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“Something Else Is Going On”
Anne Case & Angus Deaton
Princeton University Press, 2021
I originally came across the existence of this book in an essay by
American revolutionary activist, Idris Robinson. His essay,
entitled, ‘On Pain’, seemed a departure from the usual ultra-leftist
economistic emphasis in that it actively identified and took cause
to propel to the fore the existence of widespread ‘social pain’
(both physical and emotional) taking the guise of what the authors
in question here term ‘deaths of despair’. These ‘deaths of despair’
cover suicides and deaths from drug overdoses and alcohol abuse.
Whilst the economic system called capitalism, under whose
dictatorship we are all coerced to live, is earmarked as a cause in
the rise of these ‘deaths of despair’ (in particular the ‘rent
seeking’ of the American health industry and lack of welfare
provision), it is disheartening to eventually come to read how these
two academics seek, in the interstices of much quite catastrophic
data, to proffer a solution to these deaths of despair in yet one
more ‘reform’ of a capitalism that, in their eyes, is becoming
too monopolistic. It’s as if, in face of what they call an epidemic
of ‘deaths of despair’, they wish to return to the fundaments of
capitalism by extolling the free market and re-promoting the
Victorian values of family cohesion, religion and a community
belonging based on finding the meaning of life in the servitude of
wage labour. So much for
Leftists being accused of nostalgia and a return to the promised
land!
Before returning to this aspect of the issue (the authors are both
fully tenured professors in economics) it is worth recalling that
over the past decade or so there has been a growing recognition that
capitalism, at is has come to function since the 70s (coming ‘off’
the gold standard as the measure of value), is literally ruinous of
both the physical and mental health of the vast majority of people.
Works like Franco Berardi’s Soul at Work and Precarious
Rhapsody have highlighted a contemporary situation – informed by
an intensification of the globalisation that Marx could hardly not
foresee – of increased job insecurity, self-exploitation,
indebtedness and emotional precarity. In his words: “The intense and
prolonged investment of mental and libidinal energies in the labour
process has created conditions of psychic collapse.” However, if
this is bad enough for those ‘lucky’ enough to be employed, what the
book under review here does raise to the foreground is that there
are some sectors of the population for whom ‘psychic collapse’ would
have been something to look forward to. They are talking of the
‘uneducated white working class’ whereas I would prefer to join
others in speaking of a ‘surplus population’ whose parameters far
outstrip the restricted scope of this book’s focus on a “specific
American story of pain.”
Such a specifity, revealed here in terms of how the ‘deaths of
despair’ data is reduced to comparison solely with that of ‘other
wealthy countries’ and not placed in a more
international context, nonetheless reveals something quite
shocking which may have caused this book to become one of the New
York Times ‘most notable books of 2020’. Across many pages the data
that renders this book as an empirical tome, is that ‘deaths of
despair’ have risen at a far greater rate for the white American
working class with the added qualification of their not being
educated to degree level. Whilst this smacks, at the extreme, of the
existence of a kind of meritocratic eugenics at work in modern
capitalism (what’s new?), it also seems problematic to me that
‘whites’ are singled out when the data, taken over a longer time
span, as well being inclusive of less spectacular criteria than
‘deaths’ (e.g. ‘social pain’ and the hardly unpacked ‘despair’ of
the book’s title), would maybe enable more general conclusions to be
drawn about the toll that an increasingly impotent capitalism
(modelled on the mafia and gangsterism) is taking on all our life
prospects as well as the psychical impact upon us of what it is to
be seen not as a person but, in Stalin’s happy phrase, as human
capital.
The authors, then, may, in order have their book fit the ‘current
affairs’ bracket, be attempting to explain the rise of populism
amongst the American white working class that appears to form the
rump of Trump’s support. Alternatively, there must be a widespread
panic amidst the entrepreneurial class as to a “depleting” work
force which nonetheless – with the now archaic decimation of
manufacturing and robotised supply-chain timetabling – seems mainly
to employ an ‘uneducated’ working class in services and,
increasingly, in the private social care industry which, in line
with the themes of this book, is charged with befriending and
supporting the growing swathes of the sick, disabled and mentally
ill. This latter
‘industry’ (a growing sector in the UK) brings to the fore a kind of
low paid ‘affective labour’ coupled to a form of ‘rent seeking’
through which the public purse is “redistributed upwards.”
Idris Robinson is acute in what he chooses to détourne from
this book. I will join him in citing, as he does, the following
paragraph:
The lives of many millions of Americans are comprised by pain; some
cannot work, some cannot spend time with friends or loved ones in
the way that they would like, some cannot sleep, and some cannot do
the activities that make daily life possible and fulfilling. Pain
can undermine appetite, induce fatigue, and inhibit healing; in
extreme cases, it erodes the will to live.
(p.88) Idris, similarly based in the American situation, is pulling
this book in another direction and I would like to tread this path
along with him and add to what he has written.
If we take Case and Deaton’s criteria of ‘social pain’ (i.e.
despair) as an indicator and decrease the emphasis on their more
spectacular ‘deaths of despair’ on which there is far more data,
what can be seen as catastrophic becomes almost apocalyptic. The
authors dream of the existence of an ‘afflictometer’. So do we! For
such an afflictometer would reveal in neat graphs not so much an
epidemic of ‘deaths of despair’ (bad enough) but a pandemic of
social pain (spreading rapidly). What’s more, after the austerity
induced by the 2008 bank bailout and, last week, the
much-anticipated rise in the price of energy, we only need go to the
pub to collect ‘data’ and it doesn’t come in graph form.
As the Czech surrealists suggested: we are living in
concrete irrational times when a monthly energy bill can
outstrip a monthly salary…, when klepto-capitalism can make money
out of pain and death … from ‘natural’ and, yes, planned disasters
as Amedeo Bordiga long ago suggested.
This
makes it hard to swallow such oxymoronic contentions as these: “The
genius of free markets is that people can prosper while helping
others.” (115)
So, with thoughts such as these in mind, we can take a different
view about the flailing future of capitalism. Whether it be ‘deaths
of despair’ or increasing ‘social pain’ (which latter provides the
ante-chamber to ‘deaths of despair’) it is impossible to reform, to
make ‘human’, an economic system that thrives on workplace
exploitation (surplus value extracted from the workforce in
increasingly diverse forms such as ‘affective labour.’) Indeed, the
authors themselves offer their readers that “the word labour is
often synonymous with pain.” (85) This is in no small part due to
the war of each against all; the mutually competitive bedrock of any
free market economy. Yet, that these authors extol a faith in the
free market (albeit ‘radically’ removing health care from its grasp)
not only functions to paint a picture of monopoly capitalism as
somehow an ‘excessive’ form of capitalism it fails to take on board
the Marxian truism that “monopoly produces competition, competition
produces monopoly” and thus that capitalism has an in-bred tendency
to increase profits by creating monopolies (assuring growing
market-share, buying up competitors, etc).
So, when they pose the question ‘Why Is Capitalism Failing So Many?’
as the title of Part IV of their book, we cannot be too shocked to
see how this more direct and universalising question is tempered by
not simply, as they explain, magically
summoning forth a ‘future’ of capitalism as the overall title to
their book, but by restricting the scope of the problem to the USA;
making monopoly capital the polar opposite of the free market; and
scapegoating sectors, such as Big Pharma, as the anti-heroes of an
otherwise liberal and benign scenario. This maybe assists them in
limiting their ‘solutions’ in the final (and shortest) chapter of
the book to the empty verbiage, the incestual code, of governmental
policy as journalese: ‘Corporate Governance’, ‘Safety Net’,
‘Anti-trust legislation’, ‘Healthcare Reform’ etc.
So, perhaps if you can cast a spell by using such a nonsensical
phrase as “normal rate of profit” (230), if you can still envision
the by now straw-man of “some fantastical socialist utopia in which
the state takes over industry ”, if you can seriously believe that
you can earn more and live a better life by going to university, if
you can reduce this whole sorry structurally embedded affair of
inequality to a matter of “unfairness”, then, you can likewise, as a
collective of two, believe that capitalism can be reformed and that
an ever incremental social pain will no longer give rise to deaths
of despair. But it probably also needs the optimism of ivory-tower
naivety, a ten-times removed reading of Marx, and the employment of
a non-contaminating distance between yourself and those people “that
kill themselves when life no longer seems worth living.” (94)
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