WE
CAN
DO
BETTER

PRAISE FOR
We Can Do Better

“This valuable book offers a theoretical tool chest for radicals, grounded in activist learning from the past 150 years of struggle yet open to ongoing developments. The development of theory can sometimes be cast as an ivory tower pursuit, outside of, and irrelevant to, activist struggles. This book shows the power of radical theory rooted in activist knowledge in contributing to the development of effective approaches to the struggles of our times.”

— Alan Sears, Ryerson University

“In this book David Camfield sets himself two very ambitious tasks: to refute common idealist misconceptions of social inequalities as people’s own making, and to propose a historical materialist approach that understands the social world as the result of always unequal social and political relations. Camfield succeeds brilliantly on both counts. This is a must read book for anyone who wants to understand the complex forces that shape our societies and change them.”

— Sara Farris, University of London

“Clear, concise and well-argued, David Camfield’s We Can Do Better offers a powerful critique of our current system and provides hope for a better one. Aimed at newcomers, but rewarding to theoretically sophisticated readers, he relies on a reconstructed historical materialism that integrates the best of Marx and the most important insights of feminist and anti-racist analyses of capitalism, decisively refuting the standard counter-position of class and identity politics. Whether one agrees entirely or not, this is a stimulating contribution to theoretical debates regarding capitalism and strategic debates regarding how we can move beyond it.”

— Nancy Holmstrom, Rutgers University

With a new generation questioning capitalism and the social oppressions around us, there could not be a better time for David Camfield’s innovative case for a renewed historical materialism. Taking on some of the most important challenges to anti-capitalism, Camfield makes the case for a radical socialism that is anti-racist, feminist, pro-queer and ecological. In so doing, he powerfully demonstrates that historical materialism—if creatively applied—offers a compelling means to critically understand our world, the better to change it.

— David McNally, York University

“People who are inspired to change the world in the name of social justice need to cultivate an understanding of how the world works under capitalism. We are in a period of new movements emerging or re-emerging to combat sexism, racism, and myriad of other oppressions, and in the face of ecological crisis and reactionary right-wing movements, the stakes are high. As an introduction to social theory, this book will be especially useful to the activist who has questions about how seemingly separate causes are connected. This book will be a valuable tool in working together for the just society we deserve.”

— Suzanne MacNeil, President, Halifax-Dartmouth and District Labour Council

WE
CAN
DO
BETTER

Ideas for Changing Society

DAVID CAMFIELD

FERNWOOD PUBLISHING
HALIFAX & WINNIPEG

Copyright © 2017 David Camfield

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Editing: Mark Ambrose Harris

Cover design: Mike Carroll

Printed and bound in Canada

eBook: tikaebooks.com

Published by Fernwood Publishing

32 Oceanvista Lane, Black Point, Nova Scotia, B0J 1B0

and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3G 0X3

www.fernwoodpublishing.ca

Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada, the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism under the Manitoba Publishers Marketing Assistance Program and the Province of Manitoba, through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, for our publishing program. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Camfield, David, author

We can do better : ideas for changing society / David Camfield.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55266-996-9 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-55266-997-6 (EPUB).—

ISBN 978-1-55266-998-3 (Kindle)

1. Social change—Philosophy. 2. Communism. 3. Feminism. I. Title.

HM831.C36 2017 303.401 C2017-903101-5

C2017-903102-3

Ignore the jailers’ talk. There are of course bad jailers and less bad. In certain conditions it’s useful to note the difference. But what they say — including the less evil ones — is bullshit. Their hymns, their shibboleths, their incanted words security, democracy, identity, civilization, flexibility, productivity, human rights, integration, terrorism, freedom are repeated and repeated in order to confuse, divide, distract, and sedate all fellow prisoners. On this side of the walls, words spoken by the jailers are meaningless and are no longer useful for thought. They cut through nothing. Reject them even when thinking silently to oneself.

John Berger, “Fellow Prisoners”

We Can Do Better

IN THE RICH COUNTRIES OF the world, where most people reading this book will be, many people feel that their lives are getting harder. Surveys by the Pew Research Center report that since 2008 people in the U.S. have been much more likely to rate their personal financial situation as fair or poor rather than good or excellent.1 In the U.K., many people believe that life is harder today than it was several decades ago because job security has declined, pensions are weaker, work intrudes more into the rest of life, housing is more expensive, and they are burdened by high interest debt (Styles 2013). There is also, in the words of one sociologist, a “widespread perception of everyday life as ‘time squeezed’ and ‘harried’” as more people “report feeling short of time,” with “leisure time as scarcer and more hectic” (Wacjman 2015: 4, 64). Meanwhile it seems that more people are feeling miserable — very fearful and/or very sad.2

How do we explain why many people feel that life is getting harder? Is this just the whining of “entitled” Millennials, as some pundits claim? Are bad things happening to people because of their negative ways of thinking and acting, as advocates of “positive thinking” would have it? If changes in the world really are making life tougher for many, is that because governments have been spending too much and interfering with free markets? That is what many economists believe. Or is capitalism itself the root cause of unemployment, increasingly insecure and stressful jobs, growing personal debt, deteriorating public services and other developments that make life harder, as the system’s critics argue?

The answer to the question “why do many people feel their lives are getting harder?” is not obvious. This is because how societies work is not self-evident. Societies are complex, and appearances can be deceiving. It is a bit like how the sun seems to revolve around the Earth but, as the scientist Nicolaus Copernicus demonstrated in the 1500s, in fact the Earth revolves around the sun. We know what we experience personally, of course. But to explain the forces that shape our personal experiences we need to understand things that we do not experience directly or transparently.

To explain why many people feel that life is getting tougher and understand many other things in our lives that often appear random or “just the way things are,” we need ways of thinking systematically about what societies are and how societies work. In other words, we need social theory.

Social theory allows us to understand our everyday lives better. It helps us to see how schools, workplaces, families, governments and other institutions are organized and to discover why they are set up the way they are. With this knowledge we can understand the forces that shape our lives. As Alan Sears and James Cairns write in A Good Book in Theory — which I highly recommend to people who are new to reading theory — social theory “allows us to know our familiar world in new ways” (Sears and Cairns 2015: xxii).

I think social theory is also important for another reason. People who want to change society in ways that will improve the human condition and greatly reduce the harm done by climate change need social theory to make our efforts as effective as possible. With the stakes so high, hard work for social and ecological justice should not be squandered on ways of trying to make change that can never be effective because they rely on false assumptions about how societies work. That is why social theory is far too important to be left to university classrooms and publications written by academics for other academics. It needs to be read and written outside academia by people who are trying to change the world. The title of this book expresses my double conviction that we can do better at understanding society and that a much better way of organizing society is possible than the one that dominates the world today.

About This Book

THIS BOOK IS NOT ABOUT social theory in general. It aims to clearly present and make the case for the specific theory that I am convinced does the best job of explaining what human societies are, how they have changed over time and how they might change in the future. This approach is laid out in Part Two. I do not claim to have invented a new theory, and the theory I present is not a closed system of dogmas. Some people who share my belief in its power to explain society will no doubt disagree with aspects of how this book presents and uses it. That is to be welcomed, since developing social theory is a collective project of dialogue and debate. What I try to do in this book is simply to offer a clear introduction to this way of understanding society and, by using it to answer some pressing questions, demonstrate that it is valuable and relevant.

Unfortunately, other theoretical approaches are much more popular in the world today. That is why Part One of this book is about three schools of thought that are enormously influential. Most people’s way of understanding society is a jumble of different ideas that are usually at least somewhat inconsistent. Few people realize what theoretical approaches have influenced how they see the world. Discovering what these dominant ways of thinking are is an important act of intellectual self-defence. Because these approaches are seriously defective when it comes to understanding what is going in our lives, they deserve attention. They also deserve scrutiny because they discourage people from striving for social and ecological justice — they are theories that support the status quo. We need to understand their failings before we move on to think about a better approach.

After laying out the theory I find convincing, the chapters in Part Three use this theory to answer a range of questions about contemporary society. Part Four uses the theory to tackle some key questions about how to change society.

PART ONE

POPULAR BUT DEFECTIVE: THREE SCHOOLS OF THEORY

Chapter 1

Ideal Explanations?

THERE IS AN ANCIENT APPROACH to understanding societies that is still very common today. It relies on claims about alleged phenomena “that do not in any way derive from the evolution of matter and energy in space and time” (Noonan 2012: 19) or treats ideas as if they exist independently of human beings. In the realm of social theory, this broad school of thought is referred to as idealism. This is a completely different use of the word from the way it is usually used to mean the high-minded following of ideals. There are many versions of idealist theory. Let us look at a few of them.

Positive Thinking

The Secret is a film and book by Rhonda Byrne that has sold millions of copies, in many languages, in print and as a DVD, making Byrne a lot of money. Its message is that people’s thoughts and feelings attract things into their lives, whether good or bad. In this way of thinking — broadcast widely by Oprah Winfrey, among others — which is certainly not unique to Byrne, “external conditions don’t determine your life. You do. It’s all inside you, in your head, in your wishes and desires” (Aschoff 2015: 85). When terrible things happen to people, “it’s because we’re drawing them towards us with unhealthy thinking and behaviours” (Aschoff 2015: 86).

This is a twenty-first-century example of the ancient belief that people’s thoughts alone can alter the world outside their heads. As writer Barbara Ehrenreich puts it, in her witty critique of such “positive thinking,” the notion that “you can have anything, anything at all, by focusing your mind on it … bears an unmistakable resemblance to traditional folk forms of magic” (Ehrenreich 2009: 59–60, 63).

Why mention this kind of magical thinking in a book about social theory? If taken seriously, this way of thinking is a way of understanding how societies work — an extremely weak and harmful one. It rejects thinking about society as such. Instead, it focuses entirely on individuals and assumes that individuals are not influenced by the societies in which they live. It leads people to blame themselves when bad things that happen to them. If what happens in our lives is simply a consequence of what we think and feel, there is no point in, for example, trying to stop the production and sale of cancer-causing substances, end male violence against women or limit the power of employers to fire workers.

Mystifying Culture

Racism against Muslims is a growing threat in many countries today. Hostility to Muslims is visible in everyday life. It is cultivated and manipulated by many politicians — not just the most blatantly racist hard-right demagogues like Donald Trump (Kumar 2012; Beydoun 2016).

The ideology of anti-Muslim racism assumes that all Muslims share a common culture. This idea is found in the writings of thinkers like Princeton University’s Bernard Lewis, who in 1990 warned of a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the Judeo-Christian world. Lewis cautioned that “something in the religious culture of Islam … inspired … dignity and courtesy toward others,” but “when the deeper passions are stirred” this “can give way to an explosive mixture of rage and hatred” (Lewis 1990). In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, political scientist Samuel Huntington — one of the “state-intellectuals” “who have worked for or emerged from the bowels of the US state machine” (Ali 2002: 302) — argued that there is a “fundamental conflict” between “Islam and the West,” “two great civilizations and ways of life” (Huntington 1996: 212).

“Clash of civilizations” thinking wrongly sees Muslims as different, dangerous and inferior. It is used to justify military aggression, surveillance and suspicion. It is also wrong on a deeper level because there is no single fixed Muslim culture at all (or a uniform Christian or Western culture either). As writer Tariq Ali (2002: 300) explains,

the world of Islam has not been monolithic for over a thousand years. The social and cultural differences between Senegalese, Chinese, Indonesian, Arab and South Asian Muslims are far greater than the similarities they share with non-Muslim members of the same nationality. Over the last hundred years, the world of Islam has felt the heat of wars and revolutions just like every other society.

The idea that there is a single Muslim culture with fixed features is an example of a kind of idealist social theory: cultural essentialism. This explains important features of society by pointing to inherent characteristics that a culture supposedly has.

In the late 1700s, the philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder proclaimed that every nation or ethnic group had its own unique and unchangeable “folk soul.” “Those essences were manifested above all in language, but also in folklore, poetry, and the arts” (Fredrickson 2002: 70). It is easy to detect racism in the history of cultural essentialist thinking. There is plenty of evidence in how the rulers of Europe’s colonies in other parts of the world depicted those over whom they ruled. For example, in 1908 Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, an aristocrat who was the top British official in Egypt for a quarter-century, wrote:

Want of accuracy, which easily degenerates into untruthfulness, is in fact the main characteristic of the Oriental mind. The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of any ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature sceptical and requires proof before he can accept the truth of any proposition; his trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description … [Arabs] are singularly deficient in the logical faculty. (quoted in Said 1979: 38)

The racism of Cromer’s view of “Oriental” and “Arab” culture is more blindingly obvious than it is in today’s “clash of civilizations” ideology, but both are united by a similar way of thinking about cultures.

Unlike Byrne’s magical power of attraction, cultures — the patterns of customs, values and meanings that groups of people develop — undoubtedly exist. The basic problem with cultural essentialism is treating cultures as if they have defining characteristics that are shared by every member of a group and do not change. It is this mistaken way of thinking that we see in both Cromer’s praise of Europeans as rational and his denigration of “Orientals” and “Arabs” as irrational. We find it again when Lewis and Huntington talk of clashing civilizations, with all Muslims ready to explode in anger.

Cultures are looser, more overlapping, more complex and more prone to change over time than cultural essentialists recognize. Cultures do not have souls or some other kind of inner essence that is somehow shared by everyone identified as belonging to them. Thinking as if they do inevitably conceals how cultures develop and change in history. It misses how much diversity there is within nations, communities of religious believers and other groups. Even worse, it often opens the door to racist views of other groups of people who are seen as having a common culture. That is why cultural essentialism deserves to be rejected.

All About Values?

Many people explain aspects of society as the outcome of values. For example, explanations of differences between Canadian society and the U.S. sometimes see these as reflections of different values. In this way of thinking, the reason that Canada has a universal public health care system — which in spite of its many shortcomings has a very positive impact on the quality of life of people living in the country — and the U.S. does not is because more Canadians feel that values like active government and social responsibility are important.

However, even if more people in Canada respond to surveys by indicating that they are willing to pay the taxes needed to fund public health care and that they generally support public services, this still does not explain why Canada has a universal public health care system and the U.S. does not. People certainly have ideas about what is good and bad, which is at the core of what we mean when we talk about values. However, values are not actually existing substances or entities. Nor do they act in the world. “Values” did not create the Canadian health care system or block efforts to create a similar one (“single payer,” in U.S. jargon) in the U.S. It was people — organized in groups and institutions in specific places at particular times in history — who did this. To understand why Canada has a public health care system and the U.S. does not, we need to study how people organized for and against public health care and the conditions in which they did so.

Explaining a feature of society as the consequence of values makes three mistakes at once. First, it suggests that values are things that exist independently of people (this is an example of the practice known as reification, which involves treating human phenomena as things). Second, it implies that values have the power to shape social arrangements. Third, it focuses on values instead of on people in specific social environments that condition the complex thoughts and feelings that are at the heart of all talk about values. This is an idealist approach.1

Supreme Ideas

Another common form of idealist thinking is assuming that ideas are the foundation of society, or giving ideas enormous power to determine how society is structured. A case in point is what role we give to ideas in explaining what is causing the global ecological crisis.

Some environmentalists argue that the “growth paradigm — the doctrine that economic growth is good, imperative, essentially limitless, and a matter of pressing concern for society as a whole” (Dale 2015: 19) — is wrong and dangerous. This criticism is perceptive, and everyone concerned about climate change and other dimensions of the ecological crisis needs to think about its implications. However, to assume that the growth paradigm is the root cause of the crisis and propose that the solution is a shift in thinking to a different paradigm is to make a mistake about the relationship between ideas and society.

The growth paradigm was not a set of ideas that in the past somehow became influential and led people to organize economic activity in foolish ways. Rather, these ideas began to emerge only when capitalism came into existence. Only in the twentieth century did the growth paradigm fully replace “earlier conceptions of economic life … as embedded in material processes that could not grow on an infinite basis” (Dale 2015: 27) among economists.

Capitalism as a system of organizing the production of goods and services spawned the paradigm. It is capitalism that makes growth an economic imperative for societies, not the growth paradigm. The drive to grow exists because companies are forced by competition to increase the productivity of the workers they employ and the quantity of commodities they sell (for more on this see Chapter 7). Firms are also driven to expand by the demands of their investors and creditors. In capitalist societies, most people come to want faster economic growth because, as researcher and climate change activist Gareth Dale (2015: 16) writes,

when growth accelerates … workers tend to earn higher wages, states tend to receive higher tax revenues, corporations and household[s] are more likely to be able to repay debts, and investors tend to achieve higher returns. Conversely, when growth turns to contraction, trepidation is felt by all.2

The growth paradigm mystifies and justifies this capitalist reality. It deserves to be challenged, but demonstrating what is wrong with the growth paradigm is not nearly enough. Its ideas correspond to how capitalist society is actually organized. The realm of ideas is one dimension of every society; today everywhere the growth paradigm is one component of that dimension because capitalism spans the globe. But it is how capitalism is actually organized, not a set of ideas, that generates its cancer-like economic growth imperative. Thinking that ideas are the most powerful force in shaping social life (a habit especially common among intellectuals) is a kind of idealism.

The Failure of Idealism

No version of idealism can convincingly explain how society is organized or how change happens. The kind of idealism that tries to do this by pointing to supernatural forces — “positive thinking,” angels, God — can, as the philosopher Sidney Hook (2002: 197) argued, “be dismissed with a word. It can never explain why anything happens.” Supernatural forces cannot be shown to act in the world (although believing in them may influence how people act). Pointing to a supernatural force to explain an event or feature of society is quite simply a mistake. Doing this is not just silly: it is harmful because it turns people away from understanding society and trying to change it. If the cause of a problem is supernatural how can mere humans do anything about it?

Cultural essentialism at least refers to phenomena that do exist. Its problem lies in thinking about cultures as if they have inner essences that are somehow shared by everyone seen as belonging to a particular culture. The notion of a culture’s essence or soul takes us away from the messy reality of people’s customs, values and meanings by proposing the existence of something that has nothing to do with “the evolution of matter and energy in space and time” (Noonan 2012: 19) — a fatal flaw of idealism.

Treating values or ideas as if they are things that exist separately from people may not be as big a mistake as believing in the power of our thoughts to attract wealth or disease but it is still an error. People’s ideas matter, but ideas do not have a life of their own. Ideas do not make history; people with ideas in specific times and places do.

Chapter 2

In Our Genes?

WE ARE OFTEN TOLD THAT human biology determines how society is organized. This approach is called biological determinism, and it is not a new idea. Geneticist Richard Lewontin (1993: 23) notes that “the ideology of biological determinism” is made up of three claims: “that we differ in fundamental abilities because of innate differences, that those innate differences are biologically inherited, and that human nature guarantees the formation of a hierarchical society.”

For example, two evolutionary psychologists argue that unequal pay and barriers to promotion for women have nothing to do with sexism: “The sex gap in earnings and the so-called glass ceiling are caused not by employer discrimination or any other external factors, but by the sex differences in internal preferences, values, desires, dispositions, and temperaments” (Miller and Kanazawa 2007: 148). Women’s biology makes them different from men, “less aggressive and competitive” and also “far less risk-taking” and “less status-seeking” (Miller and Kanazawa 2007: 147). As a result, they are not as driven to earn money and work in higher-status jobs as men are. Women, we are told, choose to make less and work in lower-status jobs because other things — like their children — are more important to them. The implication of this analysis is clear: there is no point in trying to end pay inequity or remove barriers to women’s employment.

Women’s inherent inferiority to men is an old theme in biological determinism. In 1914 readers of the New York Times were treated to an article reporting on the fulminations of prominent Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist William T. Sedgwick against the “feminist revolutionary principle.” Sedgwick was outraged by such demands as equal pay and the right of women to vote in elections. He was eager to point out that women’s innate differences lay behind what feminists wrongly saw as injustices that could be done away with:

The real cause for women’s wages being lower than men’s is not masculine injustice. It is partly women’s lesser strength, less endurance, and lesser concentration — this last resulting from the fact that she is, and ought to be, always subject to withdrawal from her work by offers of matrimony. (quoted in MacAdam 1914)1

Sedgwick was also confident that one reason why so few women became doctors or lawyers is that they knew that their menstrual cycles could prevent them from keeping appointments “involving arduous physical and mental toil” (quoted in MacAdam 1914).

Another theme of the biological determinist approach is that people in high-status and powerful positions in society owe their place to their supposedly superior intelligence, which is seen as intrinsic and inherited (Gould 1996). This was a central idea for the eugenics movement that developed in Europe and the U.S. in the late nineteenth century. The aim of the eugenics movement was to improve the human species by encouraging superior people to marry and have children while discouraging their inferiors from reproducing (or even preventing them from having children by forced sterilization). Supporters of eugenics saw humanity as divided by biology into different races, with whites at the top of the pile. However, many people who rejected eugenics have also believed that people at the top owe their position to their inherited superior intelligence.

Changes in science and society have led to new versions of biological determinism. One is sociobiology, which got a lot of attention in the 1970s and 1980s (Rose, Lewontin and Kamin 1984). Today the most influential version of biological determinism is evolutionary psychology.

The Newest Version of an Old Story

Evolutionary psychologists rely on different science than their forebears to reach similar conclusions. They argue that human nature leads to social inequality, including the division of society into a hierarchy of social classes (Barkow 1992). Some recycle the idea that some individuals inherit superior intelligence (Kanazawa 2010), which reinforces the old belief that people at the top of society are there simply because they are smarter than the rest of us. It has even been claimed that most suicide bombers are Muslim because Islam permits men to have more than one wife (polygyny) and has a vision that martyrs will find virgins awaiting them in heaven. This vision supposedly makes the idea of being a suicide bomber appealing to single young men who face “a bleak reality on earth of being complete reproductive losers because of polygyny” (Miller and Kanazawa 2007: 167). Much as European colonial rulers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw resistance to their brutal domination as evidence that the people they ruled over were irrational savages, we are told that twenty-first-century suicide bombings have nothing to do with opposition to oppressive military occupation — which is, in fact, their main cause (Pape and Feldman 2010).

While not all evolutionary psychologists serve up such outrageously misleading and racist explanations, they do share a common biological determinist theory that they use to try to explain societies. Human nature, they argue, evolved into its current state during the Pleistocene era, which lasted from 1.8 billion to ten thousand years ago. Thus, our minds are designed to make us behave in ways that were well-adapted to the environmental conditions of our Pleistocene hunter-gatherer ancestors.

They see the mind as organized into a set of modules. Each of these modules is a psychological mechanism for responding to a specific Pleistocene-era problem with behaviour that would have been adaptive in Pleistocene conditions — in other words, behaviour that would have helped individuals to survive and reproduce in those conditions. Men and women, they believe, faced somewhat different problems and so evolved somewhat different mechanisms.

Evolutionary psychologists speculate about the adaptive problems that humans faced in the Pleistocene era and the tasks that would have had to be performed to solve each problem. For example, they argue that males had to compete with other males for sexual access to females. They then come up with arguments about how Pleistocene humans would have had to behave to solve their problems. For each problem, they say there must be a module that allows people to behave in adaptive ways. For every module, the brain has ways of processing information that produce the adaptive ways of behaving (Tooby and Cosmides 1992).

Evolutionary psychologists use this method to construct a picture of human nature. They use their account of human nature to explain why individuals behave the way they do and why societies are the way they are. No matter what the issue is, their conclusion is that society operates the way it does because the individuals who make it up are biologically programmed to behave in certain ways — dominating, competitive, violent and so on — and that men and women behave in different ways because they are biologically different.

How Evolutionary Psychology Stumbles

However, evolutionary psychology — like earlier versions of biological determinism — has fatal weaknesses. Its method of identifying the adaptive problems of Pleistocene humans is really “pure guesswork” (Buller 2005: 96). It is impossible to pinpoint the psychological characteristics that are supposedly adaptations that once solved the problems of Pleistocene humans, who have all been dead for a very long time. We cannot use surviving groups of foragers as evidence for what life was like for humans in the Pleistocene period because their societies have all been altered by the influence of capitalism and because there is a lot of variation among them. Nor can we use other animal species as evidence for the challenges that Pleistocene humans faced. In addition, there was never one fixed set of challenges; as our ancestors evolved, so too did the problems with which they had to grapple. Even if it was possible to come up with a list of the adaptive problems that humans faced throughout the history of evolution, it would tell us little about the actual psychological adaptations of humanity because we know nothing about the psychology of our Pleistocene ancestors.

Evolutionary psychology is also wrong to insist that people today have “Pleistocene minds.” Our environments have changed dramatically over the last ten thousand years as agriculture and industry have transformed our lives. This has “created strong selection pressures favoring psychological evolution” (Buller 2005: 110). Ten thousand years is long enough for humans to evolve modifications to the adaptations that evolved during the Pleistocene era. It is a mistake to assume that humans today are psychologically the same as our Pleistocene ancestors.

It is also a mistake to think, as evolutionary psychologists do, that there is a single “psychology common to all humans” today (Buller 2005: 122). Their model of the mind as made up of many modules is not supported by the best contemporary scientific knowledge of how our brains work (Buller 2005: 92–200). Their ideas about innate male-female differences in behaviour are also poor science (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Fine 2010). Even the best psychology is not up to the task of understanding society because, as we will see in Chapter 5, societies are not collections of individual minds — and evolutionary psychology is far from the best psychology.

Why do the ideas about society offered by such a dubious science get such a hearing? One reason why many people accept biological determinist explanations for why the societies we live in are so unequal, why men and women often do different kinds of work, and so on, is that these explanations claim to be scientific. Science has a high status in our society. Many of us assume that if science gives us the iPhone and in vitro fertilization then scientists must be right when they tell us why women make less money than men. These ideas are also appealing because we often assume that social arrangements that seem to be unchangeable must be reflections of an unchanging human nature. Proponents of biological determinism also enjoy lots of access to mass media.

But the study of human social life is not like physics or biology. Societies are the complex products of members of our peculiar species who, unlike other animals, can make sophisticated conscious choices rather than just acting instinctively. We certainly are the outcome of biological evolution. However, that does not mean that evolutionary biology is the key to understanding society (as evolutionary psychology assumes). One of the remarkable things about Homo sapiens is that we can and have interacted with each other and the rest of nature to create extraordinarily different ways of living. Consider these five contrasting examples: egalitarian foraging societies, ancient Egypt, Nazi Germany, the welfare state capitalist societies of Scandinavia in the 1970s, and the areas of Spain run democratically by workers and peasants during the Spanish Revolution of 1936–1937. Even if the way a society is organized seems fixed and natural to us, human societies have changed enormously over time, for better or worse. Biological determinism is a dead end.

Chapter 3

All About Markets?

MARKET THEORY IS ANOTHER VERY influential way of explaining how societies work. This sees society at the most basic level as a collection of competing individuals. Markets are natural for humanity, and as people are freed from external interference, markets will expand. This is a good thing, since “free markets” lead to the best of all possible worlds. When people pursue their self-interest, the result is the overall improvement of society. If this theory is correct, logically we should dismantle public services and weaken or eliminate minimum wages, workers’ rights laws, environmental protection rules and anything else that gets in the way of “free markets.”

This way of thinking has been around for as long as capitalism. In the 1700s Adam Smith made a major contribution to its development (although his ideas have often been misrepresented by later admirers). Smith wrote that humans have a “natural propensity” to trade; once freed of restrictions, capitalism “establishes itself of its own accord” (quoted in Hunt 1979: 51). When someone does what is in “his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it” (quoted in Hunt 1979: 54). Smith’s most influential idea is nicely summed up in this way: “in a competitive, laissez-faire, capitalist economy, the free market channeled all self-seeking acquisitive, profit-oriented actions into a socially beneficial, harmonious, ‘obvious and simple system of natural liberty’” (Hunt 1979: 54). A century later, the sociologist Herbert Spencer argued that societies evolved through competition to become more complex and efficient — he coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Like Smith, he portrayed capitalism as the culmination of human development (Callinicos 1999: 108–111).

Neoliberal Social Theory

The incarnation of this ideology that is widespread today is the neoliberal theory of society. Its best-known figures include economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and in the 1970s it went from being marginal to influential. Most people will have encountered some of its ideas. For example, we are told by one writer that “capitalist transactions are at the heart of human society — the basic principle of ‘give me that, I’ll give you this’ has been around since prehistory, and may even predate Homo sapiens” (Morgenson 2009: 43). As we shall see, the idea that trade is the essence of capitalism and that capitalism is as old as humanity is nonsense — it is, though, a very useful idea for capitalism’s cheerleaders.

Biologist Garrett Hardin’s influential notion of the “tragedy of the commons” relies on neoliberal assumptions. Hardin argued that when resources are held in common — instead of being privately owned — individuals will pursue their own selfish interests until the resources are depleted (Hardin 1968). The moral of the story is clear: “communities that share resources inevitably pave the way for their own destruction; instead of wealth for all, there is wealth for none” (Angus 2008). Hardin’s theory provides a convenient rationale for those who wish to privatize public resources and turn every element of nature into a commodity that can be bought and sold. However, the history of pre-capitalist societies, in which land, water and other resources were not private property, simply does not support Hardin: “in the real world, small farmers, fishers and others have created their own institutions and rules for preserving resources and ensuring that the commons community survived through good years and bad” (Angus 2008).

When media celebrity Glenn Beck rants to his radio and television audiences, a lot of what he says about how society works is based on neoliberal theory. Take his claim about Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), a program which aimed to provide more people in the U.S. with access to health care without confronting the grip of the profit-driven medical insurance firms that most people in the U.S. depend on in order to be able to see a doctor, firms which benefit from Obamacare. Beck claimed that the Act was another step towards totalitarianism (Right Wing Watch 2013). This should not be dismissed as merely lunatic far-right conspiracy theory. Beck’s silliness about Obamacare is inspired by the thinking of the influential neoliberal ideologue Hayek. In fact, Beck’s praise for Hayek’s 1944 The Road to Serfdom drove the book to the top of best-seller lists in 2010 (Lahart 2010).

The neoliberal theory of how societies work has three core ideas.1 The first is that people are rational, self-interested and motivated by incentives. As economist Tim Harford puts it, “rational people respond to trade-offs and to incentives. When the costs or benefits of something change, people change their behavior” (Harford 2008: 4). Many neoliberal thinkers believe that their specific idea of what it means to be rational is a very powerful tool: “‘rational choice theory’ produces an X-ray image of human life” (Harford 2008: xiii). They agree with Harford (2008: xiii) that “if you do not understand the rational choices that underlie much of our behavior, you cannot understand the world in which we live.” According to Mancur Olson (1965: 2), an economist whose ideas have influenced many sociologists and political scientists, because people are rational and self-interested, individuals will not work together for “their common or group objectives” unless either “there is coercion to force them to do so” or every individual in the group is given another incentive to work together.

According to this theory, capitalism as a way of organizing society develops spontaneously through markets. Hayek tells a tale of small groups of humans developing civilization by following rules that often forbade what their instincts demanded. This supposedly made it possible for larger-scale social ties to emerge. Civilization needed governments dedicated to defending private property in order to flourish. But government meddling with markets and social affairs constantly blocked the evolutionary progress of civilization, which, for Hayek, means capitalism. As one commentator puts it, Hayek sees markets as “the existential core of human existence, the ground from which everything else emerges” (Foley 2006: 206). Fortunately, capitalism was eventually able to take flight in European towns where governments protected private property (Hayek 1988:11–33). Markets, says Hayek, are uniquely powerful information processors. No individual or state can possibly know what people have and want, but capitalism “makes maximum use of the knowledge of all” (Hayek 1988: 78), to everyone’s benefit. Efforts to create social justice inevitably fail because social evolution cannot be guided (Hayek 1988: 74). Simply put, “evolution cannot be just” (Hayek 1988: 74).

The third plank of this theory follows from the second. Not only are attempts to bring about social justice doomed, they will also damage civilization and obstruct social evolution (Hayek 1988: 74). Not all supporters of the neoliberal theory go as far as Hayek’s straightforward claim that “[state] planning leads to dictatorship” (Hayek 1944: 70). But they do maintain that “the market (suitably reengineered and promoted) can always provide solutions to problems seemingly caused by the market in the first place” (Mirowski 2013: 64).

No Guide to Society

From Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s all the way up to current politicians in countries like the U.S., Canada and the U.K., governments around the world influenced by neoliberal theory have done tremendous harm to people and helped make the global climate change crisis worse — anyone who has any doubts about this should read Naomi Klein’s books The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything. Knowing about this harm is crucial, but it is not enough. We also need to see how the theory fails when it comes to understanding society.

To begin with, its idea of what people are like and how they behave leaves out many aspects of humanity, including the motivations behind our actions. Because it focuses so narrowly on self-interest and incentives, “love, sympathy, respect, duty, and valour fall by the wayside” (Amadae 2003: 296). It cannot deal with the fact that sometimes people do things even though they believe they will end up worse off as a result (Sen 1977). For example, a person may intervene to try to stop an assault instead of ignoring it and walking on by, even though they expect to get hurt. Neoliberal theory’s idea that being rational means behaving consistently, or trying to get the most of whatever it is that someone wants, explains very little. If that is what rationality is, then anything people do can be called rational: “any conceivable fact about behaviour, from church attendance to suicide, can be fitted into the theory” (Hodgson 2012: 102).

Contrary to the theory, there are countless examples of people acting together for their common interests or in support of others without being coerced or given some other incentive. To give just one example, in February 2003 millions of people on every continent, from the biggest cities to little settlements, marched and rallied against the looming U.S.-led attack on Iraq (Waldgrave and Rucht 2010). Collective action happens even “under the most discouraging circumstances, as long as … [people] recognize collective interests, join others like themselves, and think there is a chance their protests will succeed” (Tarrow 1998: 198).

The neoliberal theory’s ideas about capitalism are even further from reality. Capitalism has not always been with us. Markets have, it is true, existed for many thousands of years. But markets are not capitalism, and there is a lot more to capitalism than markets. Markets in non-capitalist societies were not the seeds of capitalism, needing only appropriate government shelter in order to grow. Before capitalism, merchants made money by buying goods in one place and selling them for a higher price in another place. How goods were produced usually remained unchanged. This is completely different from capitalism, in which competition drives business owners to find new, more profitable ways of producing commodities (Wood 2002: 73–80), as we shall see in Chapter 7.

Capitalism did not develop in European towns under the protection of governments that defended private property. While there is much debate about how capitalism came into the world, the analysis I find most persuasive argues that this new way of organizing society first developed in a sustained way in the English countryside (Dimmock 2014). Far from being a harmonious and peaceful spontaneous process, capitalism’s emergence involved landlords and state officials depriving English peasants of their land. That is how capitalists were able to obtain an adequate supply of people willing to work for wages as farm labourers and, later, factory hands. In the subsequent spread of capitalism within Europe and then across the world, state authorities and employers used an extraordinary amount of force and violence against people whose land and/or labour they wanted for profit-making — and they are still doing so today (McNally 2006: 83–108).

The neoliberal perspective on how markets work is almost as wrong as its view of their history. For one thing, markets do not provide information about how private economic activity affects other people and the environment. The price of a new smart phone tells me nothing about the ecological impact of the mining and refining of minerals and other raw materials used to make its components, the manufacturing process or the transportation of the phone to the store where I am looking at it. The price is equally silent about the working conditions of the African miners, the Chinese factory workers and sailors, the North American transport, warehouse and retail workers and everyone else whose labour made it possible for me to see the phone in the store.

Another feature of markets is that prices only reflect the economic situation of the present moment. This means that they cannot tell a capitalist who is considering whether or not to move ahead with mass production of a newly designed prototype how much demand for it there will be when the product is actually ready to be sold. This becomes an enormous problem when it comes to making decisions about long-term investments in infrastructure and services that will be used by many people, like hospitals, schools, energy-generating systems and parks (McNally 1993: 198–200). In addition, when knowledge is turned into a corporation’s private property, its use is not maximized by markets. Clearly markets do not work in the way that neoliberals would have us believe.

Finally, the neoliberal creed that efforts to make society more just cannot succeed — and that those efforts are actually harmful — is another helpful prop for defenders of the capitalist status quo. But it is just as dubious as the rest of the neoliberal theory. Providing welfare state programs like a comprehensive non-profit health care system, public childcare, public pensions for older people and benefits for the sick and unemployed — programs that were most advanced in Sweden, Denmark and Norway in the late twentieth century (Esping-Andersen 1990: 52) — does not move society towards dictatorship. Such programs do, however, make people less dependent on working for wages and, therefore, less afraid of their bosses. Hayek’s fear that the welfare state was creeping totalitarianism was wrongheaded, but he was right to worry about generous welfare states nibbling away at capitalists’ power. That these welfare states were built shows that it is indeed possible for people to make society more just. The fact that they have been weakened in recent decades does not prove that Hayek was right, but that employers and politicians have been successful in their efforts to reorganize society along the lines laid down by neoliberal theory.

Neoliberals argue that there are always market solutions to problems that critics say are caused by capitalist markets, but this insistence is unconvincing. Two examples clearly show why: access to good-quality health care and action to reduce climate change. The evidence is that when people must buy medical services on the market (either by paying directly or by buying health insurance from a private firm) those with more money get better care and poor people get low-quality care — or none at all. Yet most of those “who have the greatest need of care” are people with “the least financial resources” (Deppe 2009: 31). The lesson is straightforward: “the delivery of health care for all cannot be reconciled with the mechanisms of supply and demand” (Deppe 2009: 31). As an aside, it is worth adding that the U.S. medical system, which is dominated by for-profit firms, devours more money per person than public health care systems in other rich countries, but the U.S. population is less healthy than the populations of those countries (Deppe 2009: 30).

The foremost neoliberal “solution” to the worsening climate change crisis is an even bigger failure than for-profit health care. The proposed fix is based on putting a price on carbon emissions, the main biochemical cause of climate change. This is supposed to lead to a fall in emissions. Polluters are assigned carbon pollution permits and allowed to trade them (“cap and trade”). Firms and investors can also buy carbon credits (“offsets”) linked to projects in other countries, usually in the Global South, that supposedly reduce carbon emissions. This model has been put into practice in the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (ETS). It has done very little to reduce carbon emissions. It has done even less to reduce the dependence of E.U. countries on fossil fuels, whose extraction and use spews carbon and other greenhouse gases (Coelho 2012). This failure is not the result of flaws that “can be designed away … The problems of this scheme are of a structural nature, refuting the idea that nature will be better preserved by adding a price tag to it” (Coelho 2012: 14). Putting a price on carbon fails to reduce emissions. It also diverts attention away from the underlying problem: a way of organizing society in which energy generation, manufacturing, transportation, housing and much more are deeply dependent on burning oil, gas and coal. Carbon trading, like for-profit health care, shows that “the market is a blind power without any social orientation; it cannot solve social problems” (Deppe 2009: 31).2

This is clearly a theory of society that is both faulty and dangerous. Why, then, is it so influential? Writing in the late 1800s, Karl Marx used the phrase the “religion of everyday life” (Marx 1981: 969) to refer to an ancestor of neoliberal thought. One reason why market theory in one form or another is so common in capitalist societies is that its basic notions, that societies are made up of competing individuals and that markets are natural, fit with the daily experiences of many people most of the time. Competition for jobs, housing and other things is all too real in capitalist societies. We do rely on markets to get access to much of what we need or want. This gives market theory some credibility; its ideas resonate with some of our everyday experiences.

On top of this, today neoliberal thought is widely accepted by many university teachers, media commentators, politicians and other people whose institutional positions allow them to shape how people think about how societies do work and should work. This state of affairs has been made possible by the victories won by right-wing political forces since the mid-1970s, when the three-decade-long economic boom that followed the Second World War came to an end and the right went on the offensive against the movements to abolish injustice and oppression that had developed over the previous decade.3

Market theory, biological determinism and idealism shape how many people understand the world in which we live. As we have seen, each of these theoretical outlooks is a deeply flawed way of making sense of how societies work. All of them also lead to political conclusions that support today’s unjust social order. Another theory is needed. The next part of this book will outline one.

PART TWO

AN ALTERNATIVE: RECONSTRUCTED HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

THIS SOCIAL THEORY BRINGS TOGETHER the best ideas of Karl Marx and some of the thinkers who have used and developed Marx’s theoretical tools alongside important ideas developed by other theorists who have been most concerned with sexism, racism, heterosexism and other kinds of oppression. I invite readers who are suspicious about these ideas because of what they think they know about Marx (or about feminism or anti-racism) to approach them with an open mind, since these ideas have been widely misunderstood and misrepresented.

One reason these ideas often sound strange to us today is that language in our societies has been put “through a kind of linguistic cleansing, exiling suspect and nasty phrases like ‘class warfare’ … or even something as apparently innocuous as ‘working class,’” as historian Steve Fraser (2015: 6) points out. Readers who want to learn more about the streams of thought on which my approach draws will find suggestions for further reading at the end of the book. People who are already familiar with social theory may want to read the academic journal article in which I discuss the foundations of the approach used here (Camfield 2016c).

Chapter 4

Why Materialism Matters

IN THE FIRST CHAPTER OF this book, I explained what idealism is and discussed several versions of idealist thought that are widespread today. To avoid the problems of idealism, a theory capable of understanding society and guiding efforts to change it for the better must first and foremost be a consistently materialist theory. This chapter introduces a nuanced materialist approach and, as an example of how it works, uses it to briefly analyze rape culture.

Just as when we talk about how social theory idealism does not mean high-minded concern with ideals, here materialism has nothing to do with being preoccupied with money, expensive clothes, big-screen televisions or other objects. The U.S. socialist writer George Novack (1965: 4) summarizes the most “basic proposition of materialism” about “the nature of reality” in this way:

Everything comes from matter and its movements and is based upon matter. This thought is expressed in the phrase: “Mother Nature.” This signifies in materialist terms that nature is the ultimate source of everything in the universe from the galactic systems to the most intimate feelings and boldest thoughts of homo sapiens.

From this it follows that “matter produces mind and mind never exists apart from matter” and that “nature exists independently of mind but that no mind can exist apart from matter” (Novack 1965: 4). In addition, “substances that do not in any way derive from the evolution of matter and energy in space and time” (Noonan 2012: 19) — such as the supernatural forces, cultural essences and reified ideas discussed in Chapter 1 — have no role in explaining nature or human society. All materialist theories start from these basic principles.

However, these are only some bare first principles. There are many materialist theories. We have already encountered one deeply flawed materialist theory, evolutionary psychology, and another dubious theory, neoliberalism, which is compatible with a materialist outlook. Some of the most prominent materialist thinkers in the world today — the so-called “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Michel Onfray — combine elements of biological determinism and market theory. The theory we need must be materialist, but not that reactionary kind of materialist thought. Nor can it be a materialist theory that is very critical of all forms of social inequality but assumes that while the production of goods and services is a material reality, other elements of human societies like gender are not — this kind of theory is often called economic reductionism because it tends to reduce society to its economic element.

The Animals We Are

An adequate materialist theory of society needs to take the human species as its starting point. We are “a species of practical, material, bodily beings,” as theorist Terry Eagleton (2011: 130) puts it in his useful book Why Marx Was Right. As we interact with the rest of nature, we change our environments. In the course of doing so, humans change ourselves, developing our abilities and changing how we think. “We think as we do, then, because of the kind of animals we are” (Eagleton 2011: 131). How we think is always conditioned by our context: “Before we even come to reflect, we are always already situated in a material context; and our thought, however apparently abstract and theoretical, is shaped to the core by this fact” (Eagleton 2011: 136).

Humans as a species are distinguished by our extraordinary power to transform nature to meet our needs and desires. We do this cooperatively, using tools. Other species, like chimpanzees, use tools too, in limited ways, but humans use tools in a uniquely social way. Unlike chimpanzees, humans can work together and “anticipate the action of the other(s) and perform a complementary action in order to produce a result that could not be achieved by a single individual performing the actions in a series” (McNally 2001: 100). This is called heterotechnic cooperation. “Humans are the species whose members engage in cooperative heterotechnic toolmaking and who possess the whole complex of social, linguistic, and cognitive skills this entails” (McNally 2001: 101). Anyone who has doubts about whether these characteristics of this species of animal are important in understanding the societies humans create should pause and consider biologist Steven Jay Gould’s point: “we would lead very different social lives if we photosynthesized (no agriculture, gathering, or hunting — the major determinants of our social evolution)” (1977: 253).

The way that humans shape the rest of nature and ourselves is also unique because it is conscious activity. Thanks to the “swirls of electrochemical activity in the brain” that we call consciousness, humans are able to “take advantage of alternative possibilities” (Thompson 2015: 15). Even if other mammals have a degree of consciousness, “human consciousness operates at an enormously more complex level which involves not merely awareness but the awareness of being aware and consequently some sense of personal identity” (Thompson 2015: 17). Human consciousness allows us to make choices about how we interact with each other and the rest of nature (something that biological determinists never fully appreciate). Unlike other species, we choose the purposes of our activity. As Marx (1977: 284) memorably put it,

A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax.

Our species’ activity — our labour — is conscious and purposive. This allows humans to perform an enormous variety of different activities.

Since our labour is conscious and purposive, what we do is biological and social at the same time. We are both part of nature and human history. The development of human language was incredibly important here. It allowed humans to communicate using symbols that represent things. This expanded creativity. It allowed humans to develop complex cultures full of meanings and ideas that could be learned and passed on across generations. This “is the key to the human propensity to maintain and develop productive forces” (McNally 2001: 107), the forms of technology, cooperation and knowledge that humans use to produce goods and services. Consciousness and language make us “cognitive giants” (Thompson 2015: 18). However, we cannot eat ideas, and the way our relationship to the rest of nature and each other is organized shapes our thought processes.

Human societies, then, are produced by an animal species set apart from the rest of nature by its members’ ability to work together to transform the rest of nature to meet their needs and desires in ways that they consciously choose. In the process of doing this, we change ourselves and our culture.

A Materialist Approach to Explaining Society

The kind of materialist theory we need builds on this understanding of our species to explain how societies are organized. Philosopher Andrew Collier (1979: 45) clearly introduces this approach: “Let us keep our feet on the ground; starting from biologically given facts, we can begin to explain the general structures and possibilities of human societies.” I will explain my understanding of this approach in more detail in the next two chapters. Before doing that, I want to focus on one basic point.

To quote Marx (1968: 97), people “make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” People do act in the world. Everything that happens in society is done by humans. However, people never act in a vacuum. We are always in a specific context. We do not freely choose that context, and it conditions what we can do. Any context we find ourselves in is a definite place in space and time.

Humans do not exist in isolation, so our context always involves relations with other humans — even the most solitary hermit who has lived for decades in remote isolation had a mother and, as a child, was cared for by someone. Because humans create cultures, our context is never just a physical location. It is always a cultural setting too. The circumstances in which we find ourselves include ways of making sense of the world, giving it meaning and placing values on things, such as religious beliefs, attitudes about how men and women should behave, political ideologies, natural science, theories about how society works and so on. Such ideas matter, but we must not make the idealist error of treating ideas as if they exist separately from people: “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (Marx and Engels 1970: 47).

What is the upshot of all this? It is never enough to show that some feature of society exists or that a person or a group of people have done something. We must always examine the social context and explain in a materialist way why a social phenomenon exists or what made it possible for an individual or group to do something (Collier 1979: 48). Since our context today is the product of actions in the past — of history — we need to consider at least the recent past as well as the present. To give a sense of how this materialist approach to understanding society works, let us look at a brief example.

Explaining Rape Culture

Sexual assault is vile. I use the term sexual assault in the inclusive sense in which it is generally used in Canada to refer to all forms of non-consensual sexual contact including rape.1 Yet feminist writer Laurie Penny (2014: 94) is absolutely right to say that “rape and sexual violence are routine” in the world today. One of the most inspiring developments in recent years has been an upsurge of women (and some male supporters) in many countries declaring that this is unacceptable and demanding action to stop sexual assault. Many activists use the term rape culture to name what has to change:

Rape culture means more than a culture in which rape is routine. Rape culture involves the systematic suspicion and dismissal of victims. In order to preserve rape culture, society at large has to believe two different things at once: that women and children lie about rape, and that they should also behave as if rape will be the result if they get into a strange car, walk down a strange street, or wear a sexy outfit, and if it happens, it’s their own fault. (Penny 2014: 149)

If this is what exists, how do we explain it?

It is not hard to show that many men’s sexist attitudes about women and sex condone and encourage sexual assault. As Penny (2014: 94) writes, “men are supposed to fuck violently and on cue, to lust without reason, to barter crumbs of affection in exchange for access to sex with women, which they’ll take by force when denied.” However, to leave it there is to give an idealist explanation: the problem is the attitudes that many men have. Where do such ideas come from? What perpetuates them?

Some evolutionary psychologists have proposed an answer. They have argued that men are biologically programmed to rape; in the Pleistocene, men who raped had an evolutionary advantage. However, this idea has been utterly demolished by many researchers.2 It is yet another example of a faulty theory that is also dangerous; it suggests that if men are inherently prone to raping women then not much can be done to stop rape.

An alternative analysis using the kind of materialist approach I argue for in this book starts with gender inequality. The oppression of women involves hierarchical relations between men and women (gender relations). One aspect of this is the belief that men are superior to women — an example of how people who are oppressed are often seen as “inferior by nature” (Fields and Fields 2012: 128). Belief in male superiority authorizes men to use violence against women “to sustain their dominance” (Connell 1995: 83). Sometimes this takes the form of sexual assault. Patriarchal gender relations also encourage men to treat women’s bodies as available for men to use to gratify their sexual desires regardless of what women want. For most of their history, laws against rape were intended to punish only men who raped women who were under the control of other men and therefore “off limits” (Bourke 2007: 9). There is also a long history of conquerors using sexual violence to punish the vanquished and of men in dominant groups using rape to show their subordinates who is in charge.

Evidence suggests that women were not subordinated to men in the earliest human societies, which were egalitarian and communal (Coontz and Henderson 1986). Such societies still existed in parts of the world well into the modern era. For example, when Europeans first began to colonize Northern North America, many of the Indigenous peoples they met lived in egalitarian-communal societies with equality between women and men. Sexual assault was very rare in these societies and was considered unacceptable behaviour (Leacock 1981; Klein and Ackerman 1995).

In the later Neolithic era (roughly 4500–3000 BCE), among some humans particular kinship groups began to assert exclusive control over certain resources. This set in motion changes that, in societies where women moved to live with their partners’ families, could “culminate in the full-fledged control of all women’s lives and bodies” by men (Coontz and Henderson 1986: 142). In some places, such kin property led eventually to a small minority coming to control resources as their private property — in other words, the division of society into social classes. At the same time this process worsened the position of women. Male domination (patriarchy) became systemic (Coontz and Henderson 1986). From then on, women “found their allocated place in society to be that of domestic drudges, sexual playthings subject to gross physical mutilations, breeding machines, counters and pawns in family alliances” (Thompson 2015: 245).

Today, gender inequality has been reduced in many countries. It is a sign of progress that in many places the sexual assault of women — including the rape of women by their husbands — is considered a crime against women (rather than against husbands or fathers). Equality gains are the result, above all, of the hard-fought efforts of women themselves. A major change in how society was organized allowed gains for gender equality to be achieved but did not by itself weaken patriarchy: capitalism makes it possible for people to think of themselves as owners of their own bodies who should be equal before the law. This notion did not occur to people in earlier forms of society, and has only become helpful for women after they won the fight to be considered persons in the same way as men are.3 However, even where the greatest gains for gender equality have been won, the oppression of women has been reduced, not eliminated.

Sexual assault is one dimension of this oppression. Men living in an environment of gender inequality often come to act as if what they want is important and women’s lack of consent does not matter; the fact that societies where rape is less frequent are ones in which women have more power and authority is significant (Sanday 2003). Sexual assault is still sometimes a way of sustaining male dominance, a way for men to try to “keep women in their place.” It can also be a way for men to try to prove their masculinity when they feel it threatened. When women do things that in the past were considered to be generally appropriate only for men, some men feel this is an attack on them. Little wonder, since “the gains that women have made in the workplace, [their] new relative freedom from the obligation to get married, bear children and submit to male power at home and work are framed uncomplicatedly as a loss to men and boys” (Penny 2014: 100). Unemployment, low pay, lack of job security or other losses of income that prevent men from being “breadwinners” for their households also threaten some men’s sense of themselves as men. In recent years more men have found themselves facing such problems because of the state of global capitalism. War also fosters violently sexist masculinity, as do many right-wing political movements (True 2012: 39–44; Bhattacharya 2013–2014). This materialist analysis explains why sexual assaults against women are not only still routine but have become more common in some parts of the world.

Now that we have seen how a materialist approach that is not biological determinist or economic reductionist can give us insights into rape culture, it is time to look at how this approach understands society more broadly.

Chapter 5

How To Think About Societies

AS I ARGUED IN THE last chapter, the starting point for understanding any society is that it is produced and propelled by members of the species Homo sapiens. As we evolved into the distinctive species of conscious cooperative makers of tools and cultures that we are, humans emerged from the rest of nature while always remaining part of it.

Human Society and Nature

We transform nature and ourselves as we try to meet our needs. What are these needs? Philosopher Jeff Noonan argues that our needs are those things that, when we do not have access to them, reduce our abilities to move, feel or think. In other words, needs are life requirements. He distinguishes three kinds. Physical needs include clean air, open space, light, clean water, nutritious food, physical activity, shelter, waste disposal and safety. Sociocultural needs are things we require to not just survive physically but to function as members of our conscious species. These include care, education of some kind, play, meaningful work and the ability to participate in making decisions about issues that affect our lives. The third life requirement is free time, time in which we can develop our abilities to feel, move and think. Some of these needs are universal, such as clean water. Other life requirements are only needed because of the social environment in which people find themselves. For example, think of how many people today need transportation to get from home to wherever they go to earn money, which they need to buy things to fulfill their life requirements. Although transport to work is a common need today, for most of the history of humanity it was not, because almost everyone lived off the land as foragers or farmers (Noonan 2012).

Humans have a metabolic relationship with the rest of nature. The key idea here is that we take materials and energy from nature as we shape our environments to meet our needs, changing ourselves in the process (Foster 2009: 179). Humans have an astonishing ability to transform the rest of nature. Yet we always remain dependent on our environments whether we realize this or not. We can see this dramatically in the case of ancient Egypt. This was a society based on farming that took shape around the fertile delta of the Nile River. The Nile flooded every summer, making it possible to grow crops like barley, wheat, flax, millet, lentils and peas. Around 4000 BCE, the areas that could be farmed were expanded further from the river itself by the building of irrigation systems. The success of agriculture allowed the population to grow. It also made it possible to feed more people who did not take part in farming, such as traders, priests, royal officials and the many labourers who built Egypt’s famous pyramids. However, when drought connected to the El Niño weather pattern hit the region around 2250 BCE, flood levels plunged on the Nile. This was the crucial cause of the collapse of what is known as the Old Kingdom society in Egypt (Empson 2014: 43–48).

The human metabolism with the rest of nature is regulated by how human societies are organized. This is never fixed, nor is it forever. Social arrangements change over time. They are specific to particular times and historically specific places. A look at two different ways of regulating the metabolism demonstrates this.

From as early as 8000 BCE people began to farm to support themselves in the “Fertile Crescent” between the Mediterranean Sea and Mesopotamia (in what is now Iraq) and in New Guinea. This was subsistence farming performed by societies organized in highly egalitarian and communal ways; people farmed simply to feed the community. In these regions, and in other parts of the world later on, agriculture was based on slash-and-burn cultivation. This involved cutting down trees with stone axes and burning the wood to produce ash, which made the soil more fertile after it had been soaked in by rain. When land became less fertile, farmers moved on to clear new land. The abandoned area would be left to regenerate. Eventually enough plants and trees would grow back that the land could be farmed again (Empson 2014: 33–35). Slash-and-burn agriculture by egalitarian-communal farmers undoubtedly had an impact on nature. However, this was much less substantial than the impact of agriculture in modern times.

For the sake of contrast, consider how, in the late 1800s, farmers using horse-drawn metal tools turned the vast grass-covered plains of North America (the U.S. Midwest and the Canadian Prairies) — where Indigenous peoples had been dispossessed or killed1 — into fields of wheat. The harvest was then sold and transported across the Atlantic to supply markets in Britain and, later, Germany and other countries. In Europe millions of people employed in capitalist manufacturing and other industries needed to be fed. Despite being highly productive, domestic agriculture could no longer feed the growing populations of these European countries where fewer people now worked on the land. The difference between humans’ impact on the rest of nature in these two situations is not just the result of the farming tools used. It was the result of profoundly different ways of organizing society, egalitarian-communal in the first case and capitalist in the second.

The Core Activities of Human Societies

As a historically specific society takes materials and energy from the rest of nature and alters it, its members try to meet their various needs. People in all societies, no matter how they are organized, must carry out three kinds of activities if they want to survive and thrive. One is having babies. Children who grow up to help their parents (biological or adoptive) and take care of aging adults have been vital for most people in most societies. Only in the twentieth century in some countries did this kind of support become less essential for a significant number of people outside the circles of the rich. Boosting immigration is a way of preventing the labour force from shrinking in a country with a low birth rate, but this does not do away with the need for babies to born elsewhere.

The second activity is caring for the young, the old and the sick, along with the less-urgent caring that all adults need. Caregiving is essential. It raises the next generation of adults and ensures that people can get by day to day. Together, the activities directly connected to having babies and caregiving can be called social reproduction.

The third activity is producing the goods and services required for people to meet their needs and, even better, flourish. Food, clothing and shelter are obviously critical. While performing these three activities people also produce culture to make sense of their lives.

All three sets of activities happen simultaneously in every society. These are the core activities of all societies. Each one is dependent on the others, making the activities inherently interconnected — think of Neolithic humans gathering and farming to feed members of their kinship groups, for example, or people today using the money they make from paid work to buy goods and services for themselves and their children. We can also consider the three activities as aspects of a single complex process of labouring — the labour of social reproduction and production.

Although this process happens in all societies, how it is done varies enormously. The way that all three kinds of activities are performed changes. Biology dictates the physical aspects of how women conceive, gestate and give birth. Nevertheless, the meanings and customs surrounding sex, pregnancy and birth are features of society, not biology. They vary across cultures and change over time. The same is true of how people care for other people. For example, it was only in the late 1800s in countries like Britain, the United States and Canada that all young people — not just those from well-to-do families — came to be treated as children who for a number of years were to be nurtured, in part, separately from adults (compulsory schooling and protective legislation forced this change) (Sears 2003: 192).

How goods and services are produced is also variable. Although there have been a huge number of human societies and enormous cultural differences between and within them, there are only a small number of basic patterns for how societies have been organized to produce goods and services. These can be called modes of production. A mode of production is a distinctive way of organizing people for social production.2

The egalitarian-communal mode has already been mentioned. For most of human history, this is how production was structured: people, organized in groups without major social divisions or ownership of social wealth as property, gathered, hunted and later farmed to survive.3 In some places this evolved into another previously mentioned mode of production in which kinship groups claimed exclusive control over specific resources: the kin-corporate mode. Later, around 3000 BCE, the tributary mode of production emerged. This was the first mode based on the systematic exploitation of the labour of one class by another. In this system, exploitation took the form of monarchs forcing the common people to hand over a portion of what they produced to the royal state. The nobility was subordinated to this state. The feudal mode of production that developed in Western Europe out of the breakup of the Roman Empire was different than the tributary mode. Here peasants were exploited not by the tax collectors of a centralized state but by a fragmented class of aristocratic landlords to whom they paid rent, in the form of goods, unpaid labour and/or money. The capitalist mode of production first developed out of feudalism in England. Only in capitalist societies have most goods and services been produced for sale by firms that employ people who work for wages and in turn use this money to buy most of what they need. In every class-divided society before capitalism, most goods and services were not produced for sale. Instead, most were produced to be used in the households and communities of the ordinary people who made them, the direct producers.

Gender, Sexuality and Class

As humans carried out the labour of social reproduction and production, three distinct social relations developed. Each involves ways of linking together groups of individuals. In society these relations do not exist independently. They are not separate phenomena that then interact or intersect. They always exist in and through each other at the same time, as interlocking — or, to use a philosophical term, mutually mediating — relations. It is crucial to remember this as I introduce them one at a time.

One of these relations is gender. This “refers to the bodily structures and processes of human reproduction” (Connell 2002: 48). However, it is not “an expression of biology, nor a fixed dichotomy in human life or character. It is a pattern in our social arrangements, and in the everyday activities or practices which those arrangements govern” (Connell 2002: 9). Gender relations organize how bodies are dealt with in society. They specify what it means to be a man or a woman — or a member of another gender category (for example, some North American Indigenous societies have recognized “biological males who were members of a ‘third’ gender that combined masculine/feminine characteristics” [Kinsman 1996: 27] and today some people identify as neither male nor female).

Gender has existed in all human societies. Like other social arrangements, gender relations change over time. They also vary within and across societies. At any given time we can identify a particular overall pattern of gender relations in a society, a gender order. This includes differences in who does what activities — the gender division of labour. In the world today all gender orders are to some degree patriarchal. However, as mentioned in the explanation of rape culture in the last chapter, there have been societies in which gender relations were egalitarian. In such societies, women were not oppressed on the basis of their gender. We can get some sense of just how different gender orders can be by reading about the reactions of early European colonizers to the egalitarian gender relations they encountered among some Indigenous peoples in North America. Jesuit priests, for example, were horrified by the independence of Innu women of the Labrador region of what is now Canada. They condemned women’s autonomy, including sexual freedom, and the recognition of divorce if either partner wanted to end a marriage. Such behaviour was not permitted within the patriarchal gender relations of Europe in the 1600s (Leacock 1981: 44–56).

Distinct but closely connected to gender is another social relation: sexuality. Human biology makes many kinds of erotic activity possible. What people actually do and how they understand this is a matter of social arrangements. Like gender, sexuality can be found in all societies but changes over time and varies between and across societies. The social relations of sexuality have often treated sex for procreation as acceptable but stigmatized other erotic activity. In capitalist societies the social relations of sexuality have been to varying degrees heterosexist (oppressive of people who are not heterosexuals).

Today in Western countries it is usually taken for granted that most people are, and always have been, born heterosexuals, while a minority are born homosexuals (sometimes bisexuals are also recognized). Yet, when we study the sexual activities of people across time and around the world we discover that this belief just does not hold up. Sexual reality is a lot more complicated. The case of the Sambia people of Papua makes this clear: in this culture, all males between the ages of seven and nineteen performed oral sex with older males, and then as adults they had sex with women (Kinsman 1996: 26–27).

It is hard for most of us today to grasp that for most of human history people did not live as homosexuals, heterosexuals or bisexuals. They did not think of themselves as having a “sexual orientation.” For instance, in feudal Europe, “sodomy” was seen as a crime against nature and God. This referred to a range of non-procreative sexual acts, whether between men, between men and animals, or between men and women. “Sodomites” were people who committed certain forbidden acts. It was only a few centuries ago in Europe that humans began to define themselves as a certain kind of person on the basis of what gender they were attracted to (this has since spread far and wide). Capitalism, with its new workplaces, like factories, separated production from the household for many people in Europe and North America. As a result, what it meant to be a man or a woman was no longer so tied up with one’s role in family households in which everyone both lived and worked. Sexuality became a distinct aspect of people’s lives, first for capitalists and middle-class people, and later for the “lower orders” too. The “respectable” patriarchal sexuality of rich white people and the white middle class came to be seen as “natural” and “normal.” This is what eventually was dubbed heterosexuality. State, church and medical authorities did their best to enforce it on the entire population. The identities of people attracted to people of the same gender were shaped by this dominant order of sexuality, gender and class, and by how they resisted it. The result was new social relations of sexuality (Kinsman 1996: 55–56).

Class is a less ancient social relation than gender and sexuality. It is rooted in one group of people — an exploiting class — taking some of what is produced by the labour of others, a class of direct producers. For this to be possible a society must produce a surplus, more than what is needed for at least most people to survive. Only when a minority of people is able to live off the labour of others do we find class. The first fully formed society based on systematic class exploitation took shape in Sumer in Mesopotamia around 3000 BCE (Faulkner 2013: 17), though class divisions had begun to emerge earlier in some kin-corporate societies (Coontz and Henderson 1986: 142–148).

Class can involve exploiters extracting goods from direct producers. The classic case is peasants who are compelled to hand over part of their harvest to the state or a lord. Class exploitation can also take the form of labour service. In this case, direct producers have to do unpaid work, for instance, on a lord’s fields or a construction project. Sometimes those forced to labour without pay are slaves, or they are burdened with another kind of unfree status, such as the serfdom found in medieval Europe. Another form of class exploitation is wage labour. This involves workers selling their ability to work to employers and producing goods or services worth more than the value of what they are paid. Even if wages are high, exploitation still happens. High-paid wage-workers in capitalist societies today are exploited because they belong to a class of direct producers — the working class — whose labour produces commodities for capitalists that are worth far more than their pay.

Wherever class relations exist we also find state power. A state is a distinct set of “institutions and organizations” that “define and enforce collectively binding decisions on the members of a society in the name of their common interest or general will” (quoted in Burnham 1994: 2). This is much more than a governing body of some kind. States are also made up of systems of law and punishment, record keepers, tax-collecting authorities, police, armed forces, religious institutions and many other kinds of organizations.

The fact that we find state power wherever class exists is not a coincidence. Although state authorities claim to rule for the sake of society as a whole, and may do things that help ordinary people (from distributing food when crops fail to administering a public health care system), state power in a society favours the dominant social class. This has almost always been an exploiting class — an aristocracy headed by a powerful king, a class of capitalist business-owners or some other group that appropriates the fruits of the labour of direct producers. Laws uphold the ability of exploiters to exploit the direct producers. They are backed up by state servants authorized to use violence to enforce the law. So to understand “the specific form of state” in any society, the best place to begin is “the specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers” (Marx 1981: 927) — in other words, class relations. State power is a form of class relations, not a domain separate from class. This is pretty obvious when we look at states clearly run in the interests of a ruling class, most of whose subjects have no political rights at all (this was the situation in virtually all class-divided societies around the world before the rise of capitalism). It is also true when governments are elected and state institutions are officially neutral and at the service of the citizenry, as is the case in most countries today. States in capitalist societies can be forced to recognize and promote the equality of all citizens (this can weaken sexism, racism and heterosexism to some extent). But a government that threatened employers’ power over workers would find itself threatened by those at the top of the judiciary, police, military and “security” services, all of which protect the capitalist status quo.4

Societies with states have always been patriarchal, so states have always operated in ways that favour men (especially ruling-class men) and disadvantage women. States also regulate people’s bodies in line with the prevailing sexual order. It has taken the struggles of women and queers to make state power less sexist and heterosexist. In short, state power organizes the rule of a dominant class and usually props up oppressive gender and sexual orders while claiming that what public authorities do is in the best interests of all.

Other Social Relations

Gender, sexuality and class are not the only social relations that make up societies. Colonialism, in which one society imposes itself on another society and rules it directly, is another. The spread of British rule over most of South Asia and Africa from the 1700s to the middle of the twentieth century was a classic case of colonialism. When many people from a conquering society establish themselves in a colonized territory, dispossessing Indigenous peoples, colonialism takes the form of settler colonialism. Today, Canada, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Israel are all settler-colonial states. Imperialism, through which a small number of advanced capitalist countries dominate the rest of the world without using direct colonial rule most of the time, is also a social relation shaping societies today (imperialism will be discussed in Chapter 7).

Most of us today take it for granted that individuals belong to so-called races. Yet this way of categorizing people has not always existed. Far from it: in the long history of our species, racism is much more recent than class exploitation and gender oppression. Oppressing people who are treated as inherently and unalterably different from the dominant group — which is what racism does — was something spread around the world by Europeans as they established capitalist colonialism in the Americas, Africa and Asia. This form of oppression organized humanity into groups (“races”) arranged in a hierarchy. Traditional racist ideology claimed that racial divisions among humans were rooted in biology — a belief that persists today in spite of the overwhelming evidence that there is no biological basis for categorizing humans into separate races (Roberts 2011) — but these divisions have always been social creations. Skin colour and other biological features were defined by European oppressors as significant while they sorted humans into different races to justify dispossessing the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, enslaving Africans and subjugating Asians. It was racism that spawned the social relations of race. These have changed since they first came into existence but continue to organize societies today, interwoven with class, gender, sexual and other relations.5

WHAT ABOUT RELIGION?

Religion — understood broadly as belief in supernatural forces or entities — is as old as the human species. Historian Willie Thompson (2015: 114) points out that it is

adaptable to fulfill an enormous number of purposes — explaining the nature of the natural world and of the human place within it, promoting ethical rules and objectives; reinforcing community cohesion; offering consolation in hard or disastrous times; and not least, by the time rank societies evolved into rulerships, justifying domination, subordination and extreme social inequality — not to mention providing a career path for a corps of experts in religious practice.

Most materialists treat religion as basically just ignorance, an irrational holdover of worldviews that arose before modern science. A historical materialist view of religion is different and more nuanced. Religion is a common way that our culture-producing species makes sense of the world. Religious beliefs developed in response to early humans’ vulnerability to natural forces, and later to unequal social arrangements. In societies shot through with oppression and class exploitation, religious thinking can expresses both acceptance of the status quo and the desire to change it in some way.

Religious thought has long been influenced by the outlooks of specific exploiting/exploited classes and oppressing/oppressed groups (Achcar 2007). Two very different examples can help us see this. The liberation theology movement that sprang up among Roman Catholics in Latin America in the 1960s and spread from there expressed the struggle of peasants and workers against landlords, bosses and repressive U.S.-backed governments. Its radical perspective combined Marxist thought and ideas inspired by early Christianity, in opposition to most of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. In contrast, the fundamentalist movement Islamic State (Daesh) is a very different kind of religious force. It originated in Iraq after that country had been devastated by the U.S.-led occupation that began in 2003 and by the anti-occupation and civil warfare that followed. It is an ultra-right-wing political force that offers “the security of collective identity to isolated and fearful individuals” (Mishra 2015). This can be appealing to some Sunni Muslims who see no other force that they think could improve the appalling conditions they are living in. Some people are also attracted to Islamic State because it loudly condemns the global order they see as unjust, and because Islamic State is denounced by governments they hate — an example of the old attitude that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

What Societies Are

Societies, then, are built by humans working in a metabolic relation to the rest of nature to meet their needs. Society is best understood as a “set of relationships that links individuals” (Frisby and Sayer 1986: 96). Individuals are shaped by the social relations into which they are born and those within which they live their lives. Thus, every human is always a social individual.

Social relations involve differences. Gender, for instance, differentiates men and women. Class differentiates nobles from peasants, capitalists from workers, and so on. “This means that society is not homogenous. It is … a contradictory unity” (Frisby and Sayer 1986: 96). Ever since the emergence of patriarchal oppression and class exploitation — social relations which harm those who are oppressed and exploited, and are therefore antagonistic — society has been “an entity to which possibilities of conflict, movement and change are inbuilt” (Frisby and Sayer 1986: 96). This makes society “a dynamic whole” (Frisby and Sayer 1986: 96).

This whole (or totality, to use a philosophical concept) is always complex and moving. It is a matrix of interlocking social relations happening in space and time. At its core is the labour of social reproduction and production. Those activities are central because of what humans have to do to meet our needs: have babies, take care of each other and produce goods and services. That these are the core activities of every society does not mean that other activities, from warfare to religious rituals to online shopping, are less real. But it does means that certain activities have more influence on how a society is organized and how it changes over time than others, as the next chapter will discuss.

The reconstructed historical materialist approach shows what is wrong with all theories that accept what some call the social order model. The basic assumption of this model is that “society is the crucial regulator that keeps people from acting in their narrow self-interest without the slightest regard for others” (Sears and Cairns 2015: 27). In this view the state acts in the common interest, preserving social order by upholding society’s norms and representing various interest groups. This model denies that antagonistic relations exist as the very core of society. Also, theories that adopt this model often consider society as something permanently, and by its very nature, independent of people and beyond our control. This makes two crucial mistakes. One is making society something other than social relations between people. The other is failing to distinguish the way that capitalist society is beyond anyone’s control, as we will see later, from the nature of society in general.

Another great strength of reconstructed historical materialism is the recognition that society is a complex whole. This is very different from thinking of society as made up of separate institutions or systems that interact, which is how most people today think about it. This fragmented image reflects how people in capitalist societies experience the world. It is also replicated by the formal theories generated in universities to explain society. Organizing inquiry through separate and rival academic disciplines (Economics, Sociology, Political Science, Cultural Studies etc.) leads inevitably to views of society that fail to grasp it as a totality.

Understanding society as a complex whole with social production and reproduction at its core can yield many insights. To give just one example, in the excellent book Ways of Seeing, writer John Berger and his co-authors analyze traditional oil painting in Western Europe. Between roughly 1500 and 1900, this art form was very important for the ruling and middle classes.

[In it] a way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange, found its visual expression … Before it was anything else, [oil painting] was a celebration of private property. As an art form it derived from the principle that you are what you have. (Berger, Blomberg, Fox, Dibb and Hollis 1972: 87, 139)

When oil painting depicted women nude, it did so in a way that displayed them as objects for unseen male “spectator-owners.” Ways of Seeing also shows that the principle at the heart of traditional oil painting is the same message that runs through modern commercial advertising, which is also glaringly sexist. In both cases we can see how forms of culture are integral components of a capitalist and patriarchal society.

Chapter 6

Understanding History — How Societies Change

SOCIETIES EXIST IN TIME. OVER time, they change. Sometimes the pace of change is extremely slow, so slow that nothing significant shifts over the course of the longest human lifetime. Yet in some periods of history societies have experienced profound transformations in relatively few years, leaving those who lived through the experience reeling. Writer Rebecca Solnit (2016: xix) sums up why it is important to understand change: “when you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change.” This is true both for changes that improve people’s lives and those that make them worse.

We need to remember that societies do change. This is something we can easily forget if our personal experience leaves us feeling that nothing ever changes. Another reason why many of us do not appreciate how much societies have changed over time is that capitalist culture today is fixated on the present. We are rarely encouraged to think about the past. Most of the depictions of the past that we are exposed to in movies, television shows and books do not grasp just how different other societies were from the ones in which we live today. These versions of history often portray people in the past as if they thought and behaved just like people today, which they did not.

Two Misunderstandings

A first step in understanding how societies change is to set aside two common but mistaken ways of explaining history. The first is sometimes called the Great Man Theory of History. In this approach, major changes are seen as the work of exceptional individuals. So Abraham Lincoln ended slavery in the U.S., Adolf Hitler caused fascism in Germany, and Hugo Chávez was responsible for social reforms in Venezuela that helped the poor. One of the best responses to this theory is a 1935 poem by Bertolt Brecht, “Questions from a Worker Who Reads”:

Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?

In the books you will read the names of kings.

Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?

And Babylon, many times demolished,

Who raised it up so many times?

In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live?

Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?

Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.

Who erected them?

Over whom did the Caesars triumph?

Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants?

Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it,

The drowning still cried out for their slaves.

The young Alexander conquered India.

Was he alone?

Caesar defeated the Gauls.

Did he not even have a cook with him?

Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.

Was he the only one to weep?

Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War.

Who else won it?

Every page a victory.

Who cooked the feast for the victors?

Every 10 years a great man.

Who paid the bill?

So many reports.

So many questions.

People collectively make their own history in the circumstance in which they find themselves. Exceptional individuals do exist and can make a difference — for instance, to understand Venezuela in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we need to take into account Chávez’s skills as a political leader. Yet exceptional individuals are the products of their societies. When they are able to have an unusual impact it is because of their relationship to large numbers of people in conditions they did not create. In the case of Chávez, he understood the desire of Venezuela’s urban and rural poor to challenge the country’s racist rich. He tapped into that longing with his appeals to the revered legacy of nineteenth-century Latin American independence fighter Simón Bolívar, and promises of change couched in evangelical language. Crucially, Chávez was able to respond to popular mobilizations he did not control, which pushed him to become more radical (Ciccarellio-Maher 2013). No individual ever makes history alone.

Another common theory of history to beware of is based on the idea that technology determines how society changes — technological determinism. It is undeniable that the adoption of many a new technology has had an impact on society. Journalist Paul Mason (2012: 134–35) recounts a 2007 trip through Kenya:

[I] met minibus drivers suddenly able to contact their bosses when pulled over by corrupt police in search of bribes; hairdressers who, by simply collecting the cellphone numbers of their clients, had freed themselves from the decades-old tyranny of the “madam” who owns the parlour; slum dwellers mobilizing by text message to fight evictions; villagers able to receive cash remittances at the touch of a button through a cellphone money-transfer system.

These are all positive uses of cellphones. However, like systems of written language, the printing press, the telegraph and radio before it, the cellphone is a technology of communication invented by people in a specific social context. All of these inventions have affected how our tool- and culture-making species lives. But no technology changes society by itself: “the social consequences of technological invention can never be deduced from technological considerations alone” (Hook 2002: 218). What matters is how people use technology to meet their needs or further their desires, which is determined by how societies are organized, and by the social relations in which people and technologies exist. If Kenyans dwelling in slums are able to make it much harder for landlords and police to evict them, it will not be just because they have cellphones, but because they have forged solidarity among themselves on such a scale that their collective power makes evictions too much trouble for the authorities.

Social Struggles

Societies are complex matrices of social relations. No general theory can explain every aspect of how a society changes, from the mode of production to what foods people prefer. Yet there is a lot we can explain with a reconstructed historical materialism. To start with, most major changes in society involve struggles between classes and other groups whose relations with each other are unequal and antagonistic. Four examples will illustrate this.

The sustained development of capitalism happened first in England, but how did the mode of production there change from feudal to capitalist? Feudalism was in crisis across Europe by 1400. The Black Death (bubonic plague) had killed as much as one-third of a population already weakened by food scarcity. In England the nobility found itself faced with a peasantry whose power was strengthened because the reduced population — and possibly also peasants marrying later and having fewer children (Blank 2011: 17) — meant that labour, not land, was now scarce. This led to lower food prices and rents. This shift in the balance of class forces led to more peasant resistance and the decline of serfdom. With their incomes falling, lords were forced to start leasing the land they owned in order to maintain themselves, usually to better-off peasants. These tenant farmers “were compelled to specialize and produce efficiently for the market in competition with one another in order to gain a big enough return to pay for the lease and gain profits” (Dimmock 2014: 27). A new mode of production began to take shape. This was an unintended consequence of the class struggle between lords and peasants. It then took two centuries of class struggle and a civil war for capitalism to become dominant. All this was made possible by a unique set of social relations within England, which were influenced by the relations between England and other societies in Europe and beyond (Dimmock 2014; Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015).

How did slavery come to be abolished in the United States? In 1861 a political crisis turned into civil war between the North and the slave-holding states of the South. This crisis was ultimately rooted in the fact that it was impossible for both capitalism and plantation slavery to continue to expand within the U.S. and the lands into which the U.S. state’s power was expanding (Post 2011: 235–237). At the start of the war, the government of the Union, headed by President Lincoln, had no intention of doing away with slavery. However, as soon as war broke out, slaves began to flee to Union forces. Union policy on slavery began to change. As historian David Roediger (2014: 38) puts it, “their uneven, protracted, and thoughtful motion — what W.E.B. Du Bois called ‘the general strike of the slaves’ — placed slaves’ humanity and ability at history’s centre.” They showed that “their labour and loyalty could be decisive for the war effort” (Roediger 2014: 43). By issuing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and enlisting nearly 200,000 former slaves into the military, the Union dealt a decisive blow to the Southern economy and guaranteed its victory and the end of slavery for all African-Americans in 1865.

In the 1970s gender relations became less unequal across advanced capitalist countries. Changes to law brought women citizens closer to being formally equal to male citizens. Barriers to women working in some occupations were lowered, and gains were made for how much women were paid. Better access to safe and effective methods of birth control and abortion made it easier for women to decide if and when to have children. Sexist expectations about the roles of women and men in marriage and other intimate relationships were challenged. Services to support survivors of violence against women were created. The changes certainly did not eliminate patriarchy, but they did mean greater freedom for women. The gains would not have happened without a resurgence of feminism — including rallies, marches and other public actions, as well as many small discussion groups and bigger educational events — in which large numbers of women organized and agitated for change, often under the banner of Women’s Liberation (Coontz 2005: 255).

A final case reminds us that social struggle is central to the most momentous changes not only for the better, but also for the worse. In the early 1930s Germany was in the grip of the Great Depression and political crisis. A coalition government including the left-wing Social Democratic Party foundered in 1930. The right-wing president appointed one new chancellor after another. Elections failed to produce a stable government. The capitalist class was unable to resolve the crisis of German society; the traditional liberal and conservative parties could not agree about what to do. Nor was the working class able to resolve the crisis on its terms. The Social Democrats were trying to square the circle: they wanted to revive German capitalism while also improving conditions for workers. The Communist Party did not have an effective strategy for building broad support for a revolutionary solution to the crisis. Eventually the president, backed by key figures in the German establishment, appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor, and the Nazi Party took power. The Nazis broke the deadlock between the capitalist class and the working class by imposing their fascist dictatorship, killing millions of people (Gluckstein 1999).1

Changing Core Activities

As we have seen, production and social reproduction are the core activities of all human societies. This means, as Marx’s collaborator Frederick Engels once wrote, that “the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life” (Marx and Engels 1975: 394). Because societies are interconnected wholes, changes to these core activities have cascading effects throughout the rest of a society. For example, as capitalism remade societies in Europe and North America, more people began to leave their family households and work for wages in cities. There they were less under the eye of people who knew them. This allowed men attracted to men and, later, women attracted to women to create their own subcultures and new sexual identities that distinguished them from the rest of society (Kinsman 1996: 50–52). The transition from one mode of production to another has far-reaching effects.

This does not mean that the mode of production and the class struggles that happen when production is organized in class-divided ways fully explain every significant change in society. Recall the shift, mentioned in the previous chapter, that led to people understanding themselves as being heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. Capitalism made this shift possible in that people’s lives became less dominated by their place as a woman or man in a family household, which allowed sexuality to be experienced as a distinct sphere of life. But the subcultures and resistance of people attracted to people of the same gender also shaped sexual identities, as did the efforts of the powerful to enforce their kind of “respectable” sexuality on the whole population (Kinsman 1996: 55–56). The gains for women’s equality in advanced capitalist countries in the late twentieth century are another example. They were not caused by capitalism or the economic boom of the three decades that followed the Second World War. Most workers’ organizations did little or nothing to bring them about. It was the struggles of the women’s movement that were key (including initiatives by working-class women). That said, the fact that many more women were working for pay for longer periods of their lives, and more women were going to university in an era of growing prosperity, definitely helped set the stage for the upsurge of feminism that began at the end of the 1960s (Coontz 2005: 252–255).

As these two examples show, reconstructed historical materialism does not explain all major changes in society as simply the result of class struggle or how production is organized. Remember that this theory also insists that class and production never exist apart from other social relations. In history they have always been interwoven with gender, sexuality and, often, other relations too. For instance, the capitalist class relations that became dominant in England were patriarchal, as were the feudal class relations they replaced. But they became patriarchal in a different way. In England in 1800, some young women toiled for low wages and suffered physical and sexual violence from male bosses. Yet the patriarchal class exploitation they faced was different from the kind their peasant ancestors had endured in 1300. According to feudal law, serf women were possessions of their lords and owed them personal allegiance. A lord could often refuse to let a serf woman marry a man who served another lord, at least not without paying a fee in advance, and serfs were never free to move somewhere else (Coontz 2005: 110; Bennett 1971: 240). The interlocking gender oppression and class exploitation that wage-earning women experienced in early capitalist England was dreadful, but they were not personally subjugated to employers in the way that serf women were to lords.

We can also see gender and class woven together in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. The big German socialist movement that the Nazis sought to destroy was not helped by its “moralizing talk of traditional working-class values” when it tried to address “new generations of young working women … the shopgirls, hairdressers, typists, assembly-line workers, and cleaners … ‘the young prettily-dressed girls’ pouring from the shops and businesses at the end of the working day” (Eley 2002: 200) in the 1920s. The Nazi regime, created in 1933, banned genuine unions and all political opposition as it went about using the fascist state to revive capitalism in Germany. At the same time, it tried to remake gender and sexuality in line with its ideology that true masculinity was that of a combat soldier and father, while true femininity was that of a wife and mother of racially pure babies, which led the regime to discourage “Aryan” women from working outside the home (Loroff 2011).

Clearly, struggles between exploiting and exploited classes have been paramount in driving major changes in society, and struggles between oppressed groups and their oppressors have also been important. These are generally interwoven — think of women workers who go on strike over low pay and sexual harassment by male supervisors, or the epic struggle against apartheid in South Africa, which combined the fight of most of the population against white minority rule with the Black working-class struggle against capital. As we have seen, the transition from one mode of production to another has a big impact on other aspects of society.

Warfare

Another important force driving historical change is warfare. Patterns of warfare reflect modes of production. In pre-capitalist societies war was often a way for rulers to enrich themselves by plunder and conquest when they could not squeeze more from those they exploited. Rome’s aristocrats waged wars that greatly expanded the territory under their control in the centuries after conflict between them and the plebeian majority (mostly small farmers) ended in a compromise that won farmers protection against taxation and losing their land because of debt (Faulkner 2013: 41–42). In the Middle Ages the nobles of feudal Europe frequently warred against each other and against societies bordering on Western Christendom. This was because seizing land and goods was the only way nobles could increase their incomes when they were unable to peacefully acquire more land or coerce more goods, labour and/or money from the peasantry (Brenner 2007: 71).

Warfare under capitalism is different. Capitalist states fight each other over the resources, labour and/or markets that capitalists need in order to make profits. Forces fighting for control of a state sometimes wage civil war for such things. Sometimes state decision-makers go to war to weaken rivals that are seen as immediate or potential threats to their economic or political power. The struggles of oppressed nations to determine their own futures can also lead to war, as can class struggles and other revolts. All of these combined in the First and Second World Wars, which opened and closed the “Thirty Years’ Crisis” of 1914–1945 (Anievas 2014). More recently, the U.S.-led war and occupation of Iraq in 2003 was undertaken by officials in the government of President George W. Bush, who aimed to take control of Iraq’s oil reserves to bolster the United States’ global dominance at the expense of its European and Asian rivals. Their “bomb and build” strategy most benefited the wing of the U.S. ruling class that includes war industries, oil companies and engineering firms, to which members of the Bush administration had close ties (Bieler and Morton 2015). The popular uprising in Syria that broke out in 2011 evolved into a civil war as the Syrian regime’s brutal repression led many of its opponents to organize militarily, and the U.S., Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other political forces intervened in the country to advance their own interests (Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami 2016).

Forces of Production

There is one other reality that plays a crucial role in shaping how societies change over time: the forces of production. This concept refers to the technology, knowledge and ways of cooperating with which humans produce goods and services. Forces of production obviously have a huge impact on each and every society, but these do not directly cause major changes in social relations — the idea that they do is technological determinism. However, the kind of productive forces a society has makes some kinds of changes possible and others inconceivable.

One of the most dramatic demonstrations of this is what happened in Russia after the social revolution of 1917. This revolution made by workers, peasants and soldiers briefly put ordinary people in control through their highly democratic councils. However, they could do little to begin a transition towards the goal: an advanced society in which people’s needs would be met by democratically planned production, and where shorter hours of work would give everyone lots of free time to develop their human potential. Capitalism had developed only pockets of advanced industry in Russia’s cities; most of the former empire’s population lived in poverty in the countryside, farming with simple tools. Three years of World War I had also drained the country. The forces of production required to take more than a tiny step towards a society of shared plenty did not exist in Russia. The leaders of the revolution gambled that victorious revolutions in Western Europe would come to their aid, allowing them to draw on the more sophisticated and abundant productive forces that advanced capitalism had developed there. Workers did rise up in Germany, Italy and elsewhere, but nowhere did they take power into their own hands more than momentarily. This doomed the Russian Revolution to defeat, one that came in a form no one had foreseen: destruction from within by a bureaucracy that became a new ruling class. This class used the language and symbols of Marxism to justify its counter-revolutionary dictatorship while it industrialized the country by super-exploiting workers and peasants.2

A society’s forces of production make some kinds of change possible and rule out others, as the experience of post-1917 Russia shows. There is little more we can say about how forces of production actually affect how societies change other than the following. When a mode of production goes into crisis the outcome may be a transition to a new mode. If that happens, the new relations of production will usually not be ones that cause the productive forces to regress significantly. This is simply because few people ever want to give up the technology and scientific knowledge that exists in their society (Chibber 2011).

Across human history, in societies founded on modes of production other than capitalism there was a weak tendency for people over time to develop the forces of production as they tried to meet their needs and reduce their vulnerability to nature’s challenges. There was, for example, much interest in tools that made farming easier, crop yields larger and weapons more deadly. However, the development of productive forces was limited in powerful ways by the social arrangements through which goods and services were produced — the relations of production. These are the relations between exploiters and exploited, and among the members of both the exploiting class and the class of direct producers.

Before capitalism, relations of production placed obstacles in the way of sustained advances in technology and science. They also stood in the way of putting newly invented methods of production into widespread practice. For example, in societies where peasants had access to enough land that they could produce all or most of what they needed to survive, it was extremely difficult for lords or state authorities to alter how they farmed. If peasants felt they would not benefit from new tools, crops or agricultural methods that their superiors wanted them to adopt, they would drag their feet or not comply at all. Forcing peasants to farm differently took enormous effort (after all, they were not employees who could be fired!), which generally made it impractical (Brenner 2007: 70). In capitalist societies, as we will soon see, things are very different. Capitalism is unique in various ways, including how it systematically develops the forces of production.

Chapter 7

Capitalism

TODAY CAPITALISM STRUCTURES THE ENTIRE world in decisive ways, so there is nothing more important to understand about how societies work than capitalism. To start with, as we have seen, capitalism is one of a number of different modes of production that have existed in history. It is not, as some people think, a state of mind or a matter of greedy attitudes — though it does foster attitudes such as greed, competitiveness and obsession with money and material goods among people in capitalist societies. Like other modes of production, capitalism is a distinctive way of organizing society to produce goods and services.

As discussed in Chapter 3, capitalism has not always existed. It is a relatively new development in human history. Capitalism is also not just an “economic” system in the way that people usually understand that idea; there is a lot more to it than firms, markets, money and so on. Capitalism involves a way of regulating the metabolism between humans and the rest of nature — a very destructive one. In addition to organizing how people produce goods and services, capitalism shapes how people make culture, and how they have babies and carry out caregiving (social reproduction). Capitalism moulds gender, sexuality and other social relations too (while at the same time being shaped by them). Instead of thinking of it as a separate economic realm of society, it is better to think of capitalism as a way of organizing production that permeates all aspects of societies in which it becomes dominant, from schooling to sex to spirituality. For instance, recall how the idea “you are what you have” is at the heart of advertising and traditional Western European oil painting — these are distinctively capitalist kinds of culture. Every society is shaped by its mode of production, but capitalism’s impact is more pervasive and powerful than other modes of production.

Capitalism has three distinctive features that make it what it is. First, as in other class-divided societies, most of the means of producing goods and services — land, machinery, laboratories and so on — are the private property of a very small class of owners. Under capitalism the owners are usually private businesspeople, but enterprises can also be state-owned. These capitalists control economic units, ranging from small firms to giant multinational corporations, that produce goods and services as commodities for sale. The goal of production is profit; people in capitalist societies have to buy commodities to meet their needs, but meeting needs is not itself the objective of profit-driven enterprises. The economic units compete with each other. This forces capitalists to search for new ways to cut costs and increase productivity. Firms that are unsuccessful in the competitive race will go out of business or be taken over by rivals. Economic competition makes capitalism more dynamic than any previous mode of production. It has powered the unprecedented and extraordinary development of humanity’s productive forces over the last several hundred years. Competition also gives capitalism a unique drive to expand, spreading across ever-larger areas of the globe and infiltrating ever-deeper into each society.

The second, closely related, feature of capitalism is that most goods and services take the form of commodities. They are bought and sold rather than being produced for the immediate use of the direct producers, as is the case in other modes of production. This makes markets central to capitalist societies. Most non-capitalist societies have markets of some kind, but only capitalist societies are regulated by markets. Over time, more and more aspects of society and the rest of nature are turned into commodities, from land to entertainment to childcare to genetic data. Most people in capitalist societies have to buy most or all of the goods and services they need to survive. To do this, they need money.

The third distinctive feature of capitalism is that our ability to work (our labour power) becomes a commodity on a large scale. Capitalists need a pool of people who have no choice but to seek paid employment, so widespread markets in labour power are indispensable — and so too is all the unpaid work in the home, mostly done by women, that raises the children who will be the next generation of workers; this unpaid labour in the home also keeps the current generation well enough to work for wages. Working for wages existed in some pre-capitalist societies, but never on the scale that it does under capitalism. Wage labour often involves workers who are legally free to quit and search for another job, but workers may also be tied to a particular employer. Migrant workers in countries where the state issues work permits that restrict workers’ employment options are one example. Another example would be indentured workers who are forced to toil for a specific employer until a debt is repaid. The relationship between employers and people who sell their ability to work is one of class exploitation. Workers’ labour produces commodities worth far more than the value of what they are paid (in money and any supplemental benefits). The difference between the value of what workers produce and what they receive is surplus-value appropriated by capitalists.1

WHAT IS THE WORKING CLASS?

In capitalist societies, people who sell their labour power in exchange for wages (whether high or low) and have little or no management authority in the workplace make up the bulk of the working class. The working class also includes unwaged people who are dependent on other people’s wages (such as women who do unpaid work in the home full-time) and unemployed people. Wage-workers may be employed full-time or part-time, for a very short length of time or on a long-term basis, in a city or a rural area. In the Global South, many work in the unregulated “informal economy.” They may be completely dependent on paid employment, or they may combine working for wages with some other activity, such as growing food for themselves on a small plot of land.

The working class has been swelling because “the global peasantry is slowly disintegrating […] increasingly unable to sustain [themselves] by farming alone, and dependent on periodic or permanent wage labour” (Dyer-Witheford 2015: 133). However, some of the millions who have been driven from the land in the Global South cannot find any work for wages at all and are forced to eke out a living in forms of “self-employment” like selling food or cigarettes on the street (Davis 2006). These dispossessed and highly marginalized people can be thought of as a layer surrounding the working class.

Rhythms of the System

Every mode of production has unique rhythms or, to put it differently, laws of motion or rules of operation. These are the patterns of activity that the system exhibits. For capitalism, competitive accumulation is what dictates how the system operates. Competition drives capitalists to cut costs and squeeze more work out of workers for the sake of accumulating higher profits. For this reason, as McNally (2006: 122) says,

no amount of moral lecturing or enlightenment will change the behaviour of capitalists as a group, since only by doing what they do will they survive in the war of economic competition. The imperatives of cost-minimization and profit-maximization compel capitalists to do these things. If a given company stops doing them, it will simply be replaced by others who will do so.

Capitalism’s laws of motion are the “societal logic that links together such disparate phenomena as impoverishment of the poor, privatization of life forms, and destruction of the natural environment” (McNally 2006: 123) — these phenomena all flow from the competitive drive for profits, which trumps human needs. Capitalism’s extraordinary increases of the productivity of human labour also flow from this. It is the never-ending drive for profit that compels capitalists to introduce ever-more advanced technologies into workplaces. This makes it possible for workers to produce more cookies, cars or computer chips per hour, and for employers to replace workers with machinery.

As McNally mentions, capitalism’s laws of motion inevitably lead it to degrade nature. Competition forces firms to expand ceaselessly, to produce more commodities. As a result, they are forever devouring energy and non-renewable resources. Capitalists are always in search of cheaper raw materials and energy for their operations. Burning fossil fuels is so crucial to capitalism because they are cheaper than alternative ways of generating energy — such as wind and solar power — that produce less of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. Capitalists also generally favour cheaper food; when food costs less, workers will be less insistent in their demands for higher wages. This encourages forms of agriculture that use vast amounts of energy and water and are often highly polluting, like industrial meat production and monocrop grain farming. Firms in general are also driven to pollute as much as they can get away with, since operating in ways that are less polluting and less wasteful eats into profits. What matters to the system is profits now, not whether this way of organizing society is sustainable. The result is that capitalism creates a destructive shift in the metabolism between humans and the rest of nature (Moore 2015; Kovel 2007; Foster 2009; Empson 2014).

Another feature of capitalism’s rhythms is that they are very irregular. Capitalist economic activity fluctuates between periods of expansion (when firms are selling more commodities, expanding and often hiring more workers) and slumps (when sales fall and more companies go out of business, throwing workers out of jobs and causing even greater misery). Some such slumps are limited to one region of the world while others are global. So far the capitalist world economy has experienced four global crises: one in the 1870s and 1880s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the slump that lasted from the mid-1970s until the early 1980s, and the one that began in 2007.

This pattern of boom and slump is not random or accidental. It is not the result of what individual consumers do, as mainstream economists often argue. Nor is it caused by the psychology of capitalists, as followers of the economist John Maynard Keynes maintain. It is an inherent feature of the system’s inherent laws of motion. Capitalism’s unstoppable competitive drive leads firms to produce more commodities than can be profitably sold, and at the same time reduces the rate of return on investment (the rate of profit). The result, sooner or later, is a crisis. States can spend more, cut interest rates and create more money to try to postpone a crisis. However, this does not change the system’s fundamental rhythms: “capitalism is an alienated system that, like Frankenstein’s Creature, takes on a life of its own. No one can actually control it, even if relations of power allow some to profit from it, and massively so” (McNally 2011: 87–88).

When the pressures on profits build up to the point of crisis, the system can be reset — raising the levels of investment and commodity production — at great human cost. However, for this reset to happen, less-competitive firms need to go out of business and employers must reduce workers’ real wages and other costs. There is nothing automatic about this. Yet no economic crisis is permanent either.

CLASSES ORGANIZE

The social class you belong to is determined objectively by where you find yourself within society’s relations of production, whether as a seller of labour power, the owner of a small business or an executive of a multinational firm. But there is huge variation in to what extent members of a class understand that they share a common situation and common interests with others in their class, and in how willing and able they are to act collectively to advance their class interests.

Although capitalists are pitted against each other by competition they tend to be quite aware of their role in society and their common interests, especially when they face striking workers or a movement seeking higher corporate taxes or regulations that restrict what firms are allowed to do. A host of national and international institutions — government departments, political parties, think-tanks, elite universities, conferences and so on — help members of the ruling class to come up with explanations for what is happening in the world, devise strategies, formulate policies and work to implement them.

The working class is in a very different situation. Workers are divided by competition for jobs, by sexism, racism, heterosexism and other forms of oppression, by identification with different nations, and in other ways. Unlike the ruling class, members of the working class do not have an array of well-funded institutions at their disposal and plenty of free time in which to use such institutions.

Unity and solidarity among workers is made possible by what they have in common: subordination to the tiny class that controls most of the world’s wealth, in addition to shared places of work and sometimes shared residential areas. But working-class solidarity is never a given. It must be nurtured and sustained by formal organizations like unions, community groups and workers’ political organizations. Informal networks and other ways of organizing also help forge solidarity, both in and around paid workplaces and in community spaces.

Experiences of collective struggle — such as union organizing, strikes and protest movements — play a crucial role in helping workers to understand where they fit in society, how society is organized and what workers’ common interests are. Lessons learned in struggle can be forgotten, but ongoing organizations can preserve and pass on insights to subsequent generations.

One way of thinking about how working classes are shaped as groups of people in specific places and moments of history is to see the forces that promote unity and solidarity as those that recompose the working class. In contrast, the forces of individualism and fragmentation decompose the working class. In the early twenty-first century, working classes in many countries have suffered a lot of decomposition. Higher unemployment, the shrinking number of better jobs, and the declining quality of public services all lead to more competition between workers for scarce jobs or services. Scapegoating also corrodes solidarity, as people blame recent immigrants, older workers, young people or some other group of ordinary people for the problems in their lives. Bureaucratic unions, whose responses to today’s problems are generally ineffective, do little to promote working-class recomposition. The political parties linked to unions (like the Labour Party in the U.K. and the New Democratic Party in Canada), which are distant from the everyday lives of workers — and accept capitalism as it exists today — do even less.

A Built-in Antagonism

Because capitalists face systemic pressure to make workers work harder, and restrain or reduce what they pay for labour power (and public-sector employers generally treat their workforces in much the same way as private-sector employers), the relationship between the working class and the capitalist class is an antagonistic one. Class antagonism also arises out of the fact that capitalists control society’s productive forces and most of the rest of the wealth that workers have produced. Workers’ efforts to meet their needs and live better frequently collide with how employers treat them in the workplace. Workers’ efforts also run up against capitalists’ efforts to hold down wages, and the lengths to which governments go to serve the interests of a tiny, ultra-rich minority that controls most of society’s resources. These collisions generate class struggle, which often takes low-level forms, such as working slow, but can also flare up into strikes, protests, occupations, blockades, riots, uprisings and revolutions. Class antagonism can also be reflected in elections when workers vote for a party they think will take up their cause against the ruling class, as many Greek workers did in January 2015 when they voted for the left-wing party SYRIZA (the SYRIZA-led government very quickly capitulated to capitalist pressure to impose yet more austerity) (Kouvelakis 2016; Sotiris 2016a).

Workers suffer a lack of control over their own lives when they work for wages: this is the heart of the antagonism between the working class and capital. When people sell their ability to work to employers, they have little or no control over what goods or services they produce, how workplaces are organized and how they carry out the duties they are hired to perform. Decisions about most or all such matters are made by employers or managers. All wage-workers experience this condition of alienation, or “objective powerlessness” (Rinehart 2006: 14), though some are allowed at least a bit more autonomy than most. This condition exists in public sector workplaces as well as in for-profit firms. Alienation is an important reason why peasants and others who were able to survive without a boss usually avoided working for wages as long as they could. It is also why workers look forward to their time off and many dream of becoming their own boss. The lives of peasants, artisans and other ordinary people in pre-capitalist societies were never easy, but at least most of these individuals did not experience the profound lack of control over their life activity that most wage-earners take for granted. The spread of work for wages has subjected most of humanity to alienated labour.

CAPITALISM AND DISABILITY

The spread of capitalism and working for wages led to the oppression of people with disabilities. Although in pre-capitalist societies people with disabilities were sometimes persecuted or discriminated against, they were often able to contribute to productive activities in rural communities. Capitalism changed this. People seen by employers as unable to generate as much profit as other workers because of their impairments were marginalized or excluded from the world of paid work — such people were treated as a social problem. Disabled people are often condemned to poverty and excluded from mainstream social life. Even where disability rights gains have been won, people with disabilities are still oppressed by capitalism (Russell and Malhotra 2001).

Uneven Development and Imperialism

Another feature of capitalism is that it does not develop evenly. Ever since capitalism first took off in England, capitalist production has spread around the world in a very uneven way.

As we have seen, competition drives capitalists to introduce new technologies. Competitors often adopt innovations introduced by cutting-edge firms, but the higher profits made by those firms may be invested in newer technology that allows the firms to maintain their lead. “The result may be a self-reinforcing process that gives rise to privileged concentrations of high-productivity capital” (Callinicos 2009: 89). At the same time, the fact that capitalism first developed in a sustained way in England and the Netherlands — which, at the time, were cultural backwaters in many respects in comparison to the Ottoman Empire and China — gave those two countries a military advantage over other societies. They used this superiority to continue the conquest of societies outside of Europe that had been begun by feudal Spain and Portugal. European colonial domination of the rest of the world left a decisive imprint on how capitalism developed globally even after European colonialism was dismantled (Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015).

The uneven development of capitalism is easy to see today. For example, eighty-three of the largest one hundred non-financial multinational corporations (ranked by foreign assets) are based in the U.S. or the European Union (E.U.). Two-thirds of the top research and development firms are also based in the U.S. and E.U. (Serfati 2015: 10), but it is not just a matter of where the biggest companies are based. It is a matter of economic and military power. A small number of states where capitalism is most highly developed — the U.S., the major countries of Western Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan — still dominate the globe (although China, India, Russia and Brazil are becoming more powerful). Instead of directly ruling other countries as colonies, they usually exert their dominance through economic relationships and institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). In the background looms the enormous military might that these states, especially the U.S., wield. This is the form that imperialism takes today.

Capitalist States

This hierarchy of states is part of capitalism, not a separate system. As we saw in Chapter 5, state power in a society operates in a way that favours the social class that is dominant and generally maintains oppressive relations of gender and sexuality. In capitalist societies, the dominant class is the capitalist class. States are not neutral servants of their citizens. State power is deployed for two key objectives. The first is to guarantee the power of those who rule. This often involves maintaining the status quo — keeping people in line so that profit-making is not disrupted and groups with privilege (such as men, white people and heterosexuals) are not troubled by challenges to their power. While state authorities generally prefer to maintain order by persuading the ruled to accept the way things are as legitimate, they can also use force — for example, by unleashing police violence against people protesting austerity. But guaranteeing order does not necessarily mean opposing any kind of change. At times state authorities set out to modify social arrangements in ways that serve some or all capitalists and/or a privileged group. When faced with a strong movement, in the streets or in workplaces, that demands the government bring in a reform or reverse an unpopular measure, state authorities may also act, hoping that this will be enough to make the pressure die down.

The state’s other key objective is to keep the wheels of capitalism turning. One way states do this is by issuing money and setting interest rates: “Money is the blood of capital’s body, and monetary authority is a key to power in modern capitalism” (Mann 2013: 55). States also contribute to capitalism by running schools designed to produce workers with the attitudes and skills that employers want. They also regulate immigration to bring in the desired amount of certain kinds of workers. States help businesses by providing public infrastructure, transportation and other services. More broadly, as political economist Geoff Mann (2013: 63) puts it,

the state is the ideal institution to protect capitalism from the capitalists, who, when they each act on their own, tend to cause more than minor bumps in the market-mediated road. The state can legitimately coordinate and regulate their actions, and keep information on their actions in ways that the capitalists might hate, but that nonetheless are often the only reason the system works at all.

Clearly the state is not an optional extra for capitalism.

Although state institutions are separate from companies, and governments may do things that some or most capitalists oppose, there are extremely strong forces that push states to help capitalists make profits no matter who is in government. Quite simply, states depend on firms investing and employing people. When capitalist economic activity stalls, states come under pressure because tax revenue falls and there are more unemployed workers demanding aid from the state. States are also subject to capitalist pressures through the international currency and bond markets. As a result, states are not just states in capitalist societies; they are capitalist states — an integral part of the system.

Capitalism, Patriarchy and Racism

Capitalist societies are and always have been male-dominated. As capitalism transformed European feudal societies it changed how patriarchal gender relations were organized there. Something similar happened in other parts of the world where Europeans imposed capitalism on colonized peoples whose gender relations were already patriarchal, or where capitalism developed in response to European imperialism, such as in Japan. When societies with egalitarian gender relations came under European colonial rule, colonialism led sooner or later to both capitalism and the oppression of women.

The reason that capitalism and gender oppression go together is not just that this mode of production emerged within societies that were already patriarchal. Capitalism is hardwired for sexism. This is because capitalists and state authorities depend on women giving birth to and caring for children who will grow up to be the next generation of workers. This gives them a powerful incentive to support laws that regulate women’s bodies (such as those that restrict access to abortion) and, more generally, to reinforce oppressive gender relations (Ferguson and McNally 2013: xxix).

Capitalism and racism have been intertwined since shortly after this mode of production began to take shape. As mentioned in Chapter 5, capitalist imperialism divided humanity into a hierarchy of so-called “races.” In this arrangement, the dominant white group racially oppressed subordinate groups, which were treated as inherently and unalterably different. Today imperialism still perpetuates racism, even though most people rightly consider ideas about the superiority of the “white race” as dangerous nonsense. Imperialism maintains racism by sustaining a “global system of social stratification” in which “the darker your skin is, the less you earn; the shorter your life span, the poorer your health and nutrition, the less education you can get” (Winant 2004: 135). In this system, people in African, Asian and Latin American countries oppressed by imperialism are treated as culturally deficient, as are people elsewhere who trace their heritage to these parts of the world. For example, Muslim and Arab residents of imperialist countries are often treated as essentially irrational and religious (Kumar 2012). Another way that capitalism perpetuates racism occurs when employers use and cultivate racial hierarchies that are profitable for them. People who experience racism are often forced to accept jobs with low pay and few or no benefits. By dividing and weakening the working class, racism also allows capitalists to work all employees harder and lower wages across the board (Camfield 2016b).

The System Today: Neoliberal Capitalism

Over the few centuries capitalism has existed, the way it is organized has changed a number of times. Its essential features — the production of commodities by competing economic units, the regulation of society by markets and widespread wage labour — have stayed the same. What has changed is how capitalists, states and money have been bound together in producing for profit.

In the 1970s, capitalism experienced a global crisis. Eventually states and major capitalists came up with a new way of organizing the system that allowed the rate of profit to rise and boosted the power of capital. At the heart of this organization of capitalism was “the systematic use of state power to impose (financial) market imperatives” (Saad-Filho and Johnston 2005: 3). Governments strove to dismantle anything that could be a barrier to profit. Workers’ rights, unions, corporate taxes, controls on banking, investment and the movement of capital, environmental and other regulations on how companies operated, the state ownership of enterprises, the public delivery of services to the public, and unemployment insurance and other programs that reduced people’s dependence on wage work — all were targeted. Sociologist Raewyn Connell (2010: 23) points out that the aim was

to make existing markets wider and to create new markets where they did not exist before … Needs formerly met by public agencies on the principle of citizen rights, or through personal relationships in communities and families, are now to be met by companies selling services in a market.

Part of the expansion of markets has been the massive growth of lending money and financial speculation as ways for capitalists to make profits. Banks and other financial institutions have devoted much effort to coming up with new interest-paying securities to sell. With real wages stagnating or falling for many, working-class people have taken on more debt.

This market-driven approach has also been applied to the relations between imperialist countries and the rest of the world. “Third World” countries were not just urged to implement such policies to attract foreign investment; they were often forced to do so by the terms of loan agreements when they needed to borrow money from the IMF or WB.

The politicians and state bureaucrats who began to reorganize capitalism in this way drew inspiration from the neoliberal theory of society discussed in Chapter 3. This approach was first rolled out by the dictatorship in Chile that was put in place by a military coup in 1973. Before long, governments in Europe and North America began to experiment with it. They often met with real resistance, but over time they succeeded in overcoming opposition from workers and others who stood to lose from the new arrangements, which have often been labelled neoliberal. The approach spread around the world. Capitalist power has forced left-wing governments to adopt neoliberal policies they had sworn to oppose — for example, France in 1984 (Birch 2015) as well as Greece in 2015 (Sotiris 2016a). Although the global slump that began in 2007 showed that this way of organizing capitalism had not overcome capitalism’s built-in pattern of boom and slump, the response of dominant states to the crisis has been to reinforce neoliberalism rather than to experiment with organizing capitalism along different lines. One appalling consequence is that growing numbers of poor people around the world are being treated as disposable: their labour is not wanted by employers and they have little or no significance as consumers, so their lives are worthless (Davis 2006).

Hidden Potential

Before ending our look at capitalism, it is important to highlight something that is sometimes overshadowed when we pay attention to the extremely harmful features of this way of organizing society. Although the goal of production under capitalism is profit, not improving the human condition, a consequence of capitalism has been an incredible development of humanity’s productive forces. The kinds of technologies, knowledge and social cooperation that now exist have made it possible for people to live longer, healthier lives, accomplish remarkable achievements and understand the universe as never before. Unfortunately, they are often harnessed to make weapons that could destroy most life on the planet, surveillance systems that states and corporations use for power and profit and other uses that do nothing for human well-being. Most of the real benefits of today’s forces of production are only available to people to the extent that they can pay for them. So along with its many wasteful and damaging creations, capitalism has created unprecedented possibilities. However, it bars most people from enjoying the full benefits of today’s science and technology and prevents many possibilities from being realized at all.

There is no better illustration of this truth than the case of food, a basic physical need. Before capitalism, when people were hungry or died of starvation it was usually because food was simply not available. This was most often the result of poor harvests. Capitalist agriculture is so productive that more than enough food is produced to meet the needs of a huge global population. However, in 2012 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported that 1.52 billion people do not eat enough food to sustain “normal activity” and 2.56 billion have less food than what is needed to support a more strenuous level of activity (Hilary 2013: 119). Quite simply, as the executive director of the British NGO War on Want puts it, “hunger in the modern era is a consequence of distribution rather than shortages of food” (Hilary 2013: 122). Food production as it has come to be organized by capitalism also consumes a great deal of energy and generates a lot of greenhouse gases and other kinds of pollution, along with vast profits for multinational firms. Yet the technology and knowledge needed to reorganize agriculture to produce enough food for all in ecologically sustainable ways does exist (De Schutter 2011).2

PART THREE

ANSWERING SOME OF TODAY’S QUESTIONS

THE CHAPTERS IN THIS PART of the book use the theory developed in Part Two to propose answers to a range of questions that are on the minds of many people today. When reading them, it is important to remember that, as I argued in Chapter 5, societies are complex wholes. Each of these chapters deals with one aspect of the global interlocking matrix of social relations. In reality, these are distinct but not separate. For example, the processes that are making life harder for people, even in rich countries (discussed in the next chapter), are interwoven with those that are perpetuating sexism (discussed in Chapter 10).

Chapter 8

Why Is Life Getting Harder for People in Rich Countries?

AS WE SAW IN THE introduction to this book, many people in advanced capitalist countries sense that their lives are getting more difficult. Although there are plenty of reasons to be critical of the polling industry and how it shapes what gets presented as “public opinion” (Lewis 2001), it is hard to ignore all the survey results and other ways in which people express this feeling. What is happening, and why?

Harder Work

“Unemployment and precarious jobs have left a young generation hard pressed to see a bright future” (International Labour Organization 2011: 14). This accurate observation comes not from a radical critic of capitalism but from a report from the International Labour Organization (ILO), an agency of the United Nations. In 2016 over forty million people were unemployed in the thirty-four countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This was eight million more people than the number of unemployed before the ongoing global economic slump began in 2007. Fourteen million people had been without work for over a year, two-thirds more than before 2007. Across the OECD countries, one in six young people is neither employed nor participating in some kind of education or training (OECD 2016).

Unemployed people obviously have little or no income. Neoliberal changes to unemployment insurance and other income support programs have made it harder to qualify for benefits, and they have shortened the length of time people are able to collect them. For example, in Canada in 2013 only 39 percent of unemployed people were able to collect Employment Insurance. Those who were ineligible or whose benefits had run out could only turn to provincial social assistance (welfare); in most provinces this paid a single person deemed employable around 40 percent of the amount of money designated by Statistics Canada as the low income cut-off (LICO), a measure of poverty (McCormack and Workman 2015: 112, 119). Looking for a job has, for many people, become harder too. Applicants are increasingly expected to perform in job interviews:

the interview, regardless of the job, becomes a kind of talent show audition hinging on generic questions about change, teamwork etc. (the equivalents of the standard repertoire of X Factor ballads), while the interviewee must project an all-purpose positivity by extemporising around this script without revealing its artificiality. The candidate must project the right image and hit the right notes, and must put his “heart and soul” into every performance, even for the most dreary role. (Southwood 2011: 27)

To make matters worse, the effort involved in today’s “jobseeking” turns “the home into an office and friendship into a promotional network” (Southwood 2011: 27).

Life on the job is also getting harder. Across the board, employers are trying to squeeze more work out of workers. Labour researcher and activist Kim Moody (2015: 5) points out that manufacturing has undergone

one of the biggest job-destroying intensifications of labour in the history of capitalism. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, if you survived the process, your job had been stressed, reengineered, measured, monitored, standardized, and connected just-in-time to another stressed … etc. job; while you and your fellow workers had been informed that you were the organization’s most valuable asset.

Across occupations, employers are increasingly subjecting workers to “performance management” schemes whose origins can be traced to how work has been reorganized in manufacturing. Managers come up with “key performance indicators” that can be measured. They then impose targets, and the workers’ performance is tracked on an ongoing basis, often using computer business systems. Some employers’ schemes rate not just output but workers’ behaviour as well — for example, one U.K. bank assesses how well workers “value individual contributions and differences and empathize with other situations” (Taylor 2013: 47). From workers in Amazon warehouses whose movements are constantly tracked, to university faculty whose publications are scored and counted (Head 2014), more and more workers are now experiencing what labour researcher Phil Taylor (2013) aptly calls “the new workplace tyranny.”

It is not just this kind of micromanagement that is making people’s jobs harder. Layoffs and hiring freezes mean that many workplaces are short-staffed and individual workloads are going up. Multitasking only adds to the stress. In addition, for growing numbers of people it is harder to get away from the job because they are expected to communicate by email, text message or phone outside of regular work hours. It is no longer just about using a laptop at home on the weekend — smartphones make it possible for workers to be contacted almost anywhere 24/7, further weakening the line between time on the job and the rest of one’s life (Wacjman 2015: 92–93).

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that more workers are working very long hours, while others don’t have enough hours of paid work. It is becoming more common to work non-standard hours, outside the daytime Monday–Friday period. Growing numbers of workers also find themselves saddled with irregular schedules; sometimes these change on short notice, making it hard to plan anything else (Wacjman 2015: 65, 75). Along with these time problems we find the spread of insecurity in the world of paid work. Fixed-term rather than open-ended contracts are becoming more common. There is also a rise in jobs that are classified as casual or temporary; instead of being hired by an employer in the actual workplace, workers are sometimes hired through temporary agencies (International Labour Organization 2011). Immigrants and people who experience racism are especially likely to find themselves with insecure jobs.

Putting all this together, it is clear that the world of paid work is getting harder for many people. Coping with these problems is made tougher by the decline of mutual aid and solidarity in the workplace and beyond, an issue that was briefly mentioned in the last chapter. Tighter management control over people on the job often makes it harder for workers to help each other out or to band together and take a stand against the boss. As break times shrink and there are fewer opportunities to socialize before or after shifts due to changing schedules, workers often have less social interaction with each other. With unionization shrinking, and cultures of solidarity on the job in decline, more workers are left to cope on their own (Richardson 2008). The weakening of ties among workers outside the world of paid work has the same effect.

Rising Pressures off the Job

Another reason that life is getting more difficult for some is directly connected to the work people do for pay: incomes often do not keep up with the cost of living. This leads to people taking on more debt. In Canada, the share of income spent on paying the interest and principal of household debt has been rising since early in the twenty-first century, even though interest rates are at historic lows (Parliamentary Budget Office 2016). In the U.K., that share has also been rising in recent years, especially for the lowest-income households (Gibbons and Vaid 2015). In the U.S., by 2006, debt servicing ate up 14.5 percent of disposable income, up from 10 percent in 1983. Younger, older and low-waged people spent “over half of their pre-tax income … servicing their debt” (Fraser 2015: 259).

A credential (or multiple credentials) from a university, college or some other kind of institution of higher education has become increasingly important for people applying for jobs with better pay and working conditions. However, the cost of getting post-secondary education has been rising, and students are going deeper into debt to pay for it. In Canada, students who take out federal student loans graduate with an average debt of over $28,000 (Burley and Awad 2015: 4). The situation is even worse in the U.S. where the average person with student loans owes about $30,000 (Goodnight, Hingstman and Green 2015: 77). Neither figure includes other education-related debt. Student debt in the U.K. is rising, with one study estimating that 70 percent of today’s graduates will not pay off their debts but instead make payments for thirty years as legally required before having the balance written off (Tetlow 2016).

As more people find themselves with jobs that force them to work non-standard and/or irregular hours, it also becomes harder to schedule time with family and friends. The problem of coordinating schedules is particularly hard for dual-earner couples with children; the start and end times of childcare, school and work often do not fit well together. People with children are also affected by rising expectations about what counts as good parenting. It is not just paid work that is being intensified but also the unpaid work of parenting. The pressure to sacrifice for one’s children is especially strong on mothers (Wacjman 2015: 75–77, 69, 126).

Meanwhile, governments have been cutting back on public services that working-class people use. The public health care systems in Canada and the U.K. are an example: funding cuts are leading to services being denied or delayed thanks to rationing and longer wait times.1 Public transportation, libraries, support for people with disabilities, and many other services are also being reduced.

As we try to cope with these difficulties, we are bombarded through the mainstream media with the message that being busy is good — a reflection of the lives of high-status people like “financial traders and corporate executives, who are invested in high-pressure, burnout careers” (Wacjman 2015: 72). At the same time, we are increasingly told that we must be happy. Unhappiness is often treated as pathological: “if you’re not happy, wish things were different, or find it hard to adapt to the conditions of modern life, you may be diagnosed as suffering from a mental illness” (Forrester 2015: 32). In advanced capitalist countries, “health has become an ethical imperative. Through diet and exercise we are more and more concerned with our own bodies” (Forrester 2015: 32).

Why Is All This Happening?

The evidence is clear, but what explains why life is getting harder for so many people? Many critics point the finger at the influence of neoliberal ideology on governments, and at corporate greed. Both of these are very real. However, this is not a good enough explanation. Why have governments pursued these policies? Why do CEOs never stop trying to boost their profits?

If we remember that capitalism has inherent rhythms or laws of motion (see the previous chapter), it is easy to understand that greed is not the main reason that employers — or the investment firms that own shares in their companies — do what they do. Firms are driven to maximize profits by capitalism’s relentless competition. Since the onset of the current crisis of neoliberal capitalism in 2007, which has pushed up unemployment, the pressure to boost profits has been higher. Marxist economist Michael Roberts (2016) contends that “bank regulation, quantitative easing, fiscal stimulus in some countries and other measures have failed to get major economies back to pre-crisis trend growth.” That is why, at any given time, employers are trying to squeeze more effort out of workers, creating a workforce with less job security and cutting staffing levels to the minimum. As competition for better jobs becomes tougher, parents are told that they need to do more to help their children succeed.

In 2008–2009, the states of the advanced capitalist countries managed — by pouring trillions of dollars into the banking system and economic stimulus spending — to stop the “Great Recession” from turning into an economic collapse like the Great Depression of the 1930s (McNally 2011). They then turned to austerity. This involved big cuts in spending on health care, social services, education and many other public services. However, austerity did not lead to a decrease in spending on prisons, police and the armed forces. Services have been weakened and jobs lost; in both cases women, who rely more on public services and hold a clear majority of public sector jobs, have been hit especially hard. Bailing out the system after the Great Recession and the austerity that followed were efforts to keep the wheels of capitalism turning.

The austerity drive is not just or even mainly about spending less. “It is a shift in the entire civilisational edifice of capitalism, deepening an equivalent shift that began in the mid-1970s,” as socialist writer Richard Seymour (2014: 3) puts it. In other words, it is about taking the neoliberal way of organizing capitalism to a whole new level. When we are urged to be happy and take responsibility for our health, it is mainly because governments want workers to be off work less often and for the population as a whole to accept harder times, expect even less support from the state and be less expensive to maintain.

Life is getting harder for many people, even in the richest countries, and the culprit is capitalism.

Chapter 9

Why Is So Little Being Done About Climate Change?

IN 2016 REPRESENTATIVES OF MOST of the world’s states signed the Paris Agreement to limit climate change. Its stated aim is to keep the Earth’s global average temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius above its pre-industrial level (the level it was at during the second half of the 1800s) while trying to limit the rise to only 1.5 degrees.

As Naomi Klein (2016) puts it, these are “bold targets.” Unfortunately, the Paris Agreement contains no plan for reaching these targets. Klein (2016) explains the reality of what was agreed to:

Add up all the emissions-reduction plans brought by governments to Paris and it puts us on a pathway to warming the planet not by 1.5–2 degrees Celsius, but by 3–4 degrees … our governments said to the world: “We know what we need to do in order to keep us all safe — and we are willing to do roughly half that.”

The International Energy Agency (2015: 7) recognizes that the current policies of the world’s states will not “lead to … the absolute decline in emissions necessary to meet the 2-degree target.” It is not a coincidence that “nowhere in the Paris agreement or its preamble do the words fossil fuel, coal, oil, gas, or pollution appear” (Kahle 2016). What is going on, and why?

What Is Happening and Where Are We Headed?

The Earth’s climate is changing. In 2015 the average annual surface temperature of the planet was, for the first time, a full degree Celsius higher than the pre-industrial level (Met Office 2015). Because of how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have been emitted by humans over the past 150 years or so (especially since the middle of the twentieth century), mostly by the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas), climate change is unavoidable. The issue is not if the planet will heat up but how much hotter it is going to get. Or, to cut to the heart of the issue, “the question is no longer whether there will be environmental catastrophes, but for whom” (Yuen 2012: 130).

In order to have a 50 percent chance of limiting global warming to under two degrees, while respecting the need for wealthier countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions more than poorer countries, rich countries need to immediately start slashing emissions by 8–10 percent per year (Klein 2014: 87). But nothing remotely like this is happening. Emissions are still increasing. According to the four scientific organizations that cooperate in the Climate Action Tracker project, if current policies are followed, the planet’s average temperature will rise by between 3.3 and 3.9 degrees by 2100. Even if all the voluntary pledges to cut emissions made in Paris were actually met — an absurdly optimistic scenario — the planet would warm by between 2.2 and 3.4 degrees, with a 50 percent chance of a 2.7-degree warming or more (Climate Action Tracker n.d.). To make matters worse, the more the planet heats up, the greater the danger that warming will set off feedback loops that cause greenhouse gas emissions to skyrocket. The disintegration of the ice sheet in the western Antarctic or large-scale melting of Arctic permafrost are two such possibilities. These would be “tipping points beyond which runaway warming would occur” (Klein 2014: 14).

What is climate change doing? The one degree of warming above pre-industrial levels that has happened “has already disrupted the global climate system” (Angus 2015). It is not just that average temperatures have risen. Heat waves that used to be very rare are becoming more common. Extreme heat waves are more likely. This makes droughts a bigger problem. Very heavy rainfall and intense storms are also happening more often. Sea levels are rising more quickly. Glaciers and snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere are shrinking, as is ice in the Arctic (Angus 2015; Met Office 2015).

Yet this is nothing compared to what we can expect if the planet warms by close to four degrees on average. If that happens, some regions will scorch: for example, summer temperatures in the western U.S. and northern central Russia could rise by twice that much. A planet on course for four degrees of warming by the end of the century would see half its land surface experiencing “highly unusual heat extremes” by 2050 — these extremes would cover 90 percent of the land by 2100 — according to a study produced by the Potsdam Institute scientific research organization for the World Bank (2015: 10). Worse, by 2100 some 60 percent of Earth’s land surface would experience “unprecedented heat extremes” (World Bank 2015: 11). In the language of the study, this would be “a completely new climatic regime posing immense pressure globally on natural and human systems” (World Bank 2015: 13). More rain in regions that are already wet, worse drought in regions that are already dry, more frequent and severe storms, ocean water becoming more acidic and sea levels rising, with the biggest increases happening in latitudes close to the equator — this is some of what would take place on a much warmer planet.

If this happens virtually every society would be severely affected, but some parts of the world would be devastated. As Klein (2014: 13) explains,

[the rising sea levels] would drown some island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, and inundate many coastal areas from Ecuador and Brazil to the Netherlands to much of California and the northeastern United States, as well as huge swaths of South and Southeast Asia. Major cities likely in jeopardy include Boston, New York, greater Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

Advanced capitalist countries would obviously be in a better position to cope with this kind of flooding, unlike countries dominated by imperialism. In a much hotter world, people who have to work outside — or in buildings without cooling systems — would suffer badly. So too would poor people, especially the very poor in isolated rural areas, women, Indigenous peoples, older people, children and people with disabilities. Such major climate change would have a host of harmful effects. These include the spread of malaria, respiratory diseases, food-borne infectious diseases and heat-related illnesses, less access to clean water and proper waste disposal, the collapse of some fisheries, higher food prices, food shortages, displacement and mass migrations (World Bank 2015: 23–29). As suffering people turn on each other, protest for help, or start to take what they need but cannot afford, state repression would escalate.

Why So Little Action?

There is a lot of debate about why the response to climate change still falls so short of what science tells us is needed. Many people believe that humans are simply addicted to burning fossil fuels. There is, they say, something in human nature that keeps us from acting to try to prevent climate change from becoming much, much worse than it already is (there are both biological determinist and idealist versions of this argument). Ecologist Andreas Malm (2015), an astute critic of this way of thinking, responds that this boils down to saying “we, all of us, you and I, have created this mess together and make it worse each day.” Malm (2015) asks the following question:

How many Americans are involved in the decisions to give coal a larger share in the electric power sector, so that the carbon intensity of the US economy rose in 2013? … The most extreme illusions about the perfect democracy of the market are required to maintain the notion of “us all” driving the train.

Individuals do not choose how their society generates energy or how it produces goods and services. They find themselves in a society with a certain way of organizing its metabolism with the rest of nature, and they live their lives within that framework whether they like it or not. No real or imagined aspect of human nature explains the grossly inadequate response to climate change. We need a much more specific explanation.

The place to begin is how energy is produced. In the world today, most greenhouse gas emissions are produced by how societies generate energy. Capitalism’s drive for profit leads to more economic activity and a swelling demand for energy. Most of the coal, oil and natural gas extracted from the Earth to meet that demand are controlled by private companies. “If I can drill and make money, then that’s what I want to do,” says the president and CEO of ExxonMobil (quoted in Malm 2015). Most electricity-generating plants are run to make money. Almost all cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains, which have engines that generate energy, are designed and produced by corporations. So is the technology that heats buildings. In other words, most of the energy system is controlled by capitalists. They are in business to make money; generating energy is a means to that end — and it is a very profitable one. In the words of three environmental studies researchers,

the existing investments made by fossil fuel interests are simply too great, their profits too astronomical … and the diversity of their product too limited for them to undermine their own ability to hold on to this status quo … perhaps never before has there been an industry with so much power and so much to lose through domestic and international policymaking. (Ciplet, Roberts and Khan 2015: 152)

The companies that profit most from fossil fuels are not going to voluntarily go out of business or reinvent themselves so they can make money in other ways.

Clearly it will take far-reaching action by states to significantly reduce the threat of climate change; it is no coincidence that many of the countries that have done the most to move to renewable energy are ones in which a lot of electricity is generated by public utilities rather than privately owned corporations (Klein 2014: 99). Yet the best that states have come up with is the Paris Agreement and its utterly inadequate and purely voluntary pledges. Meanwhile, states continue to subsidize fossil fuel industries by approximately $500 billion to $1 trillion USD per year (Ciplet, Roberts and Khan 2015: 143). States’ policies aid and abet the extraordinary profits of these industries. For example, together the largest five oil companies made over $1 trillion USD in profits between 2001 and 2013 (Ciplet, Roberts and Khan 2015: 144). States continue to fund highways instead of trains powered by clean energy. Although not all states have equally bad policies when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, not one is acting with the urgency that the situation demands.

Why is this? One reason is that companies whose profits would suffer from a rapid shift away from fossil fuels put a lot of effort into lobbying governments (Ciplet, Roberts and Khan 2015: 148–151). The influence of the growth paradigm on politicians and state bureaucrats, discussed in Chapter 1, is another. More importantly, slashing emissions would require states to make “heavy-duty interventions: sweeping bans on polluting activities, deep subsidies for green alternatives, pricey penalties for violations, new taxes, new public works programs, reversals of privatizations” (Klein 2014: 39). This kind of state action is completely incompatible with neoliberal ideology, which, as we have seen, has enormous influence on governments and top civil servants around the world.

However, to explain why states have failed to rise to the challenge of the climate change crisis, we need to go deeper than corporate lobbying and the power of ideology. Elite strategists know that a government that tries to take dramatic action would face a furious backlash from the capitalists at home and abroad whose profits would suffer the most. The more that capital in that country depended for its profits on fossil fuel extraction, processing and use, the more intense the opposition would be. Some firms would refuse to invest: they would instead lay off workers and move their operations and money out of the country. Financial capital would likely hammer that state’s currency and bonds on international markets. All this would have a huge impact on the state because states are dependent on capitalist economic activity. States are, as we saw in Chapter 7, capitalist states. Faced with such consequences, it would take at the very least a huge amount of pressure from a mass social movement to push a government committed to climate justice to actually implement its agenda (for more on this, see Chapter 14). Even then, in some countries military intervention against a government dedicated to getting off fossil fuels — as portrayed in the Norwegian television series Occupied — would remain a threat.

Chapter 10

Why Do Women Still Face Sexism?

INTERNATIONALLY, FLAT-OUT DENIAL THAT HUMAN society is causing the climate to change is fading; Donald Trump and his cronies are outliers, though denialist groups and individuals are still being funded by fossil fuel firms and right-wing foundations (Klein 2014: 44–45). Sadly, the same is not true when it comes to the refusal to face up to the reality that women around the world are still oppressed on the basis of their gender.1 So before answering the question that forms the title of this chapter, we need to briefly survey the evidence. Because some people in rich Western countries are sure that women in the Global North are doing fine but women in the Global South are not, I will focus on gender inequality in the advanced capitalist countries.

Far from Free and Equal

Let us begin with the most extreme manifestation of sexism: the killing of women by men. Everywhere women are much more likely to be killed by their male partners than vice versa. When men kill, it is usually the culmination of a history of abuse or after a woman ends a relationship. In contrast, women who kill their male partners usually do so in self-defence (Taylor and Jasinski 2011: 345). The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that globally up to 38 percent of murdered women are killed by their partners. Women are more than six times more likely to be killed by male partners than vice versa (WHO 2013: 26).

Non-fatal violence by men against women is also more common than violent acts by women against men. When men are violent to their female partners, they are much more likely to inflict serious injury than vice versa (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2013). The WHO calculates that three in ten women globally have experienced violence (including sexual violence) from an intimate partner. On top of that, 7.2 percent of women around the world are reported to have been forced to perform an unwanted sexual act by someone other than a male partner when they were over the age of 15 — please note that this does not count sexual assaults against younger girls (WHO 2013: 16, 18). Such assaults, along with the higher frequency of sexual assaults carried out by men against their female partners, are at the heart of rape culture (discussed in Chapter 4), which is all too real in advanced capitalist countries.

The fact of male violence makes threats and hateful words uttered by men against women fundamentally different from any anti-male comments that might be directed against men.2 It is impossible for women in rich countries to avoid hostile, demeaning words and images, whether offline or online. Women’s self-worth and self-confidence suffer as a result. These also suffer because of the many ways in which women are pressured to treat men’s preferences as more important than their own and to behave and appear in ways that appeal to men.3

Women face barriers when it comes to deciding for themselves if and when to become pregnant and have a child. Even in the richest countries birth control and especially abortion are sometimes hard to access. This is particularly true for low-income women, who in these countries are disproportionately likely to experience racism. In the U.S. an assortment of federal and state laws bar women from having abortions after a certain point in their pregnancies. Other laws impose delays or ban private health insurance companies (which most people in the U.S. are forced to rely on to obtain medical services) from covering abortions. In the U.K. access to abortion is still limited by law. In Canada there is no legal barrier, but access is limited in some regions.4 Women and girls also face a lot of pressure about their reproductive choices from the media as well as religious and state institutions. Laurie Penny (2016) sums it up: “almost every ideological facet of our societies” is geared to “controlling women’s bodies before, during and after pregnancy.”

Gender inequality is still glaring when it comes to work. Girls spend more time on household chores than their brothers. Women living with male partners do more unpaid work in the home even when both individuals have full-time paid jobs. Not surprisingly, men have more leisure time than women (Miller 2016). Women’s ability to work full-time for pay is limited by the shortage of affordable quality childcare — and, to a lesser degree, care for the elderly and people who are ill or disabled. With women still primarily responsible for unpaid caregiving, especially for young children, they are more likely than men to hold part-time jobs and live in poverty. Even when part-time workers are not part of the equation, men on average make more money per year and per hour than women — the gender pay gap in the annual incomes of full-time workers in Canada, Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. is in the 18–19 percent range.5 Low pay limits women’s life choices, and women of colour and Indigenous women are, on average, paid even less than white women. Not surprisingly, women are also underrepresented in positions of authority and high status, especially if they also experience racism.

TRANS OPPRESSION

People who have been treated as female since they were infants are not the only ones subjected to patriarchal oppression: everyone identified as a woman experiences this oppression. In addition, in most of the world today people who are seen as not belonging to either sides of the gender binary of male and female are oppressed on the basis of their gender. This includes those who identify as transgender, transsexual, intersex, Two-spirited or any other gender identity. Such people are the targets of a lot of violence. They are systemically discriminated against in many ways, including in the workplace and when trying to access health care. Trans people often have very low incomes. Trans people who face racism are particularly marginalized and disproportionately likely to be assaulted or murdered (Rose 2016).

Trans oppression stems from how a society’s gender order is organized. Today the dominant gender order on the planet treats only two categories — male and female — as legitimate. These are considered polar opposites that are fixed from birth. Within such gender relations, people who are seen as not fitting into the boxes of female or male, or who are seen as rejecting the gender assigned to them, are treated as a problem.

This Is What Twenty-first-century Patriarchy Looks Like

It is clear that sexist attitudes are not just holdovers of a patriarchal past: they accompany the reality of male dominance in the present. The many gains that feminist activism has won for women have not been enough to put an end to gender oppression (sexism), even in the countries where full legal equality and anti-discrimination laws exist. Although some people — including most supporters of evolutionary psychology and neoliberal thought (discussed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3) — deny that women are subordinated on the basis of their gender, the overwhelming evidence proves otherwise. We still live in societies in which gender relations (see Chapter 5) are organized in ways that oppress women; in other words, they are patriarchal. Equal rights in law and the belief that men and women are equal coexist with real gender inequality. Patriarchal gender relations are interwoven with class exploitation and with other forms of oppression like racism and heterosexism. As a result, for example, women who run companies have more resources for coping with and challenging the sexism they face than the women workers employed in their firms.

Men are not biologically programmed to dominate women. However, male domination has existed in some parts of the world for thousands of years (see Chapter 4). Over time, the shape of male domination has changed a lot because gender orders have been reorganized along with other shifts in the social relations with which gender is intertwined. For example, today most married men do not control their wives’ labour, money and personal possessions with the backing of the law, as they did for most of the history of societies founded on class exploitation and gender oppression. The character and intensity of patriarchal oppression varies today — such oppression differs greatly between Sweden and South Korea, for example — but it exists everywhere in some form.

Because women are oppressed on the basis of their gender, men as a group derive certain advantages. They tend to have higher incomes and more wealth than women. When a man applies for a job or a promotion, his boss never wonders if he might go on maternity leave. Fathers are rarely seen as having caregiving responsibilities that make them “unreliable” or “less committed” employees. Men are generally accorded more respect. When a man argues something that a woman has just said, he tends to be taken more seriously. Men do less unpaid work in the home and have more leisure time. Men generally have more control over their own bodies and their own lives than women. These are relative advantages (privilege)6 conferred on men as a group. However, they are not equally distributed: some men have more advantages than others.

These advantages do not mean that most men have easy lives. On the contrary: most men endure class exploitation, alienation, racism, heterosexism and/or another form of oppression. Patriarchal forms of masculinity are also harmful to men (Connell 2002: 143). Yet, because of patriarchy men as a group are advantaged relative to women.

What Keeps It Going?

Why has working for pay and winning legal equality not been enough to free women from patriarchal oppression? One reason is that these things do not abolish the significant advantages that men get because women are oppressed on the basis of their gender, advantages to which men tend to cling.

Some of these are material, like more leisure time and better odds of obtaining a higher-paid, higher-status job in societies in which such jobs are becoming scarcer. Less obvious are the psychological advantages. Life in capitalist society is grueling for most people. Being treated better than women, being more able to get their way in intimate relationships with women, being able to feel better about themselves by putting down women (and “girlie” men) — these are some of the rewards offered to men in a sexist society from a very early age. Such advantages are not easily given up because most men are socialized into patriarchal masculinity when they are young boys. They then grow up assuming they are naturally entitled to certain things just because of their gender (Connell 1995: 232).

Efforts to defend or expand male privilege, which range from calls for mothers to give up paid work in order to help unemployed men get jobs, to initiatives by ultra-sexist “Men’s Rights Activists” and anti-feminist champions of “traditional family values,” help keep patriarchal gender relations in place. Such reactionary efforts can have a pronounced appeal to men who were raised with the expectation that they would be “breadwinners” for their families but who, thanks to changes in capitalism, find themselves jobless or stuck in low-paid insecure jobs (Radhakrishnan and Solari 2015).

However, the defence of male privilege is not enough to explain why patriarchy persists. As we saw in Chapter 7, capitalism is hardwired for sexism. Capitalists and top state officials rely on women birthing and caring for children who grow up to be the next generation of people whose labour will generate profits for capital. More specifically, capitalists depend on the unpaid labour that goes into having and raising children (Ferguson and McNally 2013). They tend to resist demands for public childcare (and eldercare). They almost always reject the idea of providing other public services that would lighten the burden of unpaid work disproportionately done by women, such as buying food and preparing meals. That unpaid work ends up being a massive subsidy for capital.

The way that capitalist societies are structured stacks the deck against women in the world of paid work (more so in some countries than others). Because most people are forced to depend on wages for meeting their needs and those of their children, people’s jobs affect their bargaining power in their families. In this way women’s weaker position in the job market — a consequence of how capitalist societies deal with bearing and raising children, not of women’s biology itself — puts them at a disadvantage outside the workplace. Lower pay generally means less influence in relationships and household decision-making, and in society more broadly.

Capitalism also perpetuates patriarchal oppression because gender inequality is very profitable. When women’s labour is cheaper than men’s, capitalists (both male and female) benefit. They also benefit when the working class is divided along gender lines because divided wage-workers have less power to influence how much they are paid and how employers organize work and workplaces. Sexism, in the words of a perceptive male union activist, “has led men to confuse our class interests, to side with the boss time after time, to seek false and illusory solutions to our situation as exploited wage earners” (Gray 1987: 231). Capitalists have also become expert at using gendered differences to boost profits in other ways. For example, having pink clothes and toys for girls and blue ones for boys means that adults buy more stuff. There is also a lot of money to be made when women believe that they have to pay for clothes, haircuts and makeup to feel good about themselves or please men.

The upshot of this analysis is that women’s liberation would require a radical transformation of gender relations. Women would require not just the legal right to control their own bodies but the material conditions that allow them to make genuine choices. They would need to be able to have children without their place in society being negatively affected as a result. Work of all kinds would need to be organized on an equitable basis that did not disadvantage women in any way. Without these changes, which are extremely unlikely to happen in any capitalist society, patriarchy will persist.

Chapter 11

Why Is Sex Still Political?

MANY PEOPLE THINK SEX HAS nothing to do with politics. However, what people do for erotic pleasure and how they make sense of it is shaped by social relations that change over time (see Chapter 5). Once we get over biological determinism it becomes easy to see that sex and politics are bedfellows. Certainly sex is not only about politics — by which I mean being affected by the power to maintain or change social arrangements — but in the world today it is never unaffected by power in society. People in the richest countries who realize that sex is political often wrongly think that this is only a problem in other parts of the world. To show why this belief is mistaken, this chapter, like the last one, focuses on the advanced capitalist countries.

Sex and Politics Today

There are many ways in which sex is political. Consider these:

• For most teenage boys, the process of learning what it means to be a man involves a lot of sexual banter and joking with other boys that treats women like objects to be controlled (“getting girls”). It also puts down males who are seen as not conforming to the dominant ideas about how men are supposed to be (“fags”) (Pascoe 2007).

• The sexual harassment and sexual assault of women and girls by men and older boys is routine (as discussed in Chapters 4 and 10).

• Although in a growing number of countries people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or otherwise not heterosexual now have legal rights that are equal or almost equal to those enjoyed by people in heterosexual relationships, violence against queer people is common (but underreported). In the U.S., the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (2015) reported 1,359 incidents of “hate violence” against lgbtq and hiv-affected people in 2014, including 20 homicides. In England and Wales, 5,597 such “hate crimes” were reported in a 12-month period in 2014–2015 (Morris 2015).

• People seen as queer continue to experience problems in the world of paid work as well as when dealing with the police, landlords, businesses and religious institutions. Parts of many big cities are queer friendly, and there is more acceptance of queer people in the mainstream media, but many people attracted to people of the same gender still suffer stigma, harassment and discrimination. This has a negative impact on the mental health of queer people (Rainbow Health Ontario 2015).

• “Sex workers are thrown into jail more often, and our work is more difficult, and increasingly dangerous,” as socialist writer Magpie Corvid notes, because of new laws that restrict advertising by sex trade workers and make it a criminal offence to pay for sex (Corvid 2015: 21).

• Adultery is no longer against the law in most countries but has become the focus of growing attention in the media and everyday life. What counts as adultery has expanded to include looking at pornography on the internet, cybersex and emotional intimacy with someone other than one’s spouse or partner (Cossman 2007: 83–112).

• For some young people, who today “are told they must be endlessly adaptable and prepare themselves for an economy where they cannot count on anything,” dating has been replaced by hooking up, whose defining feature “is that the participants are not supposed to care about, or harbour any expectations of, the other” (Weigel 2016: 101, 100).

All of these examples involve sexual practices or identities in some way. All of them also involve oppression and/or pressuring people to behave in certain ways. How should we make sense of this?

Sexual Regulation and the Rise of Capitalism

Sexual activity has been regulated in some way in all societies. This can be done simply by custom and tradition. It can also be done through the laws of states and the formal rules of religious institutions. Before capitalism, in societies that were patriarchal and class-divided, rulers had to make sure that there were orderly ways of determining which children inherited land and other private property. Rules about inheritance among the “lower orders” mattered less because most heads of households had little or no property to bequeath to their children. But wherever inheritance was an issue there had to be rules about which sexual relationships between men and women could produce legitimate heirs. Sex was also regulated as an aspect of how men dominated women, who were often treated as men’s property.

Most adults depended on the support of their children in old age, and children were valuable assets for peasant households (as well as for lords, who needed heirs), so sex acts that could not lead to procreation were often stigmatized. However, people who engaged in them were not necessarily oppressed (Thompson 2015: 45–49). For example, in medieval Muslim Spain a man who was found to have taken the active role in sex with another man was rebuked, just as he would have been for drinking alcohol. This act was treated as less serious than sex with a woman married to another man (Clark 2008: 53).

The development of capitalism set the stage for a reshaping of sexual politics. The shape of gender oppression changed (as mentioned briefly in Chapter 6) when women began to fight to be treated as owners of their own bodies who deserved equal rights and better jobs. In Europe, the U.S. and other European settler-colonial states, growing numbers of people moved to cities and towns. In these settings, people could move around and mingle in public much more anonymously and with less family supervision than in rural areas. New social relations of sexuality emerged (see Chapter 5). In the late 1800s these included a pattern of sexual activity and identity based on different-gender desire that treated erotic pleasure as good in and of itself, with no necessary connection to making babies. This was the birth of heterosexuality as a specific way of organizing sex between people of different genders (Katz 1995). At the same time, people who had sex with persons of the same gender began to create social networks and think of themselves in new ways (Kinsman 1996: 122–128).

Many of these changes were troubling for ruling classes. Above all, they were worried about threats to male dominance and about not enough children being born and brought up to be the next generation of obedient workers and parents. States began to regulate people’s bodies in more intrusive ways. Churches and groups of middle-class people worried about “immorality” and “vice” in the working class. Efforts were made to promote marriage, specify the age at which people could legally have sex, control prostitution, and ban same-gender sex, abortion and birth control. In this era, the old practice of punishing individuals for what were seen as bad sexual acts evolved into heterosexism: the oppression of people seen as deviating from “normal” sexuality. Heterosexism interwoven with patriarchy, racism and capitalist social domination shaped sexuality in a new way. Straight rich white men set the sexual standards.1

In the early twenty-first century the way that sexuality is socially regulated in advanced capitalist countries has changed a lot from how it was regulated in earlier eras. Same-gender sex has been decriminalized for people of a certain age (which is sometimes older than the age of consent for different-gender sex). Laws no longer ban some non-procreative sex acts between people of different genders. Birth control is widely available. Abortion is too, though not to the same extent. In many, but not all, rich countries, same-gender couples have legal rights that are equal or almost equal to those of different-gender couples. There is a thriving “pink economy” of festivals, clubs and many shops and services targeting queers who have money to spend. Divorce has become relatively accessible. Pornography and sex toys are easy to buy and they are sold on a large scale. This landscape of sexuality today would be unrecognizable to people who fought for sexual freedom a century ago. It has changed enormously even in the last four decades, as veterans of the women’s and gay and lesbian liberation movement of the 1970s can attest.

Yet in spite of these changes there are many ways in which we are not free to live our sexual lives on our own, guided only by care for our own well-being and that of our lovers. In many ways sex is still political, as the examples at the beginning of this chapter demonstrate. Why is this?

Sexual Regulation Today

Sex is still political because it is still part of a capitalist society organized by several kinds of oppression. The social relations of sexuality are interwoven with gender oppression and racism. Heterosexism has been weakened but not abolished. The pressures of capitalism in the “age of austerity” also leave their mark on sexuality.

As long as women and trans people are oppressed on the basis of their gender, sex will always be political for them (and for their male and cisgender partners). It is these oppressive gender relations that cause so many young men to learn that being male means treating women like objects for their own sexual gratification — and that it is acceptable to harass or beat up men who do not conform to the dominant version of masculinity. Gender inequality is what makes it possible for people to accept that the state, husbands or boyfriends should be allowed to deny women control over their own bodies, including when they can terminate a pregnancy. Patriarchy always complicates sex between men and women, because even when people realize that they live in a sexist society, they are still influenced in all sorts of ways by that society.

The same is true for racism. Ideas about what makes someone attractive (for example, treating paler skin as better than darker skin) and who is an appropriate lover or partner for a member of a particular “race” are influenced by racial oppression.

Equality rights gains for queer people have definitely lightened the weight of heterosexism. These gains stem both from people mobilizing to demand equality and from the neoliberal reorganization of capitalism (see Chapter 7), in which “the state has given up a few of the tools it used to attempt to shape the morality of the population” (Sears 2005: 102). However, heterosexism has not evaporated. Very often heterosexuality is still treated as normal rather than just common. Queer people — especially, but not only, those who endure poverty and/or racism — still face stigma, discrimination, harassment and violence. This continues to make same-gender sex political.

Capitalist states still regulate some sexual activities by law. In the U.S. and some other places, “laws passed ostensibly to protect children against sexual abuse are so draconian that they criminalize all or much sex involving people under the age of eighteen” (Valverde 2014). Similarly, many laws that are supposedly designed to protect sex workers end up criminalizing people who are not harming anyone. In both cases states “protect” people without paying much attention to what the people being “protected” actually want (Valverde 2014). This is a symptom of how capitalist democracy is not very democratic.

Other aspects of people’s intimate lives are influenced by how society is organized. For example, the growing concern about adultery and the expansion of what counts as cheating are connected to more straight women working in jobs where they interact with men. There is a greater realization that lots of people who are in monogamous relationships do in fact have sex with someone else at some point. Yet dealing with this fact is made difficult by the huge emphasis still placed on the importance of marriage combined with the reality that it is easier now to get divorced or never marry than it was in the past (Coontz 2005: 278–279). This valuing of marriage is especially notable in the U.S., where moral conservative political forces are strong, and where the lack of universal public health care makes people more dependent on their spouses’ health insurance for access to health care than in countries where there is a public system. In the case of hooking up, with its emotionally empty, “make no promises” (Weigel 2016: 100–101) attitude, is it easy to see how this style of intimacy fits for some (not all!) people trying to cope with the bleak and insecure world of capitalism today.

Even what we often think of as the most private dimension of our lives happens within a web of patriarchal, heterosexist and racist capitalist social relations. In these conditions, sex — like the rest of life in a society shaped by alienation, exploitation and oppression — is bound to be political.

Chapter 12

Why Does Racism Persist?

TODAY MANY PEOPLE IN CANADA and Europe think that racism is at most a minor issue in their multicultural societies, though it may still be a big problem in the U.S. Some people in the U.K. point to the 2016 election of Sadiq Khan as mayor of London as a sign of just how weak racism has become. In the U.S., the Black Lives Matter movement and the blatant racism of Donald Trump’s election campaign and actions as president have pushed more people to recognize just how serious a problem racism is. Still, many white people in the U.S. are quick to say that Barack Obama’s two election wins, like Oprah Winfrey’s celebrity status and multi-billion-dollar wealth, mean that racism is mainly a thing of the past. Many biological determinists and fans of neoliberal thought claim that racism has nothing to do with why people of colour are overrepresented among the ranks of the poor and incarcerated, and underrepresented in positions of power. So before answering the question of why racism is still with us we need to have a look at racism today.

The Reality of Racism

In the U.S., Canada and Europe people whose heritage is not European are generally categorized as being outside the white “race” (as explained in Chapter 5, races are not natural — this destructive way of organizing people was imposed on humanity by capitalist colonialism). Their experiences of racism are not identical. Yet collectively they are all affected by racism in some way. The terms they use to refer to themselves vary across countries (for example, “people of colour” is commonly used in the U.S. and Canada but not in the U.K.), so I will use “people who experience racism” and “non-white people,” although I recognize that there are problems with identifying a group of people in terms of who they are not.

A young lawyer describes African-Canadian youth today as feeling like they grew up in “a supposedly free and democratic society that seemed to be unable to see [them] unless [they] were or were potentially carrying a gun, a basketball, a baby or a welfare application” (Morgan 2015). When African-Canadians try to “speak about their lived experience and the ongoing injustices they face,” they are “met with silencing indifference, dismissal and sometimes hostility” (Morgan 2015). Some or all of this is familiar to many other non-white people in Canada, the U.S. and Europe.

In the U.K., a case of widespread child sexual abuse by men of Pakistani origin prompted claims that something in Pakistani culture was to blame. As journalist Assed Baig (2014) argues, this exposes the common belief that “white people are somehow perfect — and that any crime committed by a white person must be a deviation from that perfection.” In contrast, crimes by other people are seen as the result of “an inherent flaw of their race and culture, or at the very least of their failure to adopt ‘Western culture’” (Baig 2014).

When it comes to treatment by police, other “security services” and the courts, non-white people fare badly. Racist police violence in the U.S. and Canada has been put under the spotlight by Black Lives Matter activists. Yet, police killings and assaults are just part of the picture of how the state agencies charged with preserving the social order treat people who face racism. For instance, African-Americans are more likely than whites to be arrested on drug-related charges. When convicted, they are punished more severely. This has nothing to do with Black people using or selling illegal drugs more often (these are myths). The issue is racism in the so-called justice system (Mitchell and Caudy 2015).

Since the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on September 11, 2001, Muslims have been extensively monitored, questioned, searched, detained, deported and prosecuted in the name of the “War on Terror.” Underlying this treatment is the notion that Muslims are inherently violent and prone to terrorism. The actions of the police and other state “security” services have, along with fear-mongering and scapegoating by politicians and the mainstream media, stoked the fires of anti-Muslim sentiment in society (Kumar 2012). As a result, harassment and attacks on people identified as Muslims have become more frequent. Women wearing headscarves or other clothing seen as Islamic are especially likely to be targeted (Kale 2016).

The impact of racism is also visible in the world of paid work. In Canada, the average income from employment of non-white people is 81.4 percent of the average for white people. Women who face both racism and sexism make 55.6 percent of the average of what white men make. When only full-time, year-round employment is considered, the gap is only slightly better: 84 percent and 65.2 percent respectively (Block and Galabuzi 2011: 11–12). In the U.S., the median household income of Black people is 58.7 percent of the level for white households; for Latinx people the level is 70.5 percent.1 Non-white workers in the U.K. are significantly more likely to receive lower pay than white workers (Brynin and Longhi 2015). In general, workers who face racism are generally overrepresented in poorly paid positions and underrepresented in jobs with higher pay, status and authority. Racism in hiring is well-documented (see Oreopoulos 2011).

These are just some of the many effects of racism; there are plenty of others, both material and psychological. How can we explain this?

COLONIALISM AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

The Indigenous populations of the remaining settler-colonial states (see Chapter 5) — Canada, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Israel — experience both racism and a distinctive kind of colonial oppression. The social relations of colonialism are all about dispossession. These states were founded by Europeans invading and seizing the lands of Indigenous peoples. In each case the colonial rulers tried to eliminate the Indigenous inhabitants, whether by killing them, assimilating them or (in Palestine) making them flee and become refugees. Each of these countries remains colonial as well as capitalist because the non-Indigenous populations still deprive Indigenous peoples of the land and resources that are essential for their “material and spiritual sustenance” (Coulthard 2014: 7). Within Israel, Palestinian citizens do not have equal rights, and Israel still dominates Gaza and the territory of the Palestinian Authority (White 2009).

Racism in “Colour-blind” Societies2

Mobilization and pressure from people directly affected by racism, and from white anti-racists, have won laws that prohibit racial discrimination. Yet in spite of all the talk about “multicultural,” “post-racial” and “colour-blind” societies, racism is clearly still happening. Racism is not just about hostile or negative attitudes. People who are categorized by society as non-white are treated as inherently and unalterably different from white people, and they are oppressed on that basis. It is because of this form of oppression, which is only several hundred years old, that the social relations of race exist.

These social relations slot people into “races” and rank them in a hierarchy that, globally, puts white people at the top and dark-skinned people at the bottom (see Chapter 5). The way these social relations are organized is different from the shape they took a century ago — or even fifty years ago. Claims that non-white people are biologically inferior to the “white race” are less common now. Instead we often hear arguments about people being defined by cultures that are different and unchangeable. Yet the oppression remains, interwoven with other forms of oppression and with class exploitation.

Because non-white people are oppressed on the basis of their race, white people as a group have a number of advantages. They tend to have higher incomes and more wealth. They often do better when looking for jobs, thanks to having better access to information about openings and getting preferential treatment in hiring. They are often treated better by landlords, business owners, police and the courts. Their ideas tend to be taken more seriously than those of people who face racism. In racist societies, people classified as white can get some psychological consolation from being regarded as culturally normal or superior. All of these are relative advantages conferred on white people as a group. White privilege, like the forms of privilege that accompany gender oppression, heterosexism and other forms of oppression, is not something that people choose to have. Like it or not, it comes to them because they belong to a group that is dominant in relation to another group within their society. It is unequally distributed: some white people get more than others.

Much as the advantages that come from being male in a patriarchal society do not mean that most men live easy lives, white privilege does not guarantee most white people a trouble-free life either. It often just means “freedom from something” — such as being stopped by police or forced to undergo intrusive searches by airport security — “not a freedom to do something” (Wilmot 2005: 30). Most people categorized as white are subjected to class exploitation and alienation, sexism, heterosexism and/or some other kind of oppression. Although white people are not oppressed on the basis of their race, their lives are distorted by this destructive way of classifying and dividing humans.

So Why Is There Still Racism?

Demolishing the notion that humanity is divided into races by genes or some other aspect of biology does not end racism. Nor do laws against racial discrimination, celebrations of “diversity” or having some non-white people in top roles in government and business. Racism is perpetuated because it has deep roots in how society is organized.

One of these roots is imperialism. This is a feature of capitalism. It was the spread of imperialist domination in the form of colonialism that originally made racism a worldwide phenomenon. As discussed in Chapter 7, imperialism still sustains an extremely unequal global distribution of wealth and power. In this global order people classified as non-white are, as a whole, worse off than white people. People who live in parts of the world that are subjugated by imperialism, or who trace their ancestry to Africa, Asia or Latin America, are often treated as inherently different from white people. They are often seen as prisoners of “backward” cultures that define who they are. In Europe and the settler-colonial states, this racist approach puts its stamp on immigration policies and the treatment of non-white immigrants, their descendants and people whose ancestors were brought to these countries as slaves. Another feature of capitalism that reproduces racism is the way racism is profitable for capitalists. Employers often cultivate and use racial hierarchies because these can benefit them.

When racism divides workers, employers can make them work harder. Workers who face racism are often forced to accept jobs with lower pay and poor conditions. This yields higher profits. Employers who need to find workers to do the worst jobs are usually able to do so by hiring people who are at the bottom of the social hierarchy, and those individuals are often non-white women. Employers can also use racial identity to help them decide who to hire for particular kinds of jobs. More broadly, profits are enhanced when divisions among people outside and inside the workplace, divisions that are rooted in racism, weaken the power of the working class to fight for its interests.

The other key force that helps keep racism going is the efforts of white people to defend and expand racial privilege. An example of this would be campaigns waged against policies that are designed to make competition for jobs or admission to universities fairer for people who face racism — these policies are referred to as affirmative action, employment equity or positive action measures. Another example would include bans on the wearing of highly visible religious clothing; this kind of ban prevents some Muslims from working in some jobs. Attacks on multiculturalism policies also reinforce white privilege even though the advantage that white people get from having their culture treated as more important is almost entirely psychological. Defending racial privilege is self-defeating for white workers because racism divides, weakens and economically harms the entire working class, including white workers. This is why white privilege is “poison bait” (Allen 1967). Sadly, the relative advantages that white people get from racism make it harder for white workers to realize that they would do better if they embraced anti-racist working-class solidarity.

Chapter 13

Why Isn’t There More Revolt?

THE TURN TO AUSTERITY POLICIES by most governments in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008–2009 has not gone unopposed. For example, in 2010–2011 there was a significant student movement in the U.K. followed by large anti-austerity protests. In 2011 Occupy Wall Street inspired a wave of actions across the U.S. and beyond against the “1 percent” and their role in worsening inequalities of wealth and power. In 2012 a sustained mass movement among Quebec students drew in many other people opposed to neoliberal policies. In 2012–2013 Indigenous peoples across Canada mobilized under the banner of Idle No More against moves by the very right-wing Conservative federal government that attacked their rights and environmental protection. Many non-Indigenous people joined in. France saw powerful movements of protest and resistance focused on attacks on pensions in 2010 and workplace rights in 2016.

Yet, in spite of government austerity, completely inadequate action on climate change and the ongoing offensive by employers against workers’ past gains, there has been relatively little popular resistance in the richest countries. How can we explain this?

Defective Explanations

Among people who hope for more revolt against injustice, there are three main explanations for why there has not been more resistance. One is that most people in rich countries are duped. According to this view, the culprit is “ideological institutions that channel thought and attitudes within acceptable bounds, deflecting any potential challenge to established privilege and authority before it can take form and gather strength” (Chomsky 1989: vii) — above all, the mainstream media.

Another, overlapping, explanation is that people are not just duped — they are also stupefied by what some call a “cult of distraction” (Hedges 2009: 38). Shopping, advertising, celebrity culture and other kinds of entertainment create a “culture of illusion” that “thrives by robbing us of the intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from truth” (Hedges 2009: 45). The combination of thought control and distraction by popular culture is said to be what keeps people from rising up.

A third answer points to how neoliberal society shapes people. The idea here is that contemporary society has shaped what we think, how we feel and what we want at the deepest levels of our being, our “psychic functioning”: “Neo-liberal man is competitive man, wholly immersed in global competition” (Dardot and Laval 2013: 256). According to this view, people accept the existing social order because they assume that individuals are like firms and go about their lives on that basis.

Each of these perspectives reflects some real aspect of contemporary society. But they fail as explanations of why people in advanced capitalist countries have been responding as they have over the last decade. Let us look at each of them in turn.

It is right to recognize that newspapers, radio, television and online media outlets generally report news and discuss the world in ways that support the status quo. Sometimes this is blatant. Often it is more subtle: “a matter of the everyday, the gradual accretion of decisions taken and declined, the issues thought worthy of discussion, in what order, in what way and by whom, a line of questioning, an inflection in the voice” (Myerscough 2015: 9). Debate about specific policies and actions is often aired. However, it is rare for corporate or state-owned media to present views that are sharply critical of capitalism’s current neoliberal incarnation. Critiques of capitalism itself are almost never presented. The range of ideas that are considered worthy of discussion is usually limited to those that take neoliberal capitalism for granted (Herman and Chomsky 1988; Sparks 2007).

However, the view that people do not resist more because they are duped by the media and other purveyors of pro-capitalist ideology rests on two big assumptions. One is that people’s actions are determined mainly by what they believe. The other is that what people believe is shaped mostly by the mainstream media. Both of these are faulty.

The assumption that what people do is mainly driven by ideas is an idealist perspective. Ideas matter a lot. But the basic material facts of people’s everyday lives — what they have to do to in order to get by and take care of others, along with what possibilities are available to them in their specific time and place — are also extremely important in influencing what people do. For example, someone may really want to go to a demonstration but instead they have to stay home with a sick child. Or they may hate the government’s latest attack on welfare recipients but not know that a demonstration against it is happening in their city.

Assuming that what people think is mostly a result of what they pick up from the mainstream media makes the mistake of treating people’s brains as empty containers into which ideas are poured by powerful institutions, just like someone can dump garbage into a can — how some individuals are able to escape this thought control is rarely explained. The media have some influence on the working-class majority in rich countries, but much less than many critics think (Davis 2003: 671). One reason for this is that media messages are not transmitted in a vacuum. How people receive and interpret them is affected by many factors, including what is happening in their lives. There are also many other influences besides the media. Above all, people’s own experience of the world is critical in shaping how they think (Seccombe and Livingstone 2000). The low level of resistance to austerity has more to do with how people’s experience leads them to think that protest is futile than it does with the power of the mainstream media, as I will explain.

What about the theory that the reason for the low level of resistance is that people are distracted and duped by popular culture? Certainly the architects of austerity have nothing to fear from people spending time doing things like listening to the latest hit songs, playing online games, following what is going on in the lives of celebrities, shopping just for fun, binge-watching Netflix or watching sports. But does the fact that people do these things really explain why protest and resistance have been limited? There are reasons to think not.

First, people are not simply manipulated by popular culture. As cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall (1998: 447) argues, “Cultural domination has real effects,” but “these are neither all-powerful nor all-inclusive.” As we participate in popular culture, to varying degrees we also select the bits of it that we like, give meaning to them and ignore other elements (Storey 2006: 171). Almost all the shows we watch and the songs we listen to are commodities sold to us by capitalist firms. They usually “impose and implant … definitions of ourselves” that conform with ruling-class outlooks on the world, but “ordinary people are not cultural dopes,” and “these definitions … don’t function on us as if we are blank screens” (Hall 1998: 447). How people engage with popular culture depends a lot on what they are doing in their everyday lives and what is going on around them in society. It is easy to see this in memes that go viral on social media. For example, in 2011 during the Occupy protests there was a popular picture of Luke Skywalker holding a piece of paper telling his story and ending with the words “I am the 99 percent.”1

Second, we can see in recent history that people influenced by contemporary popular culture were still able to rise up. To make his case that U.S. popular culture keeps people in line by distracting them, writer Chris Hedges — who eloquently criticizes neoliberalism, repression and war — draws on conservative historian Daniel Boorstin’s 1961 condemnation of the culture of his day (Hedges 2009: 15–16, 47–48). Boorstin bemoaned what he saw as images seducing people into living in a world of illusions. Yet within a few years of the publication of his lament, U.S. society was challenged by widespread student protests, strikes and the liberation movements of African-Americans, Latinx people, women, gays and lesbians and other groups of oppressed people. Watching programs on commercial television channels, going to see Hollywood movies and listening to songs on albums released by major labels did not keep workers from taking part in wildcat strikes that defied both bosses and union leaders. Nor did the capitalist culture industry of the 1960s prevent millions of people in the U.S. from opposing their government’s war in Vietnam. This suggests that the influence of popular culture today does not explain the low level of resistance.

The third theory, that resistance is weak because people have been fundamentally formed by neoliberal society, is also faulty. Living in this kind of society does affect people, of course. It tends to foster a “more competitive, individualistic market-driven, entrepreneurial, profit-oriented outlook” (Hall and O’Shea 2013: 11). The problem with this theory is that it overestimates how widely this outlook is shared, how fixed it is and how deeply it moulds people. Take the case of the U.S. Since the early 1980s neoliberal efforts to reorganize society have been very successful there. Yet even in the U.S. many people reject the mantra that they should embrace competition as a way of life and not expect support from the state. Discontent with that idea was one of the reasons for the surprising popularity of Bernie Sanders’ run to be the Democratic Party’s candidate for president in 2016. Many people supported Sanders because he criticized the “billionaire class” and called for reforms — such as a higher minimum wage, stronger unions, no tuition fees at public colleges and universities and stronger Social Security (the public pension system in the United States) — that reflect a different outlook (Gude and Karp 2016).

The idea that neoliberalism has programmed our psyches also fails to notice that most people’s thinking is contradictory, not consistent. Lots of people affirm competitive individualism but at the same time do not treat people with whom they have relationships they value — such as family members, friends and coworkers — as competitors. People’s ideas are strongly conditioned by our circumstances rather than fixed once and for all. This means that how we think is more likely to change when conditions shift than the theory of neoliberal psyches recognizes (Seccombe and Livingstone 2000: 87–88, 102, 106–107).

The Story So Far

To explain why there has been relatively little protest and resistance we should use reconstructed historical materialism to investigate social conditions in advanced capitalist countries. Before doing that, though, it is worth pausing to think about exactly what we are doing. Trying to explain what has not happened (more revolt) is not the best way to go. It involves asking a question about something that never happened. A better way to proceed is to analyze what has actually happened. This can give us clues about what might make a different response more likely, which is usually the question on the minds of people who ask the question that opened this chapter.

So what have we seen since 2008 in the richest countries of the world? As mentioned at the outset, there have been important outbreaks of protest sparked by austerity policies and related neoliberal measures. We have also seen the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. (and Canada). Occasionally there has been serious disruptive resistance to what governments and employers are doing. However, the level of anti-austerity struggle has been pretty low (much lower than in Greece, Portugal and Spain).2 Strike levels are at historic lows.3

For the most part, most people have responded to the more difficult conditions they face (examined in Chapter 8) not with collective protest and resistance but by just trying to get by, usually in cooperation with family and friends. Many people have responded to stagnant or falling incomes by cutting back spending and/or taking on more debt. Some have decided to go or return to college or university to get a credential (or a second credential). More hard-pressed adults have moved in their parents.4

As they try to get by, most working-class people have generally paid little attention to party policies, debates in legislatures, elections and the rest of what can be called official politics. As the grip of the neoliberal consensus on the major parties has tightened, politicians and the media have become even more focused on personalities and scandals instead of meaningful issues and ideas. Official politics has increasingly become “a hybrid form of shopping and gossip” (Fraser 2015: 315). Is it any wonder, then, that there is “a growing indifference to conventional politics” (Mair 2013: 17) across the rich countries? Yet, there have also been unexpected outpourings of support for political leaders and parties who criticize the neoliberal mainstream from the left (Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., Bernie Sanders in the U.S.) or, more often, from the right (for example, Donald Trump in the U.S., the National Front in France and the main forces that campaigned for the U.K. to leave the European Union). Hostility towards poor people and migrants, often laced with racism, has increased — socialist writer China Miéville (2015) has analyzed this as part of what he calls “social sadism.”

An Alternative Explanation

In every capitalist society, working-class people have ways of staying alive — “survival projects” — which “take different forms, from the most narrow and individualistic modes of striving to mass collective action” (Brenner 2000: 84). In most cases these involve people who live together combining working for wages and unpaid work in some way. Other sources of income, help from family members, friends or other community members and services provided by the state or another non-profit institution (childcare, for example) may also play a role. It is a mistake to assume that the default response of the working class to capitalism is rising up in revolt, and then try to come up with a reason for why people fail to live up to this expectation. Instead, we should recognize that going on strike, protesting, rioting and other kinds of collective action are possible but less common ways of responding to the conditions that people find themselves in.

Today in the richest countries the weakening of social programs and community ties means that workers are more likely to be trying to get by without much assistance from anyone outside their own household. Forced to seek and keep paid work in labour markets, wage-earners are always pitted against each other in competition. In recent years higher unemployment, growing insecurity at work, falling job quality and weaker supports for unemployed workers (discussed in Chapter 8) have made this competition stiffer. So too has the weakening of unions and workers’ rights. These conditions at work, at home and in the community, including the heavier burden of debt many people are carrying, encourage people to not rock the boat by doing anything they think might make job loss more likely.

Belief in the idea that there might be a better way of dealing with life’s challenges than just keeping your head down and trying to make the best of it has been sapped in several ways. Solidarity and unity within the working class have been eroded in the era of neoliberal capitalism. The working class has become more decomposed, as mentioned in Chapter 7. The proportion of workers who are unionized has shrunk. Many unions have become more bureaucratic and remote from their members, and their officials have become very reluctant to mobilize workers (Camfield 2011; Moody 2007). With strikes less common (and unofficial strikes extremely rare), fewer workers have experience of fighting back by walking off the job. Even fewer have done so and actually won. As a result, fewer workers feel a sense of togetherness and recognize that they have common interests that are opposed to the interests of employers. They have made the idea of working-class collective action less credible, and action itself more difficult to organize.

Another reason why just trying to get by has been such a common response is that voices arguing against the claim that “there is no alternative” to neoliberal capitalism have been harder to hear. Political parties and other organizations that once claimed to be on the side of the working class and to stand for taming capitalism’s savagery, such as the Labour Party in the U.K. and the New Democratic Party in Canada, have changed their tune (see the next chapter). Political forces that oppose capitalism itself were greatly weakened in the last quarter of the twentieth century by neoliberalism’s victories and the collapse of most of the Communist states (see Chapter 15). After the terrorist attacks in the U.S. in September 2001, the political climate of the “War on Terror” dispersed the fledgling new movement for radical change that had emerged within the advanced capitalist countries over the previous several years. People who never encounter arguments for far-reaching social change are more likely to simply try to survive within the confines of the ways things are, even if they see the status quo as unjust. If they do hear such arguments, they are unlikely to find them convincing when their personal experience leads them to think that such change is impossible. This is the case for most people in the richest countries today.

Because the working class has become more decomposed, collective action by workers to address their problems does not seem very credible to many. This is also a major reason for the weakness of political forces that call for changing society in ways that challenge the wealthy and help workers. In these circumstances, ordinary people have become more prone to directing their anger against other people who suffer social inequality in one way or another. Muslims, migrants, poor people, foreigners, women, people who face racism, Indigenous peoples — the victims of scapegoating are many and varied. The reason that such groups are targeted is that all of them are, in different ways, oppressed. They were targets or potential targets long before the start of the global slump, and since then it has become easier to whip up hostility against them. This has only deepened divisions, further decomposing the working class. We can see here how divisions rooted in oppression are powerful forces that shape people’s sense of who their friends and enemies are, and how they should try to navigate through life’s challenges.

One other development that helps explain the story so far is the weakness of what socialist researcher Alan Sears (2014: 2) calls “the infrastructure of dissent”: “the means through which activists develop political communities capable of learning, communicating and mobilizing together. This process of collective capacity-building takes a variety of forms, ranging from informal neighbourhood and workplace networks to formal organizations and structured learning settings.” Since the 1970s, changes in how workplaces and life outside paid work are organized, combined with the weakening of left-wing political forces, have led to the disappearance of much of the infrastructure of dissent in the richest countries.

As a result, people who are interested in understanding society and taking action against injustice frequently do not develop much in the way of the knowledge and skills required to be effective workplace or community organizers. A consequence of this is that when larger numbers of people do feel that something needs to be done about injustice — such as when governments responded to the Great Recession by bailing out banks and other firms — it is less likely that sentiments will be channelled into collective action. When protest and resistance does break out — as it did with Occupy and anti-austerity protests in 2010–2011, for example — it is more likely to be short-lived and not lead to sustained social movement organizing if capable organizers and the relationships and environments that nurture them are in short supply.

The social conditions analyzed here prime people to be influenced to some extent by the mainstream media, popular culture and other purveyors of the ideology that we are all competitive entrepreneurs. In these conditions, “social dilemmas” have often come to be seen as “personal or moral failings, medical problems treatable by chemistry, or … dysfunctional behaviour that experts in social adjustment could remedy” (Fraser 2015: 322). Dominant ideologies encourage working-class people to accept the way things are and expect little help from the state. What the explanations discussed at the beginning of this chapter all fail to do is to look at the social conditions in which working-class people are living in this era of history. As a result, those explanations can provide only very partial insights. Using reconstructed historical materialism to investigate the interlocking matrix of social relationships in the richest countries is a much better way of explaining why workers have responded as they have in the years since 2008.

A final note: it would be wrong to conclude that this analysis tells us that an upsurge of revolt against austerity will never happen. What it does is highlight features of contemporary society that have, so far, led most people to respond in quite different ways to the difficulties they confront in trying to survive. Understanding these can help people who want to encourage resistance to austerity to think about how to work towards that goal.5 But is it wrong to believe that it is still possible to change society for the better? That pressing question is the next one we will examine.

PART FOUR

THE POINT IS TO CHANGE IT

Chapter 14

Is Significant Change for the Better Possible?

MANY PEOPLE FEEL THAT THE societies they live in are terribly unjust. It is clear that so much suffering is utterly unnecessary. The human species has the productive forces required to guarantee everyone a good life, one in which their needs are met and they have the opportunity to flourish. As the sociologist Göran Therborn (2016: 37) notes, “never before have the possibilities of a good world for the human species as a whole been greater. At the same time, the gap between human potential and the existing conditions of humankind in its totality has probably never been wider.” In the past many reforms have been achieved that have improved the lives of people in capitalist societies. But is it still possible to make such change for the better? Today many people believe that “the best that can be hoped for is individual success in an unfair world” (Cairns 2015: 127). Are they right?

In rich countries people often think that they can make society better by being “conscious consumers” and adopting lifestyles that are in line with their values. Reconstructed historical materialism’s analysis of the societies in which we live reveals the futility of this approach. “Justice, unfortunately, is not something that comes in commodity form,” observes anti-poverty organizer and climate justice researcher Umair Muhammad (2016: 51). This chapter will look at the two most common strategies embraced by people who realize that “ethical consumerism” and living differently are ineffective approaches to changing society. I will then propose an alternative.

Can We Vote Our Way Forward?

In countries where elections are regularly held and citizens are able to vote for their preferred political party, most people generally believe that the legitimate way to change society is through the ballot box. Beginning in Europe and North America in the late 1800s, workers and farmers who came to the conclusion that it was a mistake to support political parties that acted on behalf of capitalists created their own parties. These included the Labour Party in Britain, the Socialist Party in the U.S. and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (later replaced by the New Democratic Party) in Canada. Their early programs and rhetoric spoke of replacing capitalism with socialism, and they sometimes even mentioned revolution.

However, in practice these left-wing parties aimed to win elections and form governments that would bring in social reforms to improve the lives of the majority within capitalist societies. They sought changes such as public pensions, health care and housing, along with laws to strengthen workers’ rights and unions. The political horizons of most of the leaders and activists of these parties did not go beyond reforms within the existing society — the ideology of reformism. This political trend — a kind of reformism that traditionally was linked closely to unions — is known as social democracy. For its supporters, reforms were to be achieved solely or mainly by electing social democrats; protests, strikes and other kinds of mass direct action were seen as having no or little role. Party leaders offered capitalists an informal deal: social democrats would not try to make fundamental social change, and business owners would accept reforms that slightly reduced their profits and power. Most people who wanted a more just society looked to social democracy.

By the time World War II broke out, most social democrats in the U.S. were to be found not in the Socialist Party but in the much larger, business-dominated Democratic Party. During the Cold War that followed World War II, most social democratic parties shed their radical policies and language, officially making their peace with capitalism. At the close of the twentieth century, with the neoliberal way of organizing capitalism ascendant, the leaders of these parties went further. Not only did they accept capitalism’s latest incarnation, many openly embraced its dismantling of barriers to profit and its opening of the public sector to market penetration (Evans and Schmidt 2012). After the Labour Party lost office in the U.K. in 2010, “virtually every senior [cabinet minister] … went to work for a corporation that had benefited from their policies” (Ali 2016: 21). Today almost all the leaders of these parties endorse the austerity drive that aims to gut what remains of the public services that limit people’s subjection to the full force of capitalist markets, services traditionally championed by social democrats.

The hostility of most Labour Party MPs and top party staff to Jeremy Corbyn — who rejects austerity and wants the party to “[relearn] social democracy” (Ali 2016: 23) — since his surprise election as party leader, is testimony to what has happened to social democracy, and not just social democracy in the U.K. In many countries people who want to elect a government that will implement social reforms to improve their lives and take bold action to reduce climate change have a problem: there is no significant reformist party to vote for. However, left-reformist parties do exist in many European countries, where they have arisen in response to traditional social democracy’s embrace of neoliberalism — for example, the Left Party in France and Podemos in Spain.

Nonetheless, even where reformist parties exist, supporters of reformism face a more fundamental question: can such parties deliver reforms when they win elections? In the last several decades many governments’ room to maneuver has been narrowed by measures designed to lock in neoliberal policies. These include “balanced budget” laws and other formal limits on how much debt states are allowed to carry, such as those written into the Maastricht Treaty that covers European countries that use the euro as currency. Deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement that give investors special rights have the same effect.

States also face the pressure of credit rating agencies. These private firms (the main ones are Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch), whose owners are devotees of neoliberal ideology, issue credit ratings that affect the ability of governments to sell bonds. Selling bonds is an important way that governments raise money when their spending is greater than their revenue. A lower rating makes raising money in bond markets more expensive for a government. This puts pressure on that government to cut spending on social programs (Ioannou 2013). States seen as acting against the interests of capitalists can also see the value of their currency fall in international money markets.

Most fundamentally, states depend on capitalist economic activity: when firms reduce or stop their spending, government tax revenue falls and unemployment rises. When a government does things that capitalists do not like, they can launch an “investment strike.” If an investment strike and behind-the-scenes moves by top civil servants, politicians and business figures are unsuccessful, it is always possible for the military to step in and get rid of the offending government, which is what happened in Chile in 1973 (Winn 1986: 227–245). States in capitalist societies are part of the capitalist system. No matter what party forms government, unelected state officials and capitalists still wield enormous power. This puts big hurdles in the path of reformist governments, and it means that in a capitalist society no social reform is ever secure. Worst of all, it can lead to reformist parties in government attacking the very people who voted for them. In Greece, SYRIZA — which promised to put an end to the harsh neoliberal austerity policies backed by other parties, including the traditional social democrats — came to office in 2015. Within months SYRIZA was implementing the kind of policies its leaders had condemned (Kouvelakis 2016). As a political strategy, parliamentary reformism has always had a hard time delivering on its promise that voting a left party into office will deliver progressive change, and this is especially true today.

Local Solutions?

With traditional social democratic parties giving their blessing to neoliberal capitalism, it comes as no surprise that some people who want to change society are looking for alternatives. One that has become more popular is the approach of working on local projects to improve people’s lives in the here and now. Instead of trying to change the government, people take matters into their own hands to help themselves and others meet their needs. Urban farming is one example. Worker-run enterprises are another.

There are obvious problems with how capitalism organizes how food is produced and sold. Agribusiness is set up to make growing and manufacturing food as profitable as possible. This system is extremely wasteful, ecologically destructive and reliant on cheap labour. A lot of what it produces is not very nutritious. Higher-quality food is often a lot more expensive. In rich countries some people live in areas where there are no stores where they can buy a wide range of food at affordable prices. In response, some advocates propose that small-scale farming in urban areas is a way for lower-income people to get more affordable good-quality food.

There are undoubtedly good things about urban agriculture: “it uses land more intensively, grows more diverse products, recycles bio-waste and, by reducing transportation costs, lowers energy usage and carbon emissions” (Sharzer 2012: 70). Community gardening can give people social connections, “healthy food, physical exercise, education, job skills, a small income and community safety” (Sharzer 2012: 70). However, there are real limits to urban agriculture in capitalist societies. Wherever land is private property, landowners seek to maximize their rental income. As a result, community gardening is only viable where rent is low. Landowners can often make more money by putting their land to more lucrative uses (Sharzer 2012: 73–74). This is a barrier to expanding community gardens. Urban agriculture also does nothing to increase poor people’s incomes. At best it can exist alongside agribusiness, not replace it. As Greg Sharzer (2012: 73) points out in No Local: Why Small-Scale Alternatives Won’t Change the World, “there’s an ethical issue as well: being poor is already expensive and time-consuming, so why should poor people be forced to work more just to be healthy?”

In worker-run enterprises (also known as worker co-operatives or co-ops), workers produce goods or services without bosses. Such enterprises are run by their workers themselves, as democratically self-managed operations. In some cases they are created by workers taking control of privately owned workplaces whose owners have decided to close down. For example, at the beginning of this century, Argentinean society was wracked by crisis. Capitalists shut down many factories and other workplaces. Dozens of enterprises were taken over by workers who continued to operate them under workers’ self-management (Atzeni and Ghigliani 2007). In other cases people create new worker-run enterprises from scratch. They often do this to create jobs that will allow people to support themselves and work in an environment that they control, free of bosses.

At their best, worker co-ops produce useful goods or services and provide workers with paid work that, because it is collectively self-managed, is much less alienated than work organizations run as authoritarian hierarchies. Unfortunately, worker-run enterprises must still compete with other firms; they cannot escape the pressure to make profits that faces every enterprise in a capitalist society. This can undermine workplace democracy and drive workers to lower their own wages in order to keep the co-op going (Atzeni and Ghigliani 2007). Operating as self-managed islands in a capitalist ocean can lead worker co-ops to become more like regular capitalist firms.

There is no better example of this than the world-famous Mondragon Corporation, based in the Basque city of Mondragon, Spain. The corporation employs temporary workers as well as workers who are co-op members. It is also a multinational firm with subsidiaries and joint ventures in China and other countries that operate as conventional companies, with low wages and bad working conditions (Kasmir 2016). So although worker co-ops can improve the lives of workers who belong to them, they are constantly under pressure to dance to the rhythms of capitalism rather than those of workers (Gindin 2016).

Urban farming, worker-run enterprises and other schemes that aim to improve people’s lives without directly addressing what governments do can sometimes make positive change on a very small scale. However, all small-scale alternatives are highly constrained by capitalism’s remorseless drive for profit. Yet, in the past, we have seen change for the better on a larger scale.

Struggle Is the Key

Historian Willie Thompson (2015: 247) notes that today

among a significant minority of the world population partial steps have been taken along the road of emancipation, in standards of nutrition, dwelling space, effective medical interventions and longevity, education, gender equality, lessening of sexual and social restrictiveness and authoritarian childrearing practices.

He goes on to make a crucial point:

[none] of these advances happened smoothly, purely in consequence of the passage of time. They were accomplished only by intense effort and struggle, through resistance to exploiters, obscurantists and their power structures, and at the cost of much sacrifice and many casualties. (Thompson 2015: 247)

Thompson is restating a truth that has been understood by many before him: the key to change for the better is social struggle. None have expressed this more eloquently than Frederick Douglass — former slave and fighter for the abolition of slavery in the U.S. — did in 1857:

If there is no struggles there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. (quoted in Zinn 2001: 183)

Struggles do not always succeed in winning reforms, and social conditions affect how hard it is to win a specific kind of reform in a given time and place. Yet, throughout history, struggles have been essential in achieving the gains that have been won. The reason is simple: gains for exploited and oppressed people are losses for exploiting classes and dominant social groups, so the powerful must generally be forced to make concessions.

Thanks to research by historians over the past six decades we now know a lot more about the history of “intense effort and struggle” that has won what Thompson (2015: 247) calls “partial steps … along the road of emancipation.” For example, from the middle of the 1300s there was “increased self-assertiveness” among peasants in England. This “ranged all the way from a surprising willingness on the part of whole families to abandon all for a new life to collective armed rebellion. It was on a scale which presented a challenge to the lords” (Hilton 1969: 35). This contributed to the decline of the oppressive inherited status known as serfdom.

We have already seen (in Chapter 6) how during the U.S. Civil War the actions of slaves themselves played an important role in driving the Union government to abolish slavery. It was not only in the U.S. that the struggles of slaves undermined slavery. Assessing the end of slavery across the Americas, historian Robin Blackburn (2011: 392) concludes that

emancipation was not just a matter of decrees, laws and constitutional amendments, important though these were. Ultimately, emancipation, if it was to be effective, came from below as well as from above, with slave de-subordination destroying plantation discipline while legislation denied the slave order the force of law within a given territory.

From the late 1800s until the third quarter of the twentieth century social struggle was also very important in pushing governments to implement the kind of welfare state reforms that social democrats championed (and which revolutionary socialists supported too). Sometimes governments acted in direct response to militancy. For example, this is what happened in the 1960s in the U.S. after urban uprisings by African-Americans and in France and Italy after explosive upsurges of strikes. But often the pressure was more indirect. In Sweden in the 1940s workers’ militancy pushed the leaderships of unions and the social democratic party to “adopt a radical postwar program” (Nilsson and Zachariah 2016). This led to social reforms and “laid the basis for the welfare state” for which the country became well-known (Nilsson and Zachariah 2016). The story in the U.K. was similar. When right-wing political parties in office implemented social reforms, it was often because “the threat of a powerful working-class movement … galvani[zed] the ruling class to think more cohesively and strategically” (Gough 1979: 65). A British Conservative MP put it this way in 1943: “If you do not give the people reform, they are going to give you revolution” (quoted in Birchall 1986: 49).

In the 1960s it was social struggle by the U.S. Civil Rights movement, “the willingness to face jails and mob violence by numberless sit-in civil rights protesters and Freedom Riders” (Roediger 2008: 198), that drove legislators to pass laws that struck blows against racism. In Canada today there is no law limiting women’s access to abortion services because the pro-choice movement was able to defend doctors who set up abortion clinics. The pro-choice movement was also able to create a climate in which the Supreme Court struck down the Criminal Code’s section on abortion in 1988, and the federal government’s attempt to recriminalize it failed (Rebick 2005: 35–46, 156–167). In the 1980s and early 1990s, in many countries groups mostly made up of queer people were able to win gains in the fight for better health care for people living with AIDS, for public education to prevent the spread of HIV and against efforts to use the AIDS crisis to reinforce heterosexism (Engler and Engler 2016: 197–204).

What these examples (and many others) show is that social movements have been crucial in winning reforms that improve the lives of exploited and oppressed people. Social movements are more than protests, though movements usually do involve public protests. Social movements happen when large numbers of people act together to mount “sustained challenges” (Tarrow 1998: 2) to their opponents. They allow many individuals to realize that what they once thought of as private personal problems, such as the way they are treated by their bosses or husbands, are actually public issues that call for collective solutions. Taking part in a movement, or even just observing the action from the sidelines, encourages people to question the status quo, to realize that injustice is not “just the way things are” but the result of social arrangements that can be changed.

Getting involved in a movement often spurs people to better understand what they are trying to change. The experience of movement activity also encourages people to rethink their assumptions about who they are and what they are capable of doing. As the writer Walter Benjamin (quoted in Lowy 2005: 37) once noted, struggle can foster qualities such as “confidence, courage, humour, cunning and fortitude.” So movements do not just engage in social struggles that can win reforms; they also change people who take part in them.

To win, however, movements must contend with many obstacles. These include leaders — such as union officials, reformist politicians, middle-class leaders of communities of oppressed people and Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) managers — who generally try to prevent, contain or even put down the kind of powerful struggles most likely to win reforms.1

All in the Past?

If in the past social struggle has been key to improving the human condition, is it still possible to make gains? Today it is easy to think that reforms are no longer possible. After all, around the world today we can see governments and employers chipping away at past gains. Public health care, public education, rights and services that make life a bit easier for people who have to work for wages — all these and more have been under attack in the age of neoliberal capitalism. The hallmark of neoliberalism is measures that dismantle barriers to profit and expand market-based ways of organizing society. As mentioned in Chapter 7, increased divisions and competition have caused working classes in many countries to become more decomposed. This change in the working classes and the decline of infrastructures of dissent — as discussed in the previous chapter — have sapped the ability of people to engage in the kinds of social struggles that can win improvements in capitalist societies. It is not just a matter of short-term setbacks: people’s capacity to organize collectively and push for change really has been weakened. Today many people have never “seen a mass picket line that can effectively turn back materials or scabs or a demonstration large and angry enough to create an effervescent sense of potential power” (Sears 2014: 101). Globally the balance of power in societies has tilted even more in favour of capital. Laws and other arrangements designed to put governments in a neoliberal straightjacket have also made it harder to win reforms.

Even in these times, social struggles have occasionally managed to defeat neoliberal attacks or even win some gains. Shortly after the start of the current global slump, general strikes in France’s Caribbean island territories of Guadeloupe and Martinique won significant pay increases for the lowest-paid workers, smaller raises for other workers and other gains including lower water rates, a rent freeze, a ban on evictions and more jobs for teachers (McNally 2011: 161–163). In 2012 a widely supported teachers’ strike in Chicago beat back many employer demands and won some modest improvements and new rights in the collective agreement (Bradbury et al. 2014: 161–163). That same year a long strike by Quebec’s university and CEGEP (junior college) students against big tuition fee hikes defied repression and forced the Quebec Liberal Party government into calling an election, which it lost (Solty 2012). In 2015 massive protests by South African students united around the slogan #FeesMustFall forced the government to reverse course and abandon its plans to raise university tuition rates (Bramble 2016).

These struggles show that even when the balance of forces does not favour ordinary people, defensive victories and even new gains can at times be won through militant social struggle. However, as Richard Seymour (2014: 188) cautions, the weakening of working-class power in the age of neoliberal capitalism means that movements must be reinvented: “we have a generation of slow, patient work in front [of] us if we are to fundamentally turn things around.”

As we have seen, there are still social antagonisms — the interwoven social relations of class exploitation and different forms of oppression — at the core of societies today. So long as these exist, they will inflict harm and stand in the way of people living better lives. This has the potential to lead to people not just resisting in low-key ways but engaging in intense struggles and organizing social movements. The possibility of winning reforms cannot be permanently extinguished. Something else that will not disappear as long as capitalism exists is the system’s Achilles heel: capitalists need workers’ labour in order to function. While some employers are more dependent on workers than others, even workplaces full of advanced robots cannot do away with the need for some humans. This means that capitalism will always be vulnerable to workers refusing to work — a potent force for making change through struggle.

Chapter 15

Can We Do Better Than Capitalism?

IF IT IS POSSIBLE FOR people to win changes that make life better within the confines of the society in which we live today, what about a different kind of society altogether? We live in an era in history when, to quote cultural studies writer Fredric Jameson’s rendition of a saying whose origins are unknown, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (quoted in Cremin 2015: 28). The main reason for this is that the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and most other Communist states, along with China’s economic evolution, has done away with the model of society that for most of the last century was, unfortunately, seen by most anti-capitalists as the alternative to capitalism, or at least a step towards a much better social order (see box What Was Communism?). Another reason is the successes enjoyed by forces supporting neoliberalism, whose ideologues continue to proclaim, “There is no alternative.” Nevertheless, in spite of their influence these voices are wrong. The slogan of the global justice movement that flourished at the very beginning of this century — “Another world is possible!” — expresses a profound truth.

The Possibility of a Self-governing Society

The development and spread of capitalism over the entire world has caused death and suffering on a mind-boggling scale. At the same time it has also been responsible for developing the productive forces of Homo sapiens to extraordinary heights (think of the smartphone, to give just one example), as mentioned in Chapter 7. We often take today’s technology, knowledge and forms of cooperation for granted. Even more often we fail to see that these productive forces of human labour developed under capitalism could be repurposed as the foundation of a different mode of production.

Productive forces developed under capitalism could be used to allow people to meet their physical, sociocultural and temporal needs (see Chapter 5), and live better while spending less time producing goods and services than they are forced to under capitalism. If social production was organized to meet human needs rather than to generate ever-higher profits, all that was best in technology, knowledge and social cooperation could be retained and put to different uses. It could be harnessed democratically to ensure that everyone had the requirements of life, including adequate access to water, food, shelter, care, education and free time. Just as important, social production would be reorganized as part of an ecological transformation in humanity’s metabolism with the rest of nature. This transformation would drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other ways in which human activity contributes to the global ecological crisis.

In a society based on such a mode of production, the use of time and resources would be planned rather than determined mainly by what is profitable. They would not be squandered on making things that only exist because of capital’s need for profit, like telemarketing and advertising. Removing the drive for profit would also allow for the most effective ways of improving human well-being to be put into action. For example, health promotion and medical care would be freed from the influence of drug companies that currently divert effort into lucrative pharmaceuticals and away from reducing exposure to substances that cause cancer and other diseases in the first place.1 The waste that happens when competing firms produce more commodities than can be profitably sold would come to an end. Time and resources would no longer go into producing luxuries that only the richest people can afford.

Such a society of shared abundance would rest on the foundations of the science and technology brought into existence by capitalism at such a terrible cost. It would also build on the unprecedented interconnectedness and interdependence that capitalism had created. The ways in which huge numbers of people have been forced from the land and brought together in mines, factories, offices, power stations, rail yards and other workplaces that were connected to each other across great distances to produce commodities was — and still is — extremely violent and harmful to people and the rest of nature. However, organizing production in this way rather than around the family households of peasants and artisans also enabled new kinds of cooperation and coordination. Like much of the science and technology it has helped to birth, the far-reaching interconnectedness forged by capitalism could be modified and used in the service of improving human well-being.

In short, if people could collectively take control of the productive forces that capitalism has developed and use them to meet their needs, they could build a cooperative commonwealth. This possibility was first recognized in various ways by some socialists in the mid-1800s. As the years since then have shown, however, it is a mistake to confuse what is possible for what is likely. But the fact that what is possible has not yet been achieved must not be allowed to stop us from recognizing that this possibility exists.

Today the potential for an advanced society in which the goal of production is meeting human needs is enormously greater than when it first came to exist over a century ago. For instance, automation, robots and other forms of new technology could be used to cut the number of hours people have to work for pay instead of laying people off and boosting profits. The kind of sophisticated IT used in the inventory control systems of companies like Walmart to track hundreds of thousands of items — in 2013 the average Walmart Supercentre carried about 150,000 items, each with its unique identifying code, and about 5 million items were for sale on the firm’s website (Davis 2013) — could be used in the distribution of goods in a democratically planned economy. The IT that links different kinds of firms in innovative capitalist manufacturing networks could instead coordinate enterprises cooperating to produce those goods (Smith 2000: 97–101, 142–144). Existing technology — wind and tidal turbines, solar, hydroelectric and geothermal power plants, wave devices — could be used on a large scale to generate energy, replacing fossil fuels and nuclear power. Electric batteries and hydrogen fuel cells could power vehicles and ships, while liquid hydrogen engines could be used in aircraft (Jacobson and Delucchi 2011).

This kind of society would be much more democratic than any capitalist society. New institutions of popular power would replace those of the capitalist state. Grassroots participatory assemblies would elect delegates to higher-level bodies. Workers’ self-management would replace the tyranny of bosses in workplaces. This would do away with alienated labour. People elected as delegates and representatives would be subject to recall, and a wide range of political parties and associations would exist. Social ownership would replace the private control of society’s wealth, though there would be at least some place for very small businesses.

In this framework, there would regularly be democratic debate about a number of overall plans for how to use society’s labour and resources. Each would reflect a different way of ranking priorities (for example, should the priority for transportation be expanding bus and train service or building more electric cars? How important is reducing work time?). Once people had voted on a plan, it could then be implemented in a democratically decentralized way, with decisions made at the lowest possible level. Consumer organizations and other interest groups could be represented in appropriate decision-making bodies. Modern IT would be used to constantly track economic information, and “such a computerized planning system could respond to events far faster than any market could hope to do” (Cottrell and Cockshott 2008: 9). This kind of democratic planning has nothing in common with the bureaucratic top-down economic direction found in Communist dictatorships.

The speed with which a transition from capitalism to such a society could be made would depend on many factors. One factor would be the kind of productive forces that were available to people in the area where the transition was underway. As mentioned in Chapter 6, after workers took power in Russia in 1917 they were unable to take more than a step beyond capitalism because the productive forces available to them were so minimal; without assistance from a revolutionary government in an advanced capitalist country, the Russian Revolution was doomed. Even in a society in which productive forces were very advanced, there would be limits to how far the transition could go in any one country. The transition beyond capitalism would be a long process. Markets would not disappear overnight, but people’s labour power would not be a commodity and society would not be regulated by market forces. Over time, a growing number of services and goods would be provided to people for free, just as public education and health care are provided in some countries. This would be a self-governing society, a genuine socialism.2

NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT

Moving from capitalism towards a society founded on this alternative mode of production would uproot class exploitation and alienation. Profit would no longer dictate the priorities of society. What about the many forms of oppression that are interwoven with class exploitation, like patriarchy and racism?

Societies today are, as we saw in Chapter 5, interlocking matrices of social relations. The launch of a transition away from capitalism — a revolution in class relations — would destabilize oppressive social relations tied up with capitalism. For example, the incentive that capitalists and state authorities have to perpetuate oppressive gender relations, which keep women shouldering the bulk of the unpaid work involved in bearing and raising the next generation of workers, would be eliminated. No longer valuing some work as more important than other work because it brings in money would raise the status of caregiving and other activities that under capitalism are primarily carried out by women. Racial oppression would be dealt a huge blow because employers would no longer be using and fostering racial hierarchies to their own advantage, and because workers would no longer be competing for jobs. Doing away with the private ownership of land and natural resources would create the conditions needed to change the settler-colonial relations that oppress Indigenous peoples.

However, the process of moving from capitalism towards a self-governing society would not by itself be enough to liberate people from oppression. Reconstructed historical materialism shows us that different forms of oppression are interwoven with the social relations of capitalism but are not reducible to them. This means that in a society in transition specific struggles against patriarchy, racism, heterosexism and other forms of oppression would be necessary in order to create a society of maximum freedom. The history of freedom struggles suggests that these efforts would be driven by oppressed people organizing themselves autonomously within the broader process of social revolution. They would have the enormous advantage of being able to tackle oppression in a profoundly democratic society in which profit no longer dictated priorities — a much more favourable environment for liberation than any capitalist society could be.

WHAT WAS COMMUNISM?

For most of the twentieth century the kind of society that first developed in the U.S.S.R. and was later established in Eastern Europe, China,3 North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba4 and several other countries was defended by most of its supporters — and denounced by most of its opponents — as socialism or Communism. In these countries most means of production were owned by the state, not private companies. The state was controlled by the bureaucratic leaders of a party that claimed allegiance to Marxism-Leninism or a similar doctrine; no independent parties were allowed to exist. Independent unions and other organizations independent of the party-state were also banned. Little or no dissent was tolerated. Today, Communist one-party states persist in a few countries, but most of their economies have been opened up to multinational corporations.

From the perspective of reconstructed historical materialism, these societies were not socialist. In 1965 two Polish socialist dissidents pinpointed key features of this kind of society:

the central political bureaucracy is the ruling class; it has at its exclusive command the basic means of production; it buys the labour of the working class; it takes away from the working class by force and economic coercion the surplus product and uses it for purposes that are alien and hostile to the worker in order to strengthen and expand its rule over production and society. (Kuron and Modzelewski 1982: 23–24)

There are a number of historical materialist interpretations of what the basic dynamics of these societies were.5 The one I find most persuasive contends that the mode of production in these countries was a version of capitalism: state capitalism. This first took shape when the rulers of the bureaucratic dictatorship decided at the end of the 1920s that the U.S.S.R. had to industrialize as quickly as possible. They succeeded at industrializing the country by squeezing a colossal amount of labour from workers and peasants who were unable to organize to defend themselves. This economic development made the Communist model attractive to many people in other countries, especially ones suffering under European or U.S. imperialism. However, the state control that made Communist industrialization in some countries possible turned out to be a barrier to further economic development in the conditions of late twentieth-century global capitalism.

What Could Open the Door to a Transition?

The transition from capitalism to a self-governing society would be different from the other transitions from one mode of production to another that have taken place in human history. It would not be a shift from an egalitarian-communal society to a class society, or from one kind of class society, like feudalism, to another, like capitalism. It would involve replacing capitalist class rule with the democratic running of society by the entire population, most of whom are part of the working class or other people who control none of society’s means of producing goods and services or who, like most peasant farmers, own only tiny portions of them.

Such a change will never happen in the gradual (but still violent, tumultuous and sometimes explosive) and initially unintentional way that capitalism emerged out of feudalism and spread within Europe. Worker-run enterprises cannot slowly expand until they overwhelm capitalism; as we saw in the last chapter, capitalism imposes constant pressure on them to become more like conventional firms. The transition to a self-governing society requires “directed social transformation brought about by deliberate intent” (Thompson 2015: 247). It would not “resemble the introduction of an invasive species,” because state institutions “are specifically designed to eliminate such species as soon as they begin to threaten the system” (Riley 2016). Capitalists and top state authorities will fiercely resist threats to their power and wealth.

The goal of a self-governing society could only be reached through a process controlled by the great majority of people acting in their own interests. All the way along, such a transition would have to be a process of self-emancipation. No minority, such as a party or armed force, could be a substitute for the democratically self-organized majority. No matter how committed and well-intentioned a minority is, if it ended up acting in place of the majority, the majority would be unable to ensure that society changed in ways that really did reflect their interests. For this reason a transition can only begin when the majority takes charge of society through new democratic institutions of popular power.

This has happened, or at least started to happen, a number of times in history. In 1871 the exploited took control of France’s capital in the short-lived Paris Commune. Workers, peasants and soldiers held power through democratic councils in the Russian Revolution of October 1917. Workers’ councils challenged ruling-class power in several European countries in the years after the Russian Revolution. Part of Spain was run by workers and peasants in the Spanish Revolution of 1936–1937. The workers of Hungary created council democracy in their 1956 uprising against Stalinist rule. Workers’ movements in Chile, Portugal and Iran in the 1970s and Poland in 1980 also began to create similar structures.6 In 2000, during an uprising against the privatization of water, the Bolivian city of Cochabamba was run by

a new type of popular government based on assemblies and town meetings held at the regional and state levels. For one week the state had been demolished. In its place stood self-government of the poor based on their local and regional organizational structures. (Olivera and Lewis 2004: 125)

However, only in Russia and Spain did popular power last long enough for people to begin to reorganize society in a way that took a step beyond capitalism before that new beginning was extinguished by counter-revolution.

These and other historical experiences give us clues about how the kind of self-government of the majority that would be needed to begin a transition could be established in the future. It might arise from institutions of popular power confronting and replacing a capitalist state, much like what happened in Russia in 1917. It is also conceivable that such new institutions could develop alongside a government committed to radical change that takes office in an existing state, leading to a crisis resolved by the dismantling of the institutions of capitalist rule and the establishment of popular power. Whatever the revolutionary scenario, it would need to involve a rupture with capitalism. “The strike, the riot, the occupation and the hack” would almost certainly be among its key features; “This is the only potential ‘no’ to the no-future of capital’s futuristic accumulation of job loss, debt, eviction, foreclosure, storm-evacuation, acidified oceans and civilizational heat-death” (Dyer-Witheford 2015: 199–200).

Why Bet When the Odds Are So Bad?

A self-governing society is possible. It is also desirable, given what capitalism is doing to people and the planet.7 That said, it seems much more likely that capitalism will destroy humanity with nuclear or biological weapons — or eventually collapse amidst unimaginable horrors that leave a much-smaller human population living in a new kind of subjugation on a hotter Earth wracked by extreme weather — than it is that self-governing society will replace capitalism. Why strive for socialism if it is so unlikely?

Terry Eagleton (2015: 48) offers one answer to that question: “It is irrational to hope for the impossible, but not for the vastly improbable.” It is true, he says, that “there may be no hope; but unless we act as though there is, that possibility is likely to become a certainty” (Eagleton 2015: 43).

From a similar viewpoint, the editors of the journal Salvage (2015) add that “even a ravaged planet is worth fighting for. And that even if the best we can do is ask the question ‘Who killed the world?,’ there will still be a struggle over the right answer.” Salvage’s lead editor Rosie Warren (2015: 105) argues that “we do not, and should not, do the things we do because we are certain we will win. We can never be certain. We do them — should do them — because we cannot do anything other.”

It is impossible to be sure about what the future will bring. Nevertheless, we do know that the stakes for humanity are incredibly high. If we acknowledge that a self-governing society is a possibility, then it is worth working towards that goal regardless of the odds. Because the stakes are vast and success is possible, we should make a melancholy wager, to quote the title of a book by the historical materialist philosopher Daniel Bensaïd (1997).

There is another reason why it is worth striving for a break with capitalism that would open the door for a transition towards a democratic, egalitarian and free society with a sustainable relationship to the rest of nature, even if that objective is ultimately never achieved: the things that people should do to make social revolution more likely have beneficial effects in the here and now. Advocates of a self-governing society ought to fight both “for policies that ameliorate and strengthen the lot of the exploited and oppressed” and “to pursue a strategy … with an eye to a more vastly fundamental reshaping … aspiring to revolution” (Salvage 2015).8

In practical terms, this means engaging in social struggles in ways that are geared to trying to build powerful movements, and also building political organizations committed to the long-term goal of transforming society. These activities can be valuable regardless of what the future holds. Doing them helps to win gains that improve the lives of people today, or at least makes it harder for corporations and governments to make people’s lives worse, whether by restricting civil liberties, eroding what is left of public services or cranking up carbon emissions. In other words, fighting for a self-governing society in this way has positive consequences even if that goal is never attained.

Chapter 16

What Are We Going to Do? From Theory to Action

NO THEORY ABOUT SOCIETY IS neutral, because theories are always “understood in the context of social action to shape the future of society” (Sears and Cairns 2015: 191). For example, we saw at the outset of this book that biological determinism, market theory and common forms of idealist thought encourage people to more or less accept the way society is organized today. Although it is a mistake to accept or reject a social theory simply because of its political implications, those implications are there even if a theorist denies that there are any.

The theory presented in this book, reconstructed historical materialism, is no exception. Its ideas “contain an accusation and an imperative” (Marcuse 1968: 86), to use the well-chosen words of philosopher Herbert Marcuse. The accusation is directed against social relations that harm people and could be changed. The imperative is to change those social arrangements, with the ultimate goal of creating a society in which people can meet their needs and flourish.

If reconstructed historical materialism’s assessment of what is most likely to result in effective change for the better is basically right, we face a question: what are we going to do? Once we have this knowledge, we have an ethical responsibility to act. As Rebecca Solnit (2016: xiv) argues, “what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same.”

But what should we do? This theory does not give us a simple answer to this question about politics in the broad sense of the term. People who use reconstructed historical materialism to analyze society can reach different political conclusions, depending on how they understand the context they are in, the lessons of past struggles and other considerations. However, the theory does demonstrate that the most popular political strategies for changing society are highly flawed, as discussed in Chapter 14. What follows are a few of my thoughts about how best to work for change in advanced capitalist countries like Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., informed by a reconstructed historical materialist understanding of these societies today.

If social struggles are key to making change for the better (and to stopping things from getting even worse), we should do what we can to advance such struggles. What that involves depends mostly on what is happening where you are. That said, there are some general guidelines worth thinking about. The most common kinds of activism, such as “rallies, concerts, hashtags, petitions, and online debates,” have their uses (Tayler 2016). “The problem is that these events or tactics too often represent the horizon of political engagement” (Tayler 2016). Such methods need to be used as part of an organizing strategy that aims to build social movements. Organizing involves “aggregating people around common interests so that they can strategically wield their combined strength”: it is “long-term and often tedious work” (Tayler 2016).

It is worth stressing that in rich countries today community and campus activism is too often more about people expressing their feelings and beliefs than anything else. This can be a starting point. However, activism driven by the drive to express ourselves is not the same as bringing people together in collective action in ways that aim to draw in more people and build grassroots organization, with the aim of sparking a wider movement.

Activist and writer Scott Neigh (2010) wisely observes that

arguing that movements are the only way forward might be useful, but demonstrating that they can actually achieve gains for ordinary people is much more likely to be convincing. So put a high priority on actively supporting the strike going on in your city, the struggle against the city council decision to pave over a meadow, the anti-poverty and immigration-related direct action casework — whatever it is, use your energy and your resources … to contribute to victories, because victories create plausibility for movements.

Taking part in community organizing, union activity and campus-based student groups are all potentially useful ways to work for change in this way.

Committing to doing this almost never means doing it for pay.1 But there are many ways to contribute to organizing. Instead of thinking about it as an all or nothing activity, it is better to think of working for change as an ongoing long-term commitment. How much time we devote to it at a particular time in our lives depends on many things, including the demands of our jobs, unpaid caregiving and/or school, how healthy we are and how much potential for movement-building there is in that time and place.

Neigh (2010) goes on to offer more thoughtful advice:

Work to create a culture of social justice, a culture of resistance. By that I mean we should model ways of living which assume that working to create movements for social justice is important, useful, and entirely ordinary. Build community with this idea in mind. Talk and write … with this as a built-in assumption. And resist the urge to do it in insular, disconnected ways … rather, seek to inject this sense wherever possible into ordinary life.

As we do such things, the kind of theory outlined in this book can be a valuable tool for understanding what is happening in the society we are trying to change, challenging other interpretations and guiding efforts to organize people for action. For example, recognizing that we live in interlocking social relations of exploitation and oppression can help us to grasp that different struggles — for example, those against racist police violence and austerity — are in fact connected, and why the old workers’ movement slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all” is profoundly true.

If you are persuaded that a self-governing society is a possible alternative to capitalism, then working to advance social struggles, while essential, is not enough. Political forces consciously striving for that goal also need to be built. The case for transforming society in this way needs to be made, especially among people who are already critical of the status quo and taking action for social change. The forces of reformism — whether in the form of social democracy, localism or other kinds of politics that confine changes to “surface modification of the old society” rather than “the establishment of a new society” (Luxemburg 1989: 75) — will not fade away. They will always win out even in times of crisis unless they are challenged by large numbers of well-organized advocates of a self-governing society who have proven themselves trustworthy in past struggles and have an adequate strategy, as events in Greece in 2015 remind us (Sotiris 2016b).

Unfortunately, at present the forces supporting this kind of socialism are weak and scattered, as is the broader anti-capitalist left (this is especially true in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K.). Most existing socialist groups cling to outworn political dogmas from the first half of the twentieth century, do not genuinely integrate struggles against different kinds of oppression into class-struggle politics, and are run in ways that are not very democratic. Some still have illusions about Communism. Most of them suffer from sectarianism, the political vice of acting in ways that treat a group’s particular interests (such as recruiting more members) as more important than what is best for advancing the struggles of exploited and oppressed people.

As philosopher and activist Steve D’Arcy (2014) notes, “the fact that the levels of social struggle are so low” puts its stamp on the radical left. As a result, “it is cut off from everything that once nourished its growth and vigour” (D’Arcy 2014). It will take massive “broad-based struggles that draw in [many] people from outside the ranks of our activist scenes and subcultures” to truly renew it (D’Arcy 2014). Even so, advocates of a self-governing society can still come together, think collectively about how best to work towards a better world, and spread the message that “another world is possible” to those who are open to this idea. I hope I have shown that the kind of theory argued for in this book is a valuable tool for people in whose minds and hearts that slogan rings true.

Notes

We Can Do Better

1 <http://www.pewresearch.org/data-trend/national-conditions/personal-finances/>.

2 This important reality is one reason why reported rates of what contemporary medicine classifies as “anxiety disorders” and “depression” have increased (see Levine [2013]). Intense fear and sadness are real. However, there are many problems with how these kinds of suffering are understood and treated by modern medicine, which has a bad case of biological determinism (see Pilgrim [2015]).

Chapter 1

1 This way of thinking is facilitated by the public opinion industry, much of which is market research for corporations interested in what will and will not sell. Assessing levels of support for such measures as “active government” and “social responsibility” can encourage people to think that such things are more than just imperfect categories referring to aspects of the complex thoughts and feelings of human beings in particular times and situations (often alone rather than interacting with other people).

2 For more on capitalism and the growth imperative, see Kovel (2007: 26–91).

Chapter 2

1 I owe this reference to Cordelia Fine’s excellent Delusions of Gender (Fine 2010).

Chapter 3

1 Neoliberal theory also has a lot to say about how society should be organized, which makes its political goals even clearer. For a lively discussion of neoliberal thought, see Mirowski (2013).

2 For more on why putting a price on carbon fails as a response to climate change, see Lohmann (2006).

3 The story of how neoliberal ideology came to be so influential in the U.S. and the U.K. is told in Harvey (2005: 39–63).

Chapter 4

1 My focus here is the sexual assault of women and girls by men. This is not to deny that some men and boys experience sexual assault, but these are different and less common phenomena.

2 The essays collected in Travis (2003) show why the evolutionary psychology explanation of rape is rubbish.

3 Ellen Meiksins Wood (1995: 204–237) discusses how capitalism led to the emergence of “sovereign individuals” in Democracy Against Capitalism, though she says little about women’s struggle for legal equality.

Chapter 5

1 King (2012) is a good first book to read about the history of relations between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of what are now the U.S. and Canada. Daschuk (2013) looks in detail at what happened on the Canadian Prairies in the late 1800s.

2 This includes two dimensions: “vertical” relations between the direct producers (for example, wage-workers in a capitalist society) and exploiters (such as capitalist employers), and “horizontal” relations among the members of an exploiting class. The modes of production discussed in the next paragraph of the text are some of the most important seen in history, not an exhaustive list.

3 This is a simplification: there were arguably different classless modes of production, not just one. See Darmangeat (2016).

4 There has been a lot of debate among historical materialist thinkers about how state power works, much of it very dense and difficult. In my view, two of the most important contributors have been Simon Clarke (see Clarke [1983]) and Ellen Meiksins Wood (see Wood [1995]).

5 On racial oppression, see Camfield (2016a) and, for a longer academic examination, Camfield (2016b). Those interested in the history of racism should start with Fredrickson (2002) and Bethencourt (2013).

Chapter 6

1 For an explanation of the Nazi Holocaust, see Milchman (2003).

2 Haynes (2002) is the best introduction to what happened in Russia. However, it is insufficiently critical of the actions and ideas of the Bolsheviks before the rise of Stalinism — see Farber (1990).

Chapter 7

1 Capitalists may also exploit people who are not wage-workers, such as peasant farmers and slaves, but it is widespread wage labour that is distinctive to capitalism.

2 In addition to the sources cited at specific points in the text, this chapter draws extensively on McNally (2011, 2006).

Chapter 8

1 See the evidence at <healthcoalition.ca> and <nhsforsale.info>.

Chapter 10

1 Here, as elsewhere in this book, when I write about women I refer to all persons who identify as women or are generally perceived as women and therefore experience sexism, regardless of how they were classified at birth.

2 Of course, men who experience racism, heterosexism or other forms of oppression may have good reason to feel threatened by words directed against them.

3 Laurie Penny writes eloquently about these dimensions of oppression in Unspeakable Things (Penny 2014).

4 See the websites <plannedparenthoodaction.org>, <mariestopes.org.uk> and <arcc-cdac.ca>.

5 <data.oecd.org/earnwage/gender-wage-gap.htm>.

6 In this book privilege refers to the relative advantages conferred on members of a dominant group (such as men, white people or heterosexuals) because another group (women, people of colour, queers) is oppressed. This is a different understanding from how the term is usually used today, to refer to any and all ways in which someone is better off than someone else (for example, the idea that better-paid unionized workers are privileged because their wages are higher than those of other workers).

Chapter 11

1 Kinsman (1996: 107–137) covers this history in Canada.

Chapter 12

1 Calculated from DeNavas-Walt and Proctor (2015).

2 The rest of this chapter draws on Camfield (2016a, 2016b).

Chapter 13

1 See <http://boingboing.net/2011/10/18/luke-skywalker-is-the-99.html>.

2 See the data on strikes and protests in Genovese, Schneider and Wassman (2016).

3 See the strike data at <www.ilo.org/ilostat>.

4 For evidence from the U.S., see Grusky, Western and Wimer (2011).

5 For thoughts about this from the U.K., see Seymour (2014).

Chapter 14

1 For an explanation of why they act this way, see Brenner (2016).

Chapter 15

1 See <bcam.qc.ca/content/pinkwashing>.

2 This draws on Devine (1988), and also on Cottrell and Cockshott (2008), and McNally (1993).

3 For a good introduction to what happened in China, see Liu (2016).

4 Farber (2011) is a good introduction to what happened in Cuba.

5 Van der Linden (2009) surveys different historical materialist analyses of the U.S.S.R.

6 Haynes (2002), Gluckstein (1985) and Barker (1987) discuss many of these important historical experiences.

7 For a thoughtful response to arguments that claim socialism is not desirable, see Eagleton (2011).

8 For thoughts on strategy drawing on the experience of events in Greece in recent years, see Sotiris (2016b).

Chapter 16

1 Some people are attracted to the idea that getting a job with an NGO or a union will allow them to get paid for organizing. This is rarely true. Some left-leaning NGOs engage in activism, but few are involved in organizing to build movements. The need to attract funding from foundations, corporations and governments leads NGOs to become more conservative (see Dauvergne and Lebaron [2014] and INCITE! [2007]). Bureaucratic unionism and leaders who do not want unions to be run democratically by an active membership mean that union staffers who want to help workers to organize themselves for struggle are rarely able to do so (see Camfield [2011] and Moody [2007]).

Suggestions for Further Reading

THE IN-TEXT CITATIONS AND ENDNOTES in this book point to articles and books on many specific topics. Here are some recommendations for people who would like to read analyses from perspectives similar to this book’s or to learn more about reconstructed historical materialist theory.

Reconstructed historical materialist analysis

David McNally’s Another World Is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism (second ed.) contains an excellent look at global capitalism and how it is interwoven with racism. It also outlines an anti-racist feminist socialist politics.

Alan Sears’ The Next New Left: A History of the Future delves into the past in order to understand the situation that anti-capitalists find themselves in today.

Nick Dyer-Witheford’s Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex is a serious effort to understand the global working class and capitalism today. While I disagree with parts of the book, it is well worth reading.

Himani Bannerji’s Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism, and Anti-Racism argues for the importance of theory that fuses historical materialism and anti-racist feminism.

Robin D.G. Kelley’s Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America is a collection of essays from the 1990s that is still relevant today, and not just in the U.S.

About the ideas that flow into reconstructed historical materialism

Alex Callinicos’ The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx is probably the best introduction to Marx, although it presents Marx’s thought as more of a finished product than the brilliant, flawed and incomplete body of ideas that it was.

Some more recent books that deal with aspects of Marx’s ideas that Callinicos does not are John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies and Heather Brown’s Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study.

Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism is probably still the best introduction to Marxist social theory after Marx’s death, even though it misses some contributions and obviously does not deal with those that have appeared in the more than four decades since it was written. Ellen Meiksins Wood’s Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism is an important work.

Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment is a good introduction to Black feminist theory from the U.S. The collection Scratching the Surface: Canadian Anti-Racist Feminist Thought, edited by Enakshi Dua and Angela Robertson, is also noteworthy.

I wrote an academic journal article about the streams of thought that flow into reconstructed historical materialism (Camfield 2016c).

Other

Umair Muhammad’s Confronting Injustice: Social Activism in the Age of Individualism makes a good case for how to work for social change that is largely compatible with reconstructed historical materialism. Jonathan Matthew Smucker’s Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals is not a historical materialist work but it is worth reading by people who want to organize for change.

People interested in socialism should read David McNally’s 2017 pamphlet Socialist Politics in the Age of Trump, which discusses the socialist perspective that informs the final chapters of We Can Do Better. McNally’s pamphlet draws on Hal Draper’s classic essay The Two Souls of Socialism, which is available online.

Glossary

THESE ARE DEFINITIONS OF SOME key concepts as they are used in this book.

capitalism (or capitalist mode of production): A mode of production in which most goods and services are produced for sale (in other words, produced as commodities) by competing profit-driven economic units, and in which labour power is a commodity on a large scale.

class: This term refers both to a group of people who share a common relationship to the process of production in their society and to the social relation between the group that exploits and those who are exploited (the direct producers).

exploitation: The extraction of surplus labour from those who produce goods and services (the direct producers).

forces of production: The forms of technology, cooperation and knowledge that humans use to produce goods and services.

gender: The social relation that organizes people around “the bodily structures and processes of human reproduction” (Connell 2002: 48), or a group defined by these relations (for example, women). Gender “is a pattern in our social arrangements, and in the everyday activities or practices which those arrangements govern” (Connell 2002: 9). Gender relations organize how bodies are dealt with in society.

idealism: An approach to theory that relies on claims about alleged phenomena “that do not in any way derive from the evolution of matter and energy in space and time” (Noonan 2012: 19) or treats ideas as if they exist independently of human beings. There are many kinds of idealist theory.

materialism: An approach to theory that contends that “everything comes from matter and its movements and is based upon matter” (Novack 1965: 4). There are many kinds of materialist theory.

mode of production: A way of organizing people to produce goods and services (for example, capitalism). Modes of production are distinguished from each other by their unique relations of production.

oppression: Systemic harm, arising from social practices, that is inflicted on a group that is not constituted on the basis of a common relationship to social production (for example, racism is one form of oppression).

privilege: Relative advantages conferred on members of a dominant group (for example, men) because another group (in this case, women) is oppressed.

race: The social relation that organizes people into multi-gender groups on the basis of differences (not limited to those surrounding sexuality or ability) that are treated as inherent and unchangeable, or a group defined by these relations (for example, white people).

relations of production: The social relations between an exploiting class and direct producers, among members of the exploiting class and among members of the exploited class.

social relation: A large-scale pattern of relationships between individuals.

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Acknowledgements

THIS BOOK DRAWS ON TRADITIONS of theory (see the Suggestions for Further Reading) that emerged from efforts to change society. As people have struggled against capitalism and the different kinds of oppression interwoven with it, they have been driven to better understand their situations and how they could be transformed. Their movements have led to theoretical breakthroughs. Without them, this book could never have been written.

I am grateful to Brian McDougall for introducing me to historical materialism and socialism from below, and for his encouragement of heresy. People in and around Toronto Socialist Feminist Action, the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics and the Toronto Coalition Against Racism helped keep me from succumbing to orthodox Marxism. Reading Himani Bannerji’s Thinking Through aided my break with it. Over the years, conversations and correspondence with many people have influenced my thinking about issues discussed in this book, but Alan Sears, David McNally, Sheila Wilmot, Charlie Post and Gary Kinsman deserve special mention. Alan, David and Sheila made the time to read the first draft of this book and send me helpful comments. I must also recognize all the students and participants in discussion groups and social change efforts who have challenged me to clarify what I think and to explain my ideas more clearly while reminding me why social theory matters.

While I was working on this book many people pointed me to sources in their fields of expertise, including Jarvis Brownlie, David Churchill, Steve D’Arcy, Barry Eidlin, Paul Heideman, Gary Kinsman, Kim Moody, Jeff Noonan, Rebecca Raby, Richard Seymour, Lynne Segal and no doubt others I have forgotten (to whom I apologize). Thanks to Craig Adolphe, Brian Latour and Jillian Patterson for their work as research assistants.

Without the ongoing work of physiotherapist Stasia Meseman I would have been unable to write this book.

Thanks to everyone at Fernwood Publishing who worked on this book: Jessica Antony, Beverley Rach, Debbie Mathers, Nancy Malek and Curran Faris. Thanks to Mark Ambrose Harris for careful and thoughtful copyediting.

Finally, I must thank Monique Woroniak for love and for encouragement to keep theory relevant to the here and now.

Index

alienation, 61

biological determinism, 12–16

capitalism, 10, 17–21, 36–38, 40, 48–50, 52–67, 74–75, 79, 86–87, 89–92, 98, 113–114, 119, 120–121, 124, 126–127, 134, 139

capitalist class, 21, 49–50, 56–66, 79–80, 86–87, 98, 112, 119

capitalist mode of production, (see capitalism)

capitalists, (see capitalist class)

class, (see also capitalist class; working class) 31, 36, 39–40, 42, 48, 50–54, 56–57, 59–61, 63, 87, 89–90, 116, 119, 124–125, 134

climate change, 10, 22, 58, 76–81

colonialism, (see imperialism; settler-colonialism)

Communism, 120, 124, 125

cultural essentialism, (see culture)

culture, 7–9, 11, 28–30, 35, 53–45, 50, 55, 65, 95, 97, 101–103, 107, 131

disability, 62

ecology, 10, 34, 58, 67, 79, 113, 121

egalitarian-communal mode of production, 31, 34, 36

evolutionary psychology, 13–15

fascism, 50–51

feudal mode of production, (see feudalism)

feudalism, 35, 48, 51–52

forces of production, (see productive forces)

gender (including gender oppression), 30, 32, 37–38, 40, 42, 49–51, 64–65, 82–87, 90–91, 123

heterosexism, 38, 40, 88, 90–92, 117, 123

history, 29, 45–54

role of individual in, 46–47

idealism, 6–11, 139–140

ideology, 29, 100–104

imperialism, 40, 62–66, 98

infrastructure of dissent, 107, 118

labour (human activity), 28, 35–36, 42

metabolism with rest of nature, 34

unpaid domestic, 56–57, 73, 83–86, 105, 123

wage-labour, 21, 39, 50, 56–57, 61–62, 70–72, 86–87, 98, 105

localism, 113–114

materialism, 26–29

mental health/illness, 1, 74, 89, 133

mode of production, 36, 50, 54, 57

needs, 33

neoliberal theory, 18–23, 133–134

neoliberalism, 65–66, 75, 92, 101, 103, 112, 118

oppression, (see also disability; gender oppression; heterosexism; racism)

definition, 140

liberation from, 123

organizing (for social change), 130–131

patriarchy, (see gender)

peasantry, 39, 54, 57, 116

privilege, 85–86, 97–99

definition, 135, 140

productive forces, 28, 53–54, 67, 120–122, 125, 139

race, (see racism)

racism, 7–8, 13, 42, 65, 84, 92, 94–99, 123, 134, 140

rape culture, (see sexual assault)

reconstructed historical materialism, 25–68, 137–138

reformism,111–115, 131

relations of production, 54, 60, 134, 140

religion, 7–8, 41

revolution, 53, 123, 126–127

self-governing society, (see socialism)

settler colonialism, 40, 96

sexual assault, 30–32, 83

sexuality, 38–39, 50–51, 88–93

social democracy, 111–112

social movements, 117

social struggles, 115–119, 126–127

socialism, 120–123, 125–127

society, 42–43

change over time, (see history)

core activities of, 35–36

Stalinism, (see Communism)

state, 22, 36, 39–40, 43, 52, 63–64, 80, 92, 95, 112, 126–127, 134

technological determinism, 47–48, 53

trade unions, (see unions)

transgender, 84, 91

tributary mode of production, 36

unions, 60–61, 106, 136

values, 9–11

warfare, 52–53

work, (see labour)

workers, (see working class)

working class (see also class, labour), 39, 56–57, 60–61, 105–106