Chocolate Milk and the Capitalist State:
On Political Impossibility
There’s a clip doing the rounds of Clinton discussing her campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2016 on the Howard Stern show. They jovially lambast Bernie for overpromising in a manner akin to a candidate for 5th grade class president. For the adult in the room, Stern notes, it’s hard to counter someone who just says ‘I’ll give you free everything!’. ‘Free chocolate milk for everyone!’ Clinton quips back approvingly. Aside from the contemptuous of denigrating basic citizenship rights like healthcare and education as puerile indulgences, there’s something more revealing going on here.
A common cause of popular scepticism toward Bernie or Corbyn agenda is this quite sensible incredulity. Under a political modus vivendi suffused by a potent sense of distrust and unaccountability, when a project emerges with real ambition it is immediately caught within an air of lurid fascination. Resigned to the fact of politicians that aim low and land even lower, significant structural change is mystical; too good to be true. Both these campaigns much admired capacity to draw grassroots support is the alluring component of this mystique; the perennially flabbergasted treatment by the media is indicative of its mistrustful part. Labour’s current ground game, unprecedented in its sheer scope and organisational complexity, is powered undoubtedly by the tantalising radicalism of their manifesto. ‘Think how much ‘hope’ has become, not just a platitude,’ Richard Seymour writes, ‘but something concrete enough to inspire people to give up their daily lives for as long as this election lasts.’
This is important, because the apathy that has gripped our body politic has not come from a surfeit of ambition. Quite the opposite. It’s emerged instead from an endless hammering, further and further into the ground, of protracted boundaries of possibility. Blair’s ‘97 campaign – indeed his entire flaccid political philosophy – prided itself on being beyond change, conflict, and ambition. It was about reconciliation. A qualified yet mature acceptance of the existing political tenor. Even Obama in ‘08, who’s message was unambiguously one of ‘hope and change’ and ‘yes we can!’, carried with him a hint of his failure once in office: an illusory commitment to bipartisanship and amity, both across Congress and class. Sustained by an unsustainable asset price bubble that incorporated a not-insignificant amount of the lower-middle class into financialisation, this worked long enough. But when the sheen of the focus-group rulers wore off – Iraq and the expenses scandal here; a conspicuous absence of Obama’s trademark change and quickly deflating hope there; and finally the spectacular Global Financial Crisis – a profound double-disappointment set in. The disengagement of technocracy, and the apathy that constituted, was compounded by a sense of betrayal that they couldn’t even govern with dignity. Those that voted trusted them to do little, to usher in ‘modernity’ with respect and grace, and they couldn’t even do that properly.
Faced by this, it’s unsurprising that people look dazed upon the newfound boldness of the Left. Beyond this morbid context, though, any policy has winners and losers, as every wonk will tell you. Voters disbelief comes too from a misrecognition that offers on free healthcare, tax rises or nationalised broadband mean effectively no-one loses. It’s all a bit suspiciously easy. This is the crux of Clinton’s mocking; her figurative chocolate milk variously incarnated as unicorns and rainbows, iPads and Netflix. Beneath all this guff, it is a legitimate question to pose. But the truth is there’s nothing simple or Quixotic about these proposals. As is communicated to various degrees of success by the movements, universality and decommodification come at the expense of the rich. The answer to ‘who will pay for it’ is them. Those who’ve seen obscene growth in their wealth the past four decades as pay stagnantated and the public sphere was gutted. But there is truly nothing easy about this. Targeting the powerful, far from the simple, inherently suspicious populist ploy its painted as, is the most ardently difficult political project. The real viscousness of the delegitimisation campaigns against the insurgent Left is precisely where the costs reveal themselves. Media barons and business lobbyists all line up to malign those challenging their power, frantically trying to keep those boundaries of possibility hammered down.
These ideas of feasibility centrists bitterly peddle are constructed, political. Everything that’s ever been worthwhile was once impossible. Science Fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin puts it beautifully: ‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.’ Universal healthcare, given that it’s a core aspect of the social fabric in every other industrialised nation on earth, is eminently possible. Corporation tax of 26%, spreading some shares to workers, and a revitalised union sector is respectively relegated to the mythical world of Britian in 2010 and Germany today.
On this false paralysis, anthropologist David Graeber speaks of what he calls the ‘reality effect’. Reciting a tale from his countless experiences in direct-action groups, he notes how they were gifted a car for organisational purposes, only for it to be reduced to a burdensome hunk of metal. Without a formal, hierarchical structure, their horizontal collective could not legally own the car. After various bureaucratic hurdles involved in a sole owner insuring other members, they scrapped it for parts. There was nothing physically preventing them from using it. They could drive; the car would start. A mutual repellence is not essential to the entities of ‘car’ and ‘anarchist collective’. But, nonetheless, something about the real physical heaviness of that object, and the bureaucratic structures that called it, as it were, into functional being, made it effectively impossible to run.
The state is much like this car. It’s limits to action are not inscribed as principles of matter itself, but are dependent upon certain structural interests and levers; more broadly, the balance of power that cuts across institutions, traversing both state and economy. Under capitalism, vast amounts of material wealth concentrate as political power. This is most naked in the authoritarian control over workers (Corporations act like fascist states: top-down commands, total absence of accountability, complete discretion in actions. Why do we live in democracy until you get to your office?). But pertinent here are three other levers: i) monopoly over investment; ii) outsized influence over media apparatus; iii) interpersonal contacts of shared social field.
The first is what theorist Adam Przeworski calls the ‘structural dependence of the state on capital’, denoting the manner in which it relies upon the revenue of capitalists to function, which essentially provides a sort of veto to the rich. Because capitalists can choose when and where to invest — or, more pertinently, when not to – they can withdraw ‘business confidence’ when they don’t get their way. Capital strike has been the historic truncheon (when real ones weren’t actually being used) by the rich against radical left governments (see Greece under Syriza; Mitterrand in France; Chile, etc).
On the second point, over 80% of the worlds news outlets are owned by 3 or 4 companies. Rupert Murdoch owns almost half of all UK print publications and almost all of Australia’s media landscape. They have a strong reason to marginalise voices that threaten their material interests. Largely, no one tells their staff what to write (although instances have been well documented). Its more appropriate mechanism is best specified by Noam Chomsky – father of, among sundry other things, one of the most respect theories of media sociology – in his interview with Andrew Marr when he refuses the suggestion that he self-censors: ‘I’m not saying you don’t believe what you’re saying, what I’m saying is that if you believed any different, you wouldn’t be sitting here.’
Chomsky’s understanding of a selection process throughout life hints, too, at the final aspect, that of shared social background. Political Scientists Jeffrey Winters, in his diagnosis of American ‘democracy’, talks of the glue of the ‘wealth defence imperative’ that holds the oligarchy together. It is not conspiratorial to observe that those with vast wealth and power generally seek to preserve and extend it. Amorphous, variably organised and not always directly familiar with each other, these elite are conjoined by their class interest. Cycling through the same posts, attending the same schools, drinking at the same parties. Even when they have never met, their fates are welded in the hedge-fund nexus and channels of political donations. Ralph Miliband, in his study of the ‘state in capitalist society’, contended that the state is infused thick with these personal ties; its functionaries and representatives drawn from an incestous pool of the upper-class.
Such are the cinderblocks of the states ‘reality effect’. It is thus not authentic possibility being signified by centrists, but their pursuit of class conciliation; the passive management of domination, weighted structurally and interpersonally. Consciously or not, they refuse reasonable structural change because they are fearful of being reprimanded by capital. Eschewing conflict, propounding a belief in the end of left or right, an eternal tweaking of an extractive statis, they end up prostrating themselves to corporate power.
Earlier in the campaign, Robert Peston wrote in The Spectator that Corbyn had declared class war. ‘Who’s side are you on?’ he soberly inquired. As many noted at the time, such a conflict long predates Corbyns leadership. Ed Milliband crystallised it well when he tweeted: ‘Lots of objections to class war appearing. Totally agree. Assault on welfare state, slashing top rate and corporate tax while imposing cuts on everyone else, driving people to food banks, Universal Credit, pay freezes, growth in zero hours. When will it end?’ In truth, the poor are easy to squeeze because they have little power to resist, even under nominally democratic conditions. Disabled people cannot threaten to shut off campaign finance donations; the unemployed cannot conjure narratives of ‘tough decisions’ and statesmanly renewal. Even when they vote, many do so disoriented by this spectacle.
Political economist Alex Calinicos’ discussion of the contradictions of austerity is apt here. The state demonstrated its capacity to execute Promethean tasks, pumping trillions into the world-economy as life-support. Notoriously, though — and with the effects of which looking increasingly regressive — these funds immediately reinflated the asset books of the rich, with little benefit accruing to the real economy. All this poses a question: if the state could do this for the entire financial sector, why not bailout the environment? Or the homeless? The answer, fundamentally, is because capital would whip them back into line if they tried.
We can see the response to the Global Financial Crisis as an inadvertent unmasking of what Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek calls the ‘point of impossibility’: a course of action that is technically free to choose but under the condition, that you never, ever, actually choose it. The contradiction of this inflection point plays out in the central contradiction of post-2008 austerity. It is not any tangible, physical impossibility that’s stopping the state from passing that point (indeed, it exists precisely in the sense that you technically can choose to do so). Hence, there is nothing actually preventing the state from purchasing fossil fuel assets and coordinating our way out of climate disaster. Clearly it has beyond sufficient capacity to do so. Deciding whether or not the state pursues this course of action rather depends on whether or not it challenges the predominant material interests. It becomes impossible precisely in the moment such action is directed against the hegemonic bloc. Class character thus determines its feasibility so that, on the one hand, this pervasive, tectonic power stipulates that it cannot be done. Whilst on the other, they blatantly shatter such presumed limitations to resuscitate the capital accumulation of the rentier class.
Politics is, famously, about the art of the possible. And this involves strategising to determine who are the actors and interests organised against you, how they may be defeated or circumvented, and what resources you may leverage to do so. This is to say that possibility is never certain – never foreclosed, sclerotic. It’s always malleable; the outcome of social conflicts. Brazilian philosopher Roberto Unger likes to say institutions are ‘frozen politics’; the structural sediments of contingent, ever fluctuating balances of power. The essence of centrism is to pretend this is not the case; to take the existing ‘reality effect’ for granted. It is far easier for Clinton – on her bank account, her friends, and her ideological precepts – to sanctimoniously disparage a Green New Deal as ‘chocolate milk’, than it is to engage in the fierce struggle to extract the sacrifices needed to make it a reality.
