communism

Compulsive Behavior

by Sabine Nuss

Originally published in German in the daily newspaper neues deutschland

The Deutsche Theater in Berlin recently celebrated the premiere of the play “Das Himbeerreich” (“The Raspberry Empire”). Director Andres Veiel interviewed over twenty prominent bankers in order to trace “the connecting threads between personal motives and social structures in the financial sector.” That’s a rare concern at a time in which the crisis is often reduced to the greed of managers and thus to individual bad behavior.

Admittedly, it’s easier to criticize people than “structures” or an abstract “system”. People have faces and addresses, they bear responsibility, fulfill tasks, and act. Structures, on the other hand; where are they tangible? Marx made social structures the point of departure for his analysis, which in turn explained individual behavior. According to him, it’s competition that forces the individual capitalist, by pain of ruin, to make the hunt for constantly increasing surplus-value the purpose of his activity.

With regard to the financial sector, it was this competition that was desired by the state in the recent past. For that reason, there were regulations intended to promote competition. These laws, referred to as “deregulation” arose, once again, from the pressures of competition: states vied with each other for the position of “attractive investment location for capital.”

So how’s the situation with regard to competition and individual behavior? Ultimately, social structures are nothing more than the result of millions of individual acts by millions of people equpped with different levels of power. For that reason, structures cannot easily be traced back to individual, exposed protagonists. We are all in competition with each other every day: when seeking work, when we try to sell our labor power in the most optimal way, so that we get the job and not others. In the workplace, if I work harder than others so that the next wave of dismissals won’t affect me. As a business person, if I try to sell more commodities than others. By constantly performing these everyday actions, we constantly reproduce the structure that distresses us, and from which none of us can extricate ourselves, unless one already has enough money to live. This is not to excuse excesses by bankers, or lousy character traits. However, the point is to reveal the contradiction that permeates everything under the reigning social conditions.

Veiel has depicted that in his play: the bankers stand around forlorn in a large space. They are victims. On the other hand, they created these spaces themselves. “It’s their empire, they bear the responsibility, even if they suffer from an inherent contradiction” says the director. A solution to the crisis inspired by the left must therefore place a new architecture of “the system” on the agenda – not just with regard to the financial sector and the activity of the state. Rolling back competition in favor of cooperation can be practiced at many levels. Self-managed housing projects, worker-owned businesses, or agricultural collectives are just a few examples. In a capitalist environment, they often fail, have to be maintained with great effort, and are always precarious and subject to ridicule. But they are the fragments of a space in which people would perhaps behave differently, because they are able to, and don’t have to fight with each other for raspberries.

Just as a heads up, the blog Reification of Persons and Personification of Things has published a series of critical observations on Moishe Postone that are very worth reading.

Part 1,Part 2,,Part 3,Part 4,Part 5,Part 5a,Part 6,Part 7,Part 8,Part 9, and Conclusion.

I remain curious why the “debate” over antiracism as a politics takes such indirect and evasive forms—like the analogizing and guilt by association, moralistic bombast in lieu of concrete argument—and why it persists in establishing, even often while denying the move, the terms of debate as race vs. class. I’m increasingly convinced that a likely reason is that the race line is itself a class line, one that is entirely consistent with the neoliberal redefinition of equality and democracy. It reflects the social position of those positioned to benefit from the view that the market is a just, effective, or even acceptable system for rewarding talent and virtue and punishing their opposites and that, therefore, removal of “artificial” impediments to its functioning like race and gender will make it even more efficient and just.

From this perspective even the “left” antiracist line that we must fight both economic inequality and racial inequality, which seems always in practice to give priority to “fighting racism” (often theorized as a necessary precondition for doing anything else), looks suspiciously like only another version of the evasive “we’ll come back for you” (after we do all the business-friendly stuff) politics that the Democrats have so successfully employed to avoid addressing economic injustice.

Ich wundere mich darüber, warum die “Debatte” über Antirassismus solche indirekten und ausweichenden Formen annimmt – wie etwa die Analogisierung und die Schuld durch Assoziation, moralisierende Kritik anstatt konkreter Argumente – und warum in dieser Debatte an der Trennung von Rasse versus Klasse festgehalten wird, auch wenn dies geleugnet wird.

Ich bin immer mehr davon überzeugt, dass ein möglicher Grund dafür ist, dass die “Rasse”position selbst eine Klassenposition ist, eine, die mit der neoliberalen Umdeutung von Gleichheit und Demokratie vollständig vereinbar ist. Es spiegelt die soziale Position derjenigen wider, die von der Sicht profitieren, dass der Markt ein gerechtes, effektives oder sogar akzeptables System ist, welches Talent und Strebsamkeit belohnt, während es diejenigen, die dies nicht haben, bestraft. Deshalb trage eine Beseitigung “künstlicher” Hindernisse wie “Rasse” oder Geschlecht dazu bei, dieses System effektiver und gerechter zu machen.

Aus dieser Perspektive erscheint die “linke” antirassistische Position, nach der wir sowohl ökonomische als auch rassistische Ungleichheit bekämpfen müssen, die in der Praxis immer dem “Kampf gegen Rassismus” den Vorzug zu geben scheint (oftmals konzeptionalisiert als notwendige Voraussetzung für alles andere), als lediglich andere Umschreibung eines “Darum-kümmern-wir-uns-später”-Prinzips (nachdem wir all das unternehmerfreundliche Zeug erledigt haben). Es ist ein Politikstil, den die US-Demokraten sehr erfolgreich benutzt haben, um ökonomische Ungleichheit nicht thematisieren zu müssen.

Available here.

(thanks to Hektor for the link)