What Does it Mean to be ‘Aspirational’?

I’m always struck by the strangeness of appeals to ‘aspirational’ voters in electoral politics. It is axiomatic that this particular group is vehemently opposed to any muscular redistributive programmes. The risk, of course, is these policies penalise people for daring to ‘make something of themselves.’ Quite apart from the nonsensicalness of much of its invocation (there is really no way John Doe is ever going to hit the tax bracket of Jeff Bezos, in part because Bezos’ wealth depends precisely on that fact) I’ve found it telling that, if we take aspirational to mean what it is, a desire to better ones life, that union organisers and tenant’s associations are not considered ‘aspirational’. Collective action premised on exactly that same impetus in not recognised to be so, because what ‘aspirational’ really denotes is an ideological keyword for individualised class competition. To be aspirational under capitalism is not to collaborate together to further one’s social position against those in power, the driving force across history for those things we consider synonymous with progress, like the abolition of slavery, banning child labour, universal suffrage, or the weekend. To be aspirational under capitalism is rather to be willing to kick your neighbour in the teeth.

While crude, that colloquialism captures capitalism’s essential logic of competition. Stuart Hall, in his astute 1956 essay, ‘A Sense of Classlessness’, spoke of the shift from the classical antagonisms of labour and capital to the absent class consciousness of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, in which each of us is caught somewhere along a social ladder, our betterance locked in an inverse relation with those of others. This piece on the Unemployed Negativity blog, offers a couple useful ways of thinking through this kind of affective state: ‘lottery thinking’ and ‘negative solidarity’, in which the aspiration guiding the former is warped into an ugly destructive impulse in the latter. In the first case, a ‘Rawlsian anti-justice’ takes hold: ‘rather than considering the likelihood of achieving material success in an unequal society highly unlikely and therefore preferring a more equal one, instead the psychology of the million-to-one shot prevails.’ Hence the phenomena of poor people as ‘temporarily embarassed billionaires’, in which tax hikes are an affront against their future self. ‘Since I will inevitably be wealthy in the future, this line of thinking runs, I will ensure that the conditions when I become wealthy will be as advantageous to me as possible, even though on a balance of realistic probabilities this course of action will in fact be likely to be entirely against my own interests.’ This is precisely what is meant by that subset of ‘aspirational’ voters to whom most of the political class genuflects.

The second case is quite different. The hope in aspiration is displaced by that of jealousy and impotence. ‘Negative solidarity is actively and aggressively anti-aspirational,’ in which the conditions of impoverishment are hypostasised and generalised, so that if I have to suffer, everyone else must too. It is a pure masochism, wherein one’s pain is only metered by the knowledge that others must also face it. When Tory outriders justified the latest cut to public workers pay — even after the display of gratitous symbolism (some might even say ‘virtue signalling’) that was our weekly claps for carers, temporarily enobbled by the epithet of ‘essential workers’ — they did so by pointing to the greater decline in private sector pay. If unionised workers do better in a recession that non-unionised ones, this becomes not an argument for the extension of such institutions, but there etiolation. Eminently pathological, negative solidarity inverts the rational impulse — that we should work together to advance our collective position, to reduce rather than increase the amount of suffering— into a kind of backward levelling, wherein the inequalities within the oppressed classes are razed in a equalisation of catatstrophe (while, of course, the oppressors see their wealth continue to rise). Constitutive here is a fatalism that is inseperable from the veil of capitalist realism. If our horizon of possibility is completely effaced, the logic of decline presumed to be inexorable, then negative solidarity is the only plausible kind. It thus emerges from the pernicious coupling of atomised competition and the torpidity of TINA.

But beneath this, the classical kernel of aspiration does still exist in a powerful sense. Neoliberalism’s generation of the ‘entrepreneur of the self’, and its discursive foundation in ideas of self-reliance and self-realisation, still operates. What I really want to argue here, though, is that despite being utterly saturated by ideological distortions, those affects are potentially quite positive; and, further, that any radical project must find a way of rearticulating them outside of the perversity of lottery thinking and negative solidarity. We should, in other words, contest what is meant by aspiration, to disarticulate it’s essence of ‘betterment’ and ‘actualisation’ from individualised class competition, and re-articulate it towards projects of collective advancement and emancipatory self-realisation.

To this end, Pete Davis, a co-founder of the Democracy Policy Network and contributor to magazine Current Affairs, recently tweeted the following:

Health, food, and housing security programs are basic pillars of economic infrastructure — they undergird a dynamic economy. Economic security increases risk-taking, which is the key to ventures of all kinds. No security means no risk-taking, no ventures, and no economic dynamism […] Medicare for All, for example, would be a huge boon to entrepreneurship — much more than any tax cut or deregulation would be. What stops more people from quitting their job and starting a venture: Wealth taxes? Consumer protections? Or the fact they’ll lose their health care?

Davis expresses concisely here the kind of argument the left should be making. Implicit is a discursive shift from speaking of ‘safety nets’ to ‘foundations’. While similar on the surface — both seek to reduce poverty by providing some kind of minimal income barrier — this substitutaion entails quite a different normative paradigm. In the first sense — and here we see the impact of means-testing and the ideological confabulations of ‘scroungers’ and ‘welfare queens’ they provoke — social protection is something offered when one falls, when we fail. Those who are the biggest failures, by accident or by character, get the most protection. While inseparable from those (often heavily racialised) folk devils and the cutthroat instincts of competition, much antipathy to such programmes also comes down to the sense that ‘people shouldn’t get money for nothing’. Putting aside the distortions that inform this, it also expresses a piece of what Gramsci would call good sense: that of social obligation to one another, a mutuality, contributing to collective good. The presumption is that those on welfare do not fulfil their side of the social contract; do not, in some sense, earn the social housing they live in, or the unemployment payments, or the child support. The whole disciplinary apparatus of Britains contemporary welfare system, its surveillance and sanctions, is animated by this sense of distrust. It seeks to forecefully ellict that meeting of the social contract which, in this case, is reduced to demonstrating one’s desire to ‘work’ — which, for those right at the bottom of the labour-market, caught in cycles of tenous employment and unemployment, really means one desire to submit to an exploitative boss for terrible wages. But forced trust is not really trust, and forcing people into a hierarchical wage-relation is not mutuality. If this is the constellation that surrounds the ‘safety net’, how can a discourse of ‘foundations’ liberate this element of good sense?

To speak of foundations is to accuse detractors of putting the cart before the horse. People need help first before they can contribute: providing the necessities of life ensures that individuals are free from the ennervation and inhibition of poverty, that they have the mental and resource latitude to experiment, innovate, and realise their potentials. This is precisely what Pete Davis was getting at above: bankruptcy laws are understood not as giving people money for nothing, but encouraging active participation and value-creation. To understand decommodification in a parallel manner is to say that people can be the best they can be, and thus can contribute to the collective good, only when they have the stable foundations that enable them to do so. Social provision is not there primarily to help us when we fall, but to ensure that we rise; it is not passive, but enabling. Universalism is about generating a context in which individuals can flourish, in which their creative and entrepreunerial energies can be nurtured without the anxiety of falling into destitution. It displaces the suspicion of home economicus’ min-max assumption, in which all seeks maximal material wealth with minimum effort, with a positive anthropology of creative capabilities and a sense of ethical obligation. Thus, the unleashing of human energies is annexed by the left, with the heteronomy of capitalist production and doubly-free labour associated with dependency and enervation.

Just to conclude, it’s worth noting that this requires an attendent rearticulation of the objects of human energies, or what exactly is meant by entrepreunership. Its entymology reveals the terms originary variance, coming from the French agent-verb to ‘undertake’, with the task being perfomed left unspecified. Stepping outside the linguistic confines of 19th century industrial capitalism, in which its association with ‘business manager’ ossified, it is useful to consider it abstractly as the undertaking of projects, of projection, of that kind of generative intentionality in which humans produce and reproduce the social world and its numerous artifacts. It strikes me that the cult of the entreprenuer has more or less totally monopolised this sense of activity, of praxis, of self and social development into a shallow and materialist ‘go-getterness.’ By contrast, if we go back to Pete Davis’ tweet above, his use of ‘venture’ is key. Not coincidentally, Davis’ Democracy Policy Network, and the fascinating socialist pragmatism that seems to underline his personal philosophy, is oriented towards various kinds of institutional experimentation distinct from capitalist logics. Unions; mutual-banks; worker co-operatives; non-profit community gardens; community land trusts; political cooperatives — these are all solidaristic and democratic forms of ‘get up and go’ that don’t require exploitation and domination.

To be sure, the good sense implicit in appeals to apsiration is a politics in vitro, whose emancipatory realisation is prohibited within capitalisms ideological matrix. And to wrestle the rational affects smothered under ‘lottery thinking’ and ‘negative solidarity’ back from capital is no small task. But, given the intuitive power of the ‘foundations’ argument, the importance of self-realisation, and the fugitive mutuality it attatches itself to, the left cannot surrender this discourse to the right. That capitalism innovates and enables while socialism represses is an old nostrum that still carries too much weight. By performing this transvaluation of aspiration and entreprenuership via an immanent critique, coupled with the requisite forms of material organisation, this binary can be swiftly inverted.