This is Bo’s Research, a collection of writing and (maybe?) a newsletter concerned with bridging the gap between class struggle and the accumulation process.
I took the phrasing from Gabriel Winant’s recent retrospective essay in N+1 on the late great Mike Davis. Winant quotes an early review by Davis on Michael Aglietta’s 1976 A Theory of Capitalist Regulation:
“the political economy of workers’ struggles . . . remains for the most part a terra incognita. The underdevelopment of economic history resonates in labor history as the absence of a theoretical level linking class struggles to their structural (partial-) determinants in the accumulation process (as well as, conversely, the absence of a theory of the role of the class struggle in U.S. economic development).”
Other topics will be addressed as well (don’t worry), but I’ve found that even the writing I do on the seemingly unrelated tends to boomerang around eventually to this terra incognita that Davis identifies, which is an accurate enough summation of my concern here: theoretically ‘mediating’1 a largely historical discourse about class struggle and a largely economic discourse about the capitalist accumulation process.2 .
It is a well-worn critical point about economic discourse in general that it is ahistorical. The model of exchange that it presupposes between equal units is possible only by abstracting from the distinction between commodity owners who own money and can employ labor (capitalists), and commodity owners whose only commodity to sell is their body and time. It ‘forgets’ the history of the institutional, social and legal forces that function as the model’s condition of possibility.
At the same time, it can be said in a broad sense at least that the discipline of history (and indeed, even ‘economic history’) lacks a certain theoretical sophistication with regard to economics. More specifically, it lacks a conception of what constitutes capitalism as a historically specific mode of economic production.3
Yet you can’t really blame the historians—the Marxists can’t agree on what the structure even is (much less communicate it very clearly, cf. debates within ‘Marxology’), while the economists (and non-Marxists in general) don’t even think capitalism is specific, simply the realization of ever-present tendencies understood as ‘natural.’
The disjunction (disciplinary, conceptual, terminological, cultural, aesthetic) between the two is primarily what I’m interested in exploring.
Luckily for you all though, I’m neither a trained historian nor a trained economist.
BH
Nov 18 2022
PS: Two warnings:
(1) As you might be able to tell from the first essay posted "Capitalist History, Capitalist Structure," I tend to bury the lede in the footnotes. I’m not telling you you should read the footnotes, but I have a bad habit of doing that and also writing a lot of them.4 Do with that warning what you will.
(2) I don’t enjoy writing. While I am interested in the question of the relation between ideas and their social actuality — and anyone who shares that fascination eventually stumbles on the question of style — I don’t enjoy writing itself, and I certainly don't enjoy thinking about my own style as if I had one. I do though enjoy ideas, but basically I find writing to be a brutal task involving a mostly exhausting process of conceptual hammering. Basically that's my pre-emptive excuse if there's dearth of new publications posted on here.
I say that and yet…a quick note on style—I don’t actually buy that quote attributed sometimes to Albert Einstein and sometimes to Richard Feynman: "if you can't teach something to a 6-year-old, that means you don't really understand it". Other versions include, “if you can’t say something clearly, that means you don’t understand.” There are probably others. It doesn’t actually seem to be a quote by Feynman or Einstein. There is an excerpt from a book on Feynman by his college David and Judith Goodstein (Feynman’s Lost Lecture):
“Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, ‘Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.’ Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, ‘I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.’ But he came back a few days later to say, ‘I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.’
This seems ambiguous in relation to the cliche. Similarly, I can’t seem to source the exact citation for Einstein, although it is everywhere. Another (apparently real) quote from Feynmann though is: “If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize”.
Personally, I think the prologue to Silvanius Thompson’s 1910 Calculus Made Easy: Being a Very-Simplest Introduction to Those Beautiful Methods of Reckoning Which are Generally Called by the Terrifying Names of the Differential Calculus and the Integral Calculus (real title) is more relevant:
“Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks. Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics—and they are mostly clever fools—seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way. Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. What one fool can do, another can.”5
Over the next few weeks I’ll be re-publishing pieces currently scattered around and published elsewhere. When that’s complete, I’ll start posting new writing that hasn’t been published.
Thanks by the way for subscribing, and a special welcome to the 160 or so people who initially signed up. That’s way more than I anticipated—probably too many.
For those uncomfortable with this sort of Hegelian terminology simply replace ‘mediating’ with ‘thinking together’ because that’s basically what it means.
‘Labor history’ is probably too narrow a term for the former. My concern with ‘class struggle’ has to do not simply with struggles between labor and capital, but also conflicts real and imagined between ‘factions’ that exist and have existed within both capital and labor.
It is basically a truism for example to claim that a history of capitalism requires constructing the specificity of capitalism at the level of its economic structure; of its ‘ideal average,’ in the Marxist methodological jargon. Otherwise, what history is even being written.
Possibly a side-effect of early and embarrassing over-exposure to David Foster Wallace at an intellectually formative age.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33283/33283-pdf.pdf.