#daniel denvir

You write that 'markets and labor power change the internal character of what is traded on them and the surrounding form of life in which they are located.' What is alienation? What is it that we’re alienated from or made alien to?

Nancy Fraser

There’s a long tradition of writing about alienated labor that goes back to Marx’s very early writings. The concept refers to exploited wage labor within capitalism, where the worker is alienated from his or her work but also from fellow human beings and from what Marx famously called our 'species being,' our humanity, our freedom to collectively decide what kind of lives we want to live and to build the institutions to do that.

People today are alienated from all of those things. There’s nothing more alienated, in terms of labor, than having to follow a script in interacting with customers, either on the phone or at a fast-food joint, while you’re also doing some backbreaking or repetitive labor in horrible conditions. So, we’re no strangers to alienated labor. I think the popularity of freelancing, even though that’s quite mystified in certain ways, does speak to a hunger for creativity, for being able to determine how you use your time, being an individual, not just being under the watchful surveillance of somebody else.

But I would say the deepest meaning of alienation and being unalienated has to do with freedom and democracy. Capitalism steals from us not just our labor and energy but our ability to decide collectively the most important questions about how we want to live. How hard do we want to work? How many hours? How much leisure do we want to have? What do we want to leave for future generations? How do we want to relate to nonhuman nature? What should we do with the social surplus that we collectively produce?

These are fundamental questions, and they are decided now essentially by a small handful of people who appropriate the surplus we produce and basically use market mechanisms to invest for the sake of maximal expansion.

Daniel Denvir

In other words, we live in a society where Elon Musk gets to decide that he’s firing a car into space for fun and that’s how our social wealth is being used.

Nancy Fraser

Absolutely. Whereas there might be many other things that we would prefer to do with that wealth. We might even prefer to produce less wealth and to live more simply, companionably, socially, and easily in a more relaxed way. We could have a much freer and more democratic life. But that’s not compatible with capitalism."

Why is it that the structure of the capitalist welfare state social formation prefers and seeks to produce this family organization?... the labor force upon which industrial production depends has to get produced and reproduced in the family. This is particularly true for industrial mass production like steel and auto. For long-term planning purposes, managers need a stabilized workforce. And for this, they need the labor force to be consistent and reliable and to show up in more or less the same form that they can anticipate every day. This is part of why they were willing ultimately to accept collective bargaining.

What that means is that the family has a particular role to play. The family has to produce steelworkers. It has to raise male children who are in one way or another ready for this role. It has to refresh them each night.

And it’s a more complex undertaking than you might think. Steel mills run twenty-hour hours a day. You can’t turn them off because they’re too hot and it takes too long to heat them back up again, so you just run them constantly. They run in three eight-hour shifts, which means that every steelworker at various points is going to be doing an 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. shift, a 4:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. shift, and sometimes a 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. shift. If he’s doing a 4:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. shift, and the family has four or five kids — these are typically pretty big families, especially in the earlier Cold War period — the wife has to make dinner for the kids at 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. and then stay up and make him dinner again at midnight when he gets home.

Moreover, when he gets home, he is going to be filthy, because he works in a steel mill. His clothes are going to be caked in industrial grease, and there will be grease under his fingernails, in his hair, on his eyelids. She has to help him get clean. He’s going to be tired, frustrated, worn out, maybe humiliated from the shit he went through with his foreman that day, and he’s maybe going to want to have one or two drinks, a very common ritual. So she has to do what we could think of as emotional work to deal with that. She needs to keep him from waking up the kids. He’s then going to sleep through the next day because he was up late working at the steel mill, and so she has to keep the kids from making any noise that would wake him up during the next day.

Just from these little examples I’m giving you, you can see how the family has this economic function supplying a steady supply of labor power, but it’s people who make it up. It’s not just a series of input factors — it’s people living their lives, with human experiences and needs and desires and conflict. And basically it’s a wife and mother’s job to square that right, to figure out how to keep it all going. It’s a very difficult job, emotionally and physically. I read diaries and letters and all kinds of things from steelworkers’ wives saying things like, 'I typically do the laundry at two in the morning because that’s when I know no one will need me for anything else.' And it’s also impossible: they can never make it fully line up. They can’t ever be the family that postwar Cold War America imagined that they should be able to be."

Looking for something else to think about while you wait for the BC Election results to come in? Well, how about listening to this great podcast episode that The Dig recently posted with Naomi (not Wolf) Klein? Because it's a pretty good analysis of where things are at the moment (if you can handle listening to people sharing opinions & information on "controversial" topics) — listen here:

You write that the rise of the modern health care system 'appears in close parallel to the rise of mass incarceration.' Do those two processes just run in parallel or were they more intertwined?

Gabriel Winant

I think this comparison is very fruitful, but we have to be cautious as we use it. Because while the health care system has extremely cruel dimensions, we’re not for its abolition. It’s not exclusively a mechanism of domination and oppression.

Daniel Denvir

There’s plenty of good stuff that happens in hospitals.

Gabriel Winant

Right. And I think actually that’s important to say, because it’s only if we understand that and say that, that we then become able to parse out the ways that the health care system is helping make people who they are and reproducing them in ways that stabilize the larger social order. That is, at the most abstract level, how it’s similar to the prison system. The growing health care system is producing social roles, stabilizing social roles, and holding people in those roles, and in that way contributing to a larger social stability effect, which is also what the prison system does.

At a less abstract level, they manage bodies out of place. Both patients and prisoners are people who no longer have a productive purpose in the capital accumulation process, which is what we mean when we describe them as surplus population. And so if there’s an institution that can put together, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore would say, surplus capital and surplus state capacity to manage the surplus population, then it’s going to prosper by doing that. So they’re similar in that way as well.

What’s different about them is that health care is a social right. It’s something that we want to get. And the people who are able to get it are in a better position than the people who are not able to get it. It’s unequally distributed."

I haven’t posted in a long time about books that I’m reading or are in my reading queue lol. Here they are:

We Were Eight Years In Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

A book about the Black Reconstruction era in America after the Civil War. In 1867 Black people gained various important govermental offices until White people in power decided the Black people had too much power and took violent steps to remove black politicians from elected offices.

All-American Nativism by Daniel Denver

Explores and analyses how American politics has used immigration rhetoric to get to were we are now.

I’m Not Here to Give a Speech by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“When most outsiders think of Chile, the first thing that comes to mind are of the scars left by the civilian-military dictatorship. And with good reason: The legacy of Pinochet’s genocidal regime is everywhere — in personal and collective memories, in the country’s privatized institutions like education, and in its profoundly neoliberal constitution, which keeps the Chilean political system shackled to its brutal past and makes left politics exceedingly difficult.

Nevertheless, the legacy of the revolution led by the supporters of Salvador Allende’s socialist government endures, too. Despite opposition from a broad sector of anti-constitutional military leaders and the Chilean oligarchy, popular resistance never died out or gave in — even in the face of the intervention by US president Richard Nixon’s government, which played a key role in the military coup of September 11, 1973.

Daniel Denvir interviewed Daniel Jadue, the mayor of Recoleta, a district located in the Metropolitan Region of Greater Santiago, for the Dig (you can listen to the full-length Spanish-language episode here). Jadue’s administration is building a laboratory for communism of today and of the future, opening a people’s pharmacy and optometrist, along with a beautiful people’s bookstore. Just before this interview was published, Recoleta announced the opening of a people’s record store. All these essential services are provided at low prices, confronting a free market that supposedly self-regulates but which in Chile has only demonstrated how an unregulated market fosters a savage and untamed capitalism.

Jadue is a militant in the Communist Party of Chile and one of the most important figures on the Latin American left. We all have a lot to learn from what is happening in Recoleta, especially since one of the most persistent criticisms of actually existing socialisms has been their supposed administrative failures; their inefficiency in actually serving “the people.” With his successful measures, Jadue defies not just the historical stereotypes and realities but the entire neoliberal order.

In this conversation, Dan talks about the fight in his district and the current political situation in Chile more broadly, including the role of the student movements, the conflict between the Chilean state and the Mapuche people, the powerful feminist movement, the defeat of the center-left New Majority coalition in 2017, the weighty legacy of Pinochet, the current conservative government of Sebastián Piñera, and more.

You can hear the Dig and all of the Jacobin podcasts by subscribing at Jacobin Radio.”

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“...our state is constitutionally set up to be neoliberal. So, we are not a democracy. When the majority of the country wants to go in a certain direction, the constitution will simply not allow it.”

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“When you look at health care for the masses, you have the public system for the workers and poor people who can’t afford private clinics. In richer neighborhoods, you see these beautiful private clinics all over that look almost like luxury malls rather than hospitals designed to function as such. Can you tell us more about the dynamics of the health care system in Chile?

First of all, health care is not a right in Chile, despite the many who think it ought to be. Health care is another market commodity; you have access to the health care you can pay for. This doesn’t just occur with health care; everything in our country works this way. Education is another example.

Eighty percent of people in Chile simply don’t have access to more advanced medical treatments. The state guarantees access to a certain portion of medical care, but not nearly enough. You might be able to get an appointment, for example, if in primary care they find evidence you have cancer. The problem is, that appointment might be a year and a half from now. In a year and a half, cancer might have already killed you. This is the model country that the international right wing admires so much.”