At times the social relations behind capitalism reveal themselves. The revolutionary window closes quickly.
Ryan Ward || In what the world is calling an “extraordinary” moment, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a speech this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the annual meeting where billionaires and the technocrats who make their continued existence possible meet together to congratulate themselves on winning the game of life while offering platitudes about how to pacify those they exploit enough to prevent them from revolting.
The speech is worth reading in its entirety. For a formal state address, it is kind of remarkable, if only for the way that it makes clear that all of the great powers in the so-called liberal “rules-based international order” have known all along that the order was a lie and played along because it benefited them individually. Trump’s presidency has only revealed what was clearly apparent to many, not least those nations in the Global South, whose continued exploitation and brutalization at the hand of Western imperialism was given not a mention by Carney during his speech, despite plenty of handwringing over Ukraine and Greenland. The global rules-based order has always been about power. Who has it, and who is willing to wield it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btqHDhO4h10
And for Carney it seems, it is the “middle powers” of which Canada is one, who stand to lose the most from this rupture in the rules-based order. His call, despite its trappings in lofty moral rhetoric about values and honesty, seems to be for the middle powers to band together to allow the international system of imperialist exploitation to continue to function—without American hegemony—in a kind of distributed imperial bloc.
I’m not really interested in analyzing Carney’s speech in detail. Every media outlet is busy doing just that. My aim here is to use this moment of rupture to discuss the nature of capitalist crisis and what it means for an effective organization in order to take advantage of the revolutionary potential such moments offer us.
Shirts and tags
The more I study capitalism, the more I am impressed with Marx’s insight regarding the way that the commodity, or the material outcome of the production process, hides the social relations inherent in its production. For example, I was in a store before Christmas with my daughters and they were browsing for clothes. I picked up a shirt and looked at the tag: Made in Bangladesh. For me as consumer, the product, or the commodity, is the shirt, and it appears as an item unto itself, a finished product, or according to Marx, a fetish. The production process itself is obscured by the shirt as commodity. Only the tag reveals something of the production process and the social relations behind the shirt, and then only if I really stop to think about it or am familiar with the ins and outs of the production process. This process can be seen in the video here, where many people work together on different pieces before they are joined together and the shirt is packaged and sent to be sold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHX_J__8p2I
This video then, has served to reveal the social relations behind the production of the shirt as commodity. We can now see that the shirt was the end result of a complicated chain of social and labor relations.
This small demonstration is an example of a rupture that opens up the possibility of a change in perspective, one might even call it a revolutionary change. Obviously coming to realize that a shirt is the result of a factory process of production involving many people is not going to overthrow the capitalist system, but the logic applies to the kind of capitalist crisis and rupture that Carney is pointing out in his speech, and therein lies the revolutionary potential.
I recently wrote about the way that the logic of Marx’s commodity fetishism can be applied to the capitalist system as a whole. Please do read the whole article if you’re interested, but in a nutshell, the main point is that the reason that the capitalist system is so monolithic and immovable in our collective imagination is because the system itself conceals the social relations that it depends on for survival. In our example, the capitalist system is the shirt, and the production process is the web of social relations (bosses, workers, wage labor, state and legal apparatuses) that keeps the capitalist system afloat.
Of course, the capitalist system is not a static thing. It is constantly changing and shaping society and the world. But while we may register some of these changes on a superficial level, they are mostly just merged with our notion of “how the world is” such that capitalism, as I said in my article “continually makes and remakes social relations while concealing the fundamental role of these very social relations in perpetuating its existence.” The key question for me is how to reveal the social relations behind the capitalist system to enough people to start a revolutionary movement with enough momentum to topple the system.
Making and changing memories
Let’s switch gears a bit. Now we’re going to talk about the neuroscience of memory. Studying memory has been a huge part of psychology and neuroscience for hundreds of years. One of the reasons, aside from the general interest in the process itself, is that faulty memories or aberrant memory creation is thought to play a role in a number of psychiatric conditions that severely impact the lives of many people. For example, post-traumatic stress disorder is thought to involve particularly inflexible memories of a traumatic event. These memories are consolidated in a long-term state that is extremely difficult to work with or change in a therapeutic context.
Another example is substance abuse. Taking drugs involves many contextual and physiological cues that all come to be merged into a drug-related memory. This memory, once consolidated, can be extremely difficult to eliminate or modify. The result is massive craving whenever an addict is exposed to the drug-related cues, leading to cycles of abstinence and relapse.
Psychiatrists and psychologists have known for a long time that the process of memory formation includes a state in the consolidation process where information exists in a workable and changeable format—so-called working or active memory. Once the information is no longer needed for a current problem or task, it can be either discarded or consolidated further into long-term memory. Information that is particularly salient or that corresponds to heightened states of arousal or stress is particularly likely to be consolidated in long-term memory. This is because such information is likely deemed by the brain to be particularly important to remember for survival purposes in the future.
For a long time it was thought that information in long-term memory was fixed and unchangeable. Once it was in, it wasn’t coming out and you couldn’t modify it. However, work in recent decades has shown that information in long-term memory can be recalled back into an active state. This recalled, or “labile” memory, can then be modified through therapeutic or pharmacological means before it is reconsolidated. This discovery has already been positively taken advantage of in treatment of both PTSD and substance abuse. The goal in the therapeutic context is to recall the trauma or drug-associated memory under conditions that are conducive to a cognitive reframing of the information that comprises the memory so that when the memory is reconsolidated it will be in a new, less harmful form. For example, a person with an addiction to methamphetamine might be shown a video of themselves handling drug-related paraphernalia or preparing to use the drug, but then the person is not allowed to use. With enough pairings, the drug-associated memory becomes extinguished because it is not followed by the use of the drug and so becomes unable to evoke those cravings it once did. Relatedly, one of the reasons why treatment with psychedelic drugs is thought to be effective for PTSD or other disorders characterized by rigid memory and behavioral structure is because its physiological effect is to make neural circuits involved in creation and consolidation of memories more malleable, therefore more susceptible to changed or new memory creation. The rigid patterns of thought are “loosened” so to speak, making therapeutic intervention possible.
Something that has been shown over and over again in these types of studies is that there is a window of possibility within which a recalled memory must be manipulated before it is reconsolidated and no longer susceptible to change. It is therefore crucial that the correct information be available and effectively imparted to the person before the window of opportunity closes and the memory is reconsolidated. Many experiments have been conducted to determine the precise temporal limits of recall across different paradigms and situations as well as the best format for new information to be presented and merged with the active memory. If conditions aren’t right, the memory will be recalled and reconsolidated without any change.
I hope you can see where I’m going with this. Back to our Bangladesh shirt example. Chances are, the next time you pick up a shirt in the store or see a tag that says “made in Bangladesh” you will think of the video and remember how many people are involved in the making of a shirt. But unless you actively work to bring to mind the video, chances are that you will just as easily forget the social relations behind the shirt and come to think of it as just a shirt. That’s what most of us do when we see the tag “made in China” or “made in Pakistan” or “made in Bangladesh”. Unless we have been taught about the social relations involved in the manufacturing process, the most we probably do is think of a geographical outline of the country where the shirt is made (if we even know the shape of the country on a map). In other words, it takes a concerted effort to keep the knowledge of the real social relations behind the commodities we consume in mind.
The revolutionary window
The capitalist system itself is masterful at concealing the nature of the social relations that make it up and on which it depends. But sometimes something happens that reveals the true nature of these relations. These moments reveal that this relationship, as well as the exploitative nature of the capitalist system as a whole, is not an inevitability of human nature. It is rather a choice by the ruling class to order society in this way. A choice of a wealthy minority to extract wealth from an exploited majority. These moments of clarity are evidence of the capitalist system in crisis. This crisis is two-fold. First, these moments are usually brought on by some sort of economic collapse: the Great Depression, the stagflation crisis, the global financial crisis, the COVID pandemic, both world wars. These are crises in the sense that the capitalist global economy is unable to fulfil its promises of prosperity for all, leaving many destitute, impoverished, and dead. The state intervenes, organizing economies, nationalizing production, subsidizing incomes.
More importantly, these moments constitute crises for the capitalist class, in that the system that enables their lifestyles and the exploitation upon which they depend is revealed to be a political choice. This puts an existential pressure on the capitalist system, characterized by massive unrest and protest by the working class, which has historically been dealt with by a combination of technocratic austerity and violent repression.
The rupture in the international rules-based order that Carney so clearly spelled out at Davos is the most recent in a long line of capitalist crises. In the parlance of the discussion above, we can think of these as the recall to collective memory of the actual social relations behind the capitalist system. As we have learned from the discussion of memory, this constitutes a finite temporal state where the memory is malleable, but must be actively changed or it will become reconsolidated and fixed. These moments of rupture are not the be all and end all of revolutionary strategy but they do provide unique windows of opportunity in the class struggle. Our job is to harness these moments of rupture by organizing and educating as many as we can of the true nature of the social relations behind the capitalist system. Then we can manufacture our own more proactive moments of crisis by, for example, coordinated strikes or other direct action.
This is ideally done before the crisis arrives. The moment of rupture is too late. It is too easily co-opted by populists and reactionaries who blame the trouble on some vaguely-defined “other” (immigrants, radical leftists) while economists and other technocratic talking heads and political pundits work to assuage our inklings that the entire system is rotten before the underlying social relations are swept under by the commodification of the newly-shaped capitalist reality.
But, as a comrade of mine recently reminded me “the best time to organize is before the crisis. The next best time is right now.” Capitalist crises are coming at us with more and more regularity, and we can expect them to continue, a sure sign of late-stage capitalism on the brink. Our urgent strategy should be to help as many people as possible recognize the actual nature of their lived social relations that underpin the capitalist system and to analyze and understand the points of weakness—both political and material—and how best to harness and disrupt them, so that when these relations are clearly revealed in the next moment of rupture, our solidarity can turn the tide before the revolutionary window closes.
The pedagogy of the oppressed… is a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity. This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade.
– Paulo Freire
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