Universality and Identity Politics by Todd McGowan

Author:Todd McGowan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

A DISDAINFUL STRUCTURE

The necessary blindness to the functioning of authority that occurs in the capitalist epoch has terrible consequences for those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. While every system in history disdains those that it leaves behind, under capitalism this disdain becomes even more pronounced. One’s failure under capitalism is a result of one’s personal weakness and inability, not the dictates of birth or the social apparatus. Since, in the capitalist universe, there are only isolated particulars, the cause of my failure must reside in my particularity. If I don’t have a job, it is my fault, not the fault of a system that declares me an outcast. The obscurity of the capitalist structuring principle leads us to blame those excluded from the work force for their own fate, as the case of unemployment nicely illustrates.

When we conceive ourselves as an aggregate of particular individuals rather than as participants within the capitalist system, unemployment can only be the result of a lack of industriousness. Those who don’t have a job are the ones who don’t try hard enough. They have done something—or not done something—that leaves them in this position. A strict system of merit governs employment, enabling us to feel morally justified in our condemnation of the idleness of the permanently unemployed. But we can adopt this attitude only because we don’t see the structural necessity of their unemployment.

Even if one doesn’t go as far as Marx and assert the economic necessity of a reserve army of the unemployed, it is nonetheless clear that the proper working of the economic system depends on a certain level of unemployment.16 Capitalist economists themselves accept that eliminating unemployment altogether would portend skyrocketing inflation and economic disaster. Thus, economists search for a level of unemployment that they label “full employment.” Full employment, despite the name, is not the elimination of all unemployment but rather the minimum percentage of unemployed that the economy can endure without triggering runaway inflation.

Debate rages about where we draw the line and whether or not the line is always the same in every form of capitalist economy. But almost all economists accept that there exists what is called the “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment” (or NAIRU). If unemployment passes beneath this threshold, a crisis will ensue. The health of capitalism as a system derives from a certain percentage of workers filling the role of the necessarily unemployed.

Capitalism’s dependence on this level of unemployment removes joblessness from the failures of the particular and places it on the terrain of the success of the system. Though the capitalist economy doesn’t determine which individuals don’t have jobs, it does require that at least some individuals are in this position. In this sense, even if the unemployed are lazy and unambitious, they are nonetheless fulfilling the role that capitalism demands of someone.

In the academic labor market where the reserve army of labor is massive, the inability to recognize this dynamic appears among those who should know better. Each open permanent position in the humanities typically attracts hundreds of applicants.

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