ‘real freedom to make choices'”—a “socially embedded autonomy that credits both productive activity and freedom from gainful employment as valuable sources of selfhood and tools of social integration,” “minimiz[ing] reliance on paid employment both for a person’s socialization and for the satisfaction of needs.”
How to fund all this? Impose heavy taxes on, or transfer ownership from, private corporations that harvest profits gained from monopoly rent, such as too-big-to-fail banks. In Europe, these monies would go into a “European Sovereign Wealth Fund,” which would redistribute its revenues from each according to his abilities (e.g., a banker) to each according to his need (as defined by the managers of the fund). Azmanova assures us that the resulting political economy of trust “will increase the space for creativity by decreasing competition” while “enabl[ing] the satisfaction of human needs without inflating these needs,” “overcoming capitalism by subverting it from within” and replacing it “without a guiding utopia, without a revolution in the offing, and without a terminal crisis of capitalism.” One senses that she places most of her hopes on ‘critique,’ on the widespread dissatisfaction she sees in the West. Whereas Marx expected capitalism to fail by increasing the poverty of the workers, exacerbating the already “unfair distribution of wealth,” the new crisis of capitalism stems from its success, “its excellent economic performance, its intensity.” Exploitation no longer powers social injustice, as it did in Marx’s day; it is the core of capitalism itself, the unbearable stress of unrelenting competition and human commodification, that bears down on human beings everywhere. What the 99% of the human race now detest is “the very process through which wealth is generated and the impact this has on individuals, communities, and nature,” the “massive economic and social uncertainty” capitalism now generates. Politically, this means that banality is our friend. “Mobilized in a mundane and inglorious anticapitalist revolution”—Gramsci’s kind of revolution—these “forces can perform a social change yet more radical than any proletarian class struggle could ever achieve.” “A new multitude, more powerful in number and more bitter in its quiet discontent” than the New Leftists of the late 1960s, “is demanding a type of life that contemporary capitalism cannot deliver.”
Given this historicist argument, one can only reply that it remains to be seen whether such discontent will generate some new form of socialism or rather a fifth iteration of capitalism, not yet imagined. Up to now, capitalism has proven itself more resourceful than socialism.
But is historicism of any sort—Hegelian, racialist, Marxist, democratic-progressive, Nietzschean, Heideggerian, neo-Marxist—an adequate guide to human life? The first iteration of capitalism, along with the first iteration of modern republicanism, took its philosophic bearings from human nature and the laws of nature and of nature’s God which implant rights in each human being as such. Commercial republicanism thus held itself to a stable standard by which its achievements and its failures could be judged. Chattel slavery and wage-slavery alike eventually stood in the dock of the regimes so framed. Hegelian and Marxist historicism too had a stable standard, albeit a much more vague one: the ‘end of history,’ whether liberal or communitarian; so did racialist historicism, whereby evolution governed by the principle of the survival of the fittest would issue in the worldwide rule of a master race. All of these historicisms claimed scientific status, including the capacity to predict the future based upon experimentally confirmable laws of progress, leading to a knowable (if often somewhat vague) end, whether that were some form of egalitarian communitarianism or a worldwide reconstitution of feudalism ruled by a planetary aristocracy. In light of the catastrophic failure of so much of that stuff, the later postmodern historicisms have rejected these scientific pretensions along with the teleology that went with them. Hence the new political culture of ‘critique,’ which leaves the tasks of construction mostly undetermined.
Finally, and on the level of practice, if regimes no longer feature competition in economics and in politics, what effectual check will remain on untrammeled power? Absent the institutions described by Adam Smith and James Madison, will the practice of “critique” really keep us free?
Note
- For a review of George Friedman’s careful analysis of the Frankfurt School thinkers, see “Origins of the ‘New Left,” on this website under “Philosophers.”
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