At the historical moment Sweden has joined NATO, let us pause to reflect upon the global victory of Anglo ideology.
The Anglo Cross-political Virtue: Dutiful Martial Communitarianism
Through 15 years of living in the British Empire’s mining-management colony Canada, I have been studying Anglo ideology. This was necessitated as Anglo ideology uses words I am familiar with (eg. from my Political Sociology expertise) in very different ways. In particular, Anglo ideology permeates Anglo “leftist” thought in specific, identifiable ways that can be associated with the imperial Counterenlightenment. For Anglos, leftism is dutiful martial communitarianism. Thus leftism is not distinguished from conservative dutiful communitarianism. Both are simply considered “solidarity.”
Hence, in periods of global egalitarian movement, “Red Tories” emerged in the British Commonwealth, and correspondingly, in our conservative era, Anglo leftists identify closely with authoritarian, patriarchal isolation and immobilization policy absolutely discounting human development. Anglos regard this identity between left and right communitarianism as evidence of what they hail as a distinctively Anglo virtue, moderation.
Culturalist Causal Explanation in Anglo Leftism: American Individualism
Commonwealth “leftists” oppose leftism to neoliberalism, which they associate most consistently with the US and individualist extremism. Anglo ideology presumes that Americans are the source and embodiment of individualist extremism, individualist extremism distinguishes Americans from British subjects, and individualism causes American political outcomes.
By contrast American accounts of political causation center state opposition to the working class. American labor historian Erik Loomis argues that in the early 20th century, Americans were easy to mobilize around the concept of sacred private property–in order to dismantle union organizing and cross-racial solidarity, that is to decapacitate, divide and isolate the working class. Throughout countries organized by English common law and the legal innovations expanding and prioritizing asset claims, including the US, the political sacralization of private property is reinforced via policy that inter alia socially subsidizes small business and home ownership on a continuum with social subsidies for large business investment and risk.
The surface validity of the Anglo causal attribution concerning “individualism” rests upon an imprecise concept of individualism, such as failure to note that aside from the idealized models promoted by the global economics profession and Anglo-American common-law discourse, in neoliberal policy, elites are not individualistic. Any individualism ideology occludes the fundamental fact that concentrations of private property cohere the supports from which they exclude smallholders. Thus, as Political Sociology has conclusively shown, elites are extremely class solidaristic (particularly British and American elites!) and swaddled in supports, whereas nonelites specifically are policed and managed into disorganized atomism as a mode of governance. Trauma psychologists including Bessel van der Kolk have argued that the U.S. is thronging with traumatized people, and that the cause of traumatization is being trapped in isolation, separation from social support.
Commonwealth Anglos maintain an imprecise and reductive consensus conception of American culture and ideologies: Cross-bred with militarism, and like meritocracy and other forms of elitism, the ongoing, ragingly-conservative slaver culture for example is extremely hierarchical, not individualistic. What distinguishes the US is not some inherent natural culture of individualism that centuries of diverse immigrants somehow morphed into, but rather an extreme framework of top-down authoritarian control: a state carefully structured from its origin to serve at capital’s side against the social, developmental capacities and needs of the working-class population, and in that tradition, elected political leaders at the state and local level (governors, district attorneys, mayors, and city counselors) are ready to deploy military attacks on the American working class, usually using the National Guard (In the South, slavers’ social hierarchies formed private militias to attack the Black working class).
If Americans are to be singled out as culturally individualistic, this atomization must be related first and foremost to the first two principles: sacred private property right, legally elaborated and state-enforced, and the related, repeated American working class incapacity to autonomously cultivate and elect regional and local officials who will refrain from using state militias to attack them. (Standout historical exceptions include socialist Minnesota governor Floyd B. Olsen and environmentalist Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot. Team historical-materialist.)
Perhaps American state violence is the product of the tight capitalist-state governance system cohering elites in a decidedly non-individualistic way and proscribing and disrupting working class organizing and political representation. Perhaps American state violence is produced by small-business subsidy’s construction of an expansive, hierarchical, and exclusive property owner-identified coalition. Perhaps American state violence is an extension of the slavers’ violent militias and mass traumatization. In any case, individualism is a manufactured product of antihuman legal and state suppression, and it does not apply to or constrain the class that monopolizes political power in the US. The Anglo social democratic (martial communitarian) v. individualism conceptual binary is principally instrumental, rivalristic, intra-empire propaganda rather than a clarifying framework. Resting upon a cultural determinist explanation of American COVID politics and policies as “individualism” is not insightful scholarship so much as a shoddy, lazy contribution to ongoing intra-imperial state branding rivalry.
British Social Theory Applies Cultural Mystifications to Explain Pandemic Processes
British Sociologist Sylvia Walby’s article “The COVID Pandemic and Social Theory” (written in the first year of the COVID pandemic, in 2020), published in the European Journal of Social Theory in early 2021, is a model of Anglo left (liberal) ideology. In that article, Walby counterposes a “utilitarian neoliberalism” to what she calls “social democracy,” where she defines social democracy as absolute, universal solidarity with the disabled/vulnerable, exemplified by people highly impacted by SARS-CoV-2. She associates utilitarian neoliberalism with what she depicts as callous herd-immunity.
Despite its left’s own inflated claims, the Anglo tradition does not have social democratic institutions; briefly, in the early 20th century, societies around the world adopted more democratic policies and institutions (such as welfare states, public education, and public health care) as a result of working-class, radical Enlightenment organizing which gained influence in the context of economic crisis and a temporary dip in ruling-elite confidence. The era’s Anglo-American version of these democratic policy adoptions remained confined within the liberal sine-qua-non, sacred private property right, and should be recognized as social liberalism. After a half-century of heavy, concerted, elite-funded and -organized attacks on social citizenship and the welfare state, what is striking is how robust the democratizing period’s innovations have been.
Because the bowdlerized-Rawlsian, communitarian Anglo version of leftism is not in fact social democratic (not historical-materialist), there are a number of empirical validity issues with Walby’s formulation. First, actually-existing social democracies are well recognized for pursuing utilitarian policies, maximizing welfare across the majority of the population. Critics in the Anglo countries frequently point out that maximizing the distribution of welfare can discount or defer the interests of marginal populations, importantly including elites but as well some disabled, racialized, or religious-ethnic minorities. The Antienlightenment justice claim is that elites can patronize the most vulnerable people, protecting them from the democracy, middle class, workers, and women that undermine the welfare of the most vulnerable, as democracy deprioritizes the interests, freedoms, and patronage power of elites. The exemplary Antienlightenment argument is that women’s rights oppress vulnerable foetuses, and so a patriarchal hierarchy is required to suppress the tyrannical nature of the majority, women.
By contrast, the Enlightenment social democratic fix for the marginal injustice accompanying utilitarian majority justice is to eschew as far as possible centering elites, instead adding remediations addressing the interests of marginalized nonelites in pareto-optimal ways that do not undermine the welfare of the majority. Keeping elite interests marginal, the Enlightenment’s utilitarian + additive social democratic approach to governance is heavily criticized and oppositionally misrepresented, particularly in the imperial core and its Commonwealth tributaries.
So for example, the actually-existing social democracies Sweden and Kerala pursued utilitarian pandemic policies, constraining isolation and immobilization policies, because they recognized isolation and immobilization as inimical to human development and so generative of their own, disastrous non-viral health pandemic. This policy was taken within the context of preceding social democratic policy that had built distinctive resourcefulness by supporting human health and scientific literacy across the majority of the population, based upon the philosophical-materialist and historical-materialist insight that humans as a Terrestrial lifeform have a developmental arc and a specific, finite, identifiable range of capacities (visual capacities, sociability, communicative capacities, bipedal capacity to cover great distances, lifespan, bacteria-aided digestion and cognition, etc.) that can also be limitations (non-omniscience, mortality, vulnerability to microplastics and radiation, etc.). The utilitarian social democratic focus on majority welfare has often been a desperately-needed antidote to steeply-hierarchical capitalist inegalitarianism and the idealist mystifications that it requires.
But at times, under some circumstances, utilitarianism has also unnecessarily sacrificed the autonomous development of populations marginal to the majority. Within the social democratic framework this too is injustice (as is inegalitarianism and inequality in societal production and reproduction systems) because maximally distributing human capacity promotes innovation and resource accumulation, and can allow resources to be collected and distributed to ameliorate nonelite marginalization.
Eugenics is a classic example of an unjust application of utilitarianism, including within actually-existing social democracies. At the core of the Atlantic ruling class’ capitalist-expropriative empire, Commonwealth subjects often fail to remember/recognize that in imperial capitalism, non-modernized and de-modernized societies are subjected to violent, crippling colonial expropriation by financial-military core elites; this inherent feature of capitalism creates enormous incentive to deploy collective action capacity to rapidly modernize (or where collective-action capacity is disrupted and suppressed, inexorable corruption). In the early 20th century moment of scientistic social Darwinism converging with countries’ desperation to modernize, this meant that people with disabilities that disrupted the efficiency of the newly-modernizing social infrastructure of the time were coercively sterilized under a utilitarian eugenics policy, in actually-existing social democracies as well as in the liberal and conservative countries of the time. While coerced sterilization does not violate the Enlightenment justice of human development, it does violate individual autonomous agency, and there is a cultural argument that the experience of parenthood is a form of human development for some kinds of people.
Walby is bowdlerizing Rawlsian distributive justice, misappropriating it to a conservatized context bereft of socialist rivals: By “greatest benefit to the least advantaged” Rawls (1971, 1993) recommends that “inevitable” capitalist inequalities—in income, wealth, and powers and positions—should be arranged to make the least advantaged class better off than they would be under any alternative social and economic scheme of cooperation (JF, 59–60, 63). Contra Antienlightenment theory, this is a sociologically-specified philosophical argument that does not preclude majority-centering welfare. Walby’s appropriation of this redistributive justice principle eviscerates its sociological specification. The Antienlightenment “solidarity” proposal Walby forwards (and invalidly calls social democratic) is that the policy that is pursued must center the interests of the margin, the most unfortunate individual, to the extremity of making invisible the interests of the majority, including (as was done throughout the pandemic and beyond) by erasing the multiplicity of human health requirements as non-emergencies. This is accomplished under the steam of emergency discourse, which Walby explicitly reifies in her article. Walby’s liberal Shock Doctrine justification for claiming that one health variable (susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2) required a universal shift to the maximized conditions of prolonged population isolation and immobilization repeated the generalized logic of capitalism, wherein all human welfare is argued to follow from optimizing one, inhuman premier condition, absolute private property right.
Yet, 1) elite interests are marginal to the majority’s interests, and undermine majority agency, innovation, development and welfare; 2) as actually-existing social democracies quickly learned, even centering the nonelite marginal interests may well undermine the majority’s welfare, their developmental health, as where infrastructure is built not to add but to center rolling–putatively for the interest of people without use of their legs (as well as for elites who own automobile factories and oil companies) and disincentivizes walking, which locomotion is essential to the majority of humans’ health over maximized healthy lifespans; 3) Social democracy contributes to wealth accumulation by maximally distributing innovative agency and welfare; this allows for the addition of pareto-optimal protections for non-elite marginal interests upon the core of majority supports; 4) no matter how global, no emergency obviates the rest of the important conditions (including sociability, mobility) pertaining to human health.
Erasing the multiplicity of crucial human health requirements:
Most alarming from a (philosophical and historical) materialist perspective is disability theory’s philosophical abstraction of all humans not as agential, developmental life, but in a universal process of morbidity and mortality. This is a thanatocentric, fungal perspective. This disability theory has been adopted by some of the medical profession’s and pandemic advocates of dutiful solidarity. By contrast, in centering change and agential, innovative, developmental life, democratic Epicureanism (one of the roots of historical materialism, the radical Enlightenment, and actually-existing social democracy) explicitly operated to counter inegalitarian Antienlightenment manipulation of fear of death.
Centering innovative, agential, developmental life, a radical or democratic Enlightenment (a real social-democratic) approach to the pandemic would not have merely substituted physicians and pharmaceutical CEOs for Chamber of Commerce and NAM governance. An Enlightenment approach to the pandemic would have contained and moderated emergency, authoritarian Shock Doctrine interventions by prioritizing human health in its complexity, recognizing the centrality of social reproduction, care work–and thus by convention women’s work–to human health throughout the human lifespan, as well as preserving human health over the long term by prioritizing and protecting the ongoing development of the range of human capacities.
Centering developmental human life (and additively addressing its impaired moments and instances in supporting human development), including recognition of (but not centering) the death limit articulated with the larger sphere of Terrestrian life, would put a humane, democratic boundary on the dehumanizing, imperial positivist-mechanist population-surveillance and -governance imaginary that is used to coordinate, to rule, and to extinguish large societies. In the context of the pandemic emergency, such a democratic materialist shift would have built a more durable alternative to neoliberalism that would have better benefited even medical workers.
Interests behind erasing the multiplicity of human health requirements
As medical system workers and managers have repeatedly emphasized, the COVID pandemic was a very positive experience in that medical workers were elevated beyond capitalism’s business and political party leaders to dictate policy sometimes optimizing and sometimes minimizing harm to hospital functioning, medical worker workloads, and treating patients suffering acutely or dying from SARS-CoV-2. Medical workers remain extremely disappointed that neoliberal governance optimizing business leaders’ interests was restored at medical workers’ expense. They often bitterly report experiencing as betrayal (inducing disappointment, anger, and burnout) the public’s collusion with the demise of pandemic medical-centric governance and the return of a capitalist business leadership (represented by political parties) that presumptively ended “the pandemic” (medical-centric governance) and restored minimal (insufficient, but better than none) neoliberal sociability and mobility along with all the institutions of neoliberal inequality and inegalitarianism (many of which, like policing, are isolation and immobilization models that had been retained, prioritized, and augmented in the pandemic).
It seems that medical workers’ pandemic trauma manifests as a nostalgia for a protracted period in which mortal fear was a communitarian duty, authorizing a partial extension of neoliberal governance privileges to medical practitioners at what medical workers regard as the acceptable price of authoritarian patriarchy–“essential” policing unrelieved by non-medical feminized care work—and at the acceptable price of the ensuing cascade of costly health damages incurred in isolation and immobilization, the “antihuman” (as many feminists called it) disregard for human development. To medical workers, all harms to health prove the value of medicine.
This nostalgia stands in the way of a reckoning: Medical authority’s population management framework was incapable of building a governance alternative to capitalist neoliberalism both generating poor working conditions in the field of medicine as well as the death-drive conditions (eg. gain-of-function microbe research, lethal policing and incarceration, and myriad institutions discounting egaliberte human development) generating epidemics and pandemics and broadly deprioritizing the vital development and health of the “population.”
Medical practitioners suffered as mothers, so they are aware that feminized social-reproducers suffered in the pandemic. But like Sylvia Walby, they struggle within liberal theory to understand why. To add ad hoc acknowledgement of a majority’s, mothers’, varied pandemic suffering to a core theoretical commitment to marginal-justice thanaticism is to quixotically pursue a defunct Red Toryism in an era of Antienlightenment and capitalist inequality, an uncompromising era of conservative triumph. That tracks for Canada.
The Indomitable Neoliberals FC 