April 14, 2019 (687 words)
::
How can we criticise capitalism if it's brought us so much progress?
Tags: ideology, inequality
This post is day 104 of a personal challenge to write every day in 2019. See the other fragments, or sign up for my weekly newsletter.
(This was supposed to go out on Sunday, but as I mentioned in my latest newsletter, I’ve been preoccupied with traveling & conference stuff so this didn’t get written until over a day later. This ‘writing every day’ thing is starting to feel unsustainable. I’m not quite ready to give up yet, but the next couple of fragments will be shorter and less precise than usual.)
Continuing a train of thought from the fragment on day 100: Gratitude is a trap, which criticises appeals to gratitude as a way to shut down criticism of capitalism:
By saying that capitalism is fine and its critics should be grateful rather than resentment, capitalism’s apologists are expressing a barely muted contempt for those who think they deserve more than what they’re currently getting. […]
and, in the end:
‘gratitude’ politics is a means of dampening dissent among those who have been unfairly cheated of their fair share of society’s wealth. As a means of shielding elites from the consequences of mismanagement, it serves to contain calls for structural change. Beyond that, as a political philosophy, it is an inherently backwards-looking enterprise. Spend too much time feeling grateful for what you’ve achieved so far and you’ll become complacent, less inclined to push for what has yet to be achieved. Societal progress is driven by discontent, not gratitude, and if anyone tells you to abandon the former in favour of the latter, you should be very, very suspicious of them: what are they afraid they’ll lose?
Related, but not quite the same, is the idea of appeal to progress. This seems to be a pretty common trope among liberals - see Steven Pinker’s response to Thomas Piketty raising the alarm about economic inequality. (Here’s a Jacobin piece by Jason Hickel responding to Pinker, explaining that poverty is not decreasing as much as he may think, and a Baffler article responding critiquing Pinker as well as Yuval Noah Harari.) Most recently, I came across a tweet by Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic suggesting “comparing young adults now to those in pre-capitalist times” as a way of testing Malcolm Harris’ thesis that “millennials are bearing the brunt of the economic damage wrought by late-20th-century capitalism”. Millennials might be facing a terrible job market and massive debt, but they have iPhones and pizza, so why should they complain?
Capitalism is often defended on account of it being apparently synonymous with progress. But progress isn’t monolothic; when we talk about progress in the abstract we are often conflating several very different things. Sure, humanity may have progressed along certain axes (science, technology and culture, for example), but it’s regressed in others (stewarding the natural environment, distributing resources in an equitable way).
I suspect that the major so-called benefits of capitalism could have been achieved through a fairer economic system without all the numerous downsides we’re seeing today (in terms of ecological catastrophe and exhausted misery for much of the working class). This possibility is ignored when all these highly variegated strands of progress are placed under one giant banner of capital-P Progress, one which is inexplicably reframed as Progress Under Capitalism. Questioning the economic system itself becomes off-limits; if you don’t like inequality, surely you also don’t like refrigerators or Game of Thrones. The terms of debate are presented as a binary choice between a capital-driven ideal of Progress with all its downsides, and a pre-capital state of ignorance.
Actual societal progress is multifarious, and complicated - not everyone would agree on what constitutes progress or not. We should be skeptical of the story told by liberals of a monotonically-increasing Progress. What is the role of this sort of defense of the status quo? Whom does it serve, and whom does it leave out?
We should treat this avatar of liberal “Progress” as the Comcast of capitalist apologia: a disjointed collection of things that have no business being served in one bundle. Surely we can move beyond false dichotomies about sweeping statements like “progress” in order to isolate the specific aspects we want, or don’t.