Society Must Be Defended

Even as the United States is being torn apart by the contradictions of capitalism, the cultural and institutional apparatuses which pump out the false consciousness of a unified America are working overtime. Everywhere centrists continue to calls for Americans to "disagree better" and seek common ground despite the irreconcilably opposed material interests of the broad masses of people and the bourgeoisie. I can only really speak in terms of the academy, the milieu I inhabit, but I feel like there are even more attempts by annoying and asinine ideologists to push a false institutional neutrality on things like the genocide in Gaza (false because it's a clearly bourgeois position with no benefit to average people). However, despite the quantitative increase in calls for neutrality, many people don't seem to be buying the idea of a common American identity any longer. While the mass organizing being done by leftists to raise people's consciousness and dispel false beliefs deserves credit for the disintegration of bourgeois American society, I think that there is a profound disinterest and atomization occurring which has also sped up the process.

Of course, some disintegration is inevitable. Society needs a reserve army of disintegrated people in order to reinforce needy parts of the social organism. If everyone simply remained within their social networks and localities from cradle to grave, there would be little in the way of dynamism and innovation within society's organizations, institutions, and religions. Converts bring with them two new hands to materially reinforce a social network alongside crucial outside perspective. The classics knew of the phenomenon of disintegration; Marx's account of alienation and Durkheim's anomie in their own way each explore the inevitable demoralization of people in a highly specialized modern economy. However, when too many are stripped of a sense of belonging, when people do not have a referent for their morality, then social solidarity totters and falls. We are at that stage in the United States. The threads of mechanical solidarity which have stitched the American social organism together in the face of inequality and other material contradictions are coming undone, and more and more people drift listless and demoralized from the approved identities and worldviews.

Very dumb to those experiencing disaffection

The anomie in America is ultimately relative to the morality of the ruling class, however. As society is polarizing and splitting, new moral pluralities, such as communism, are staking their claim as legitimate rubrics of social organization. The defenders of American civil society are attempting to delegitimize the upsurge of new moralities, because they portend the upsurge of a new social organism. Lenin wrote during the time of the dual power in Russia that the bourgeoise seeks an undivided dictatorship, and the new seizure of power by the soviets challenged this dictatorship as new proletarian institutions were developed (ie, police and military apparatuses). This is the unspoken next stage of social disintegration; a new moral calculus is created with its own defenders as the balance of material power shifts. In turn, the bourgeoise ideological majority became a pole of Durkheimian deviance, the defenders of the old society became moral entrepreneurs (counter-revolutionaries) trying to bring things back. We are nowhere near the dual power at all, but a manifestation of the same general trend can be observed by activists who know and work with regular people.

So, in the end, those who become disaffected from society through the alienation of capitalism and those who become disaffected from society through direct organizing ultimately will be drawn into a new parasociety, which will in turn become a dominant society under the right conditions. It's moral entrepreneurs, the organizers, who will decide the terms and contours of that society under the weight of history, and it will be their turn to defend it from deviance and collapse. There's probably more intellectual work needed to fully elide polarization and disaffection on a material basis, but that's for another blog.