Social Murder with Nate Holdren (Unlocked)
We speak with Nate Holdren about Friedrich Engels' concept of "social murder" and the social and political processes that have enabled the pandemic to be portrayed as if nothing more could be done. This episode was originally a patron-exclusive bonus episode, to support the show and get access to all of our bonus episodes: Become a patron.
Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)
Nate Holdren 0:00
And I think that view is one, just totally by condescending saviors, who are just like, you people need to shut up, we'll figure it out, we know the science. And like you just sit and be a pawn and we'll move you around on a chessboard. I mean a bit literally, like if you're playing a game of chess, and you're like, well, this pawn told me it doesn't want to die, like you're being an irrational chess player. But like, that's sort of the world we're in, you know, like our wants are irrational within their frameworks.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:51
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So today we are joined by friend of the panel, Nate Holdren. You may remember Nate from the episode we did with him recently, where Phil, Nate, and I discussed Dan's book called Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era. Nate is also an Assistant Professor of Law, Politics and Society at Drake University. And he is here today with Artie and I to talk about a recent essay called, Depoliticizing Social Murder in the COVID-19 Pandemic. Nate, welcome back to the show. It's so nice to have you back.
Nate Holdren 1:42
It's an honor to be back. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:44
So I thought to start us off, for people who might not be familiar with your work, who maybe haven't heard our long interview about your book, can you quickly set up what your research interests are and what your background is like, maybe as a way to lead us into talking briefly about what the overall argument of this recent piece is.
Nate Holdren 2:01
Yeah, sure thing. So I wrote this book called Injury Impoverished, and it was a long winding journey to get there. But the gist of the book is that it's an examination of workplace injury law in the early 20th century United States. And I like to say, the summary is, things used to be bad and worse than you think, but then later, they were differently bad and worse than you think. And the idea is that, within employee injury law, there are different forms of organizing social responses to harms that people incur in their work. And people get hurt a lot in work. And one of the ways that injury law organizes our social response to injury is it also tends to encourage us to think about numbers as small. So like, when I say people get hurt a lot, like what's a large pile of corpses, you know, like that's an interpretive question. And powerful interests and powerful institutions want us to think that a certain pile of corpses in a stack of separate rooms is a small stack, not a big one. And part of the point of the book is to sort of run through those institutional logics and point out -- point them out and just sort of say, like, you know, look at how all of the trespassing on human dignity that is involved in that, and I won't get into the details. But as you both know, there's also a huge chunk of the book is on -- like the second half of the book is on the specific effects on disabled people, as a population of these changes. But that's the book, and it comes -- it's kind of a long, winding journey, how I ended up writing it. I came out the other side of the book into -- well, so I turned the book in, in late 2019, and it was scheduled for publication in May 2020. [laughter] And I wasn't sure what to do, I was kinda -- I had a bunch of other things I wanted to work on kind of broadly about work and law and class and the labor movement. And I had notes for an essay on this category called social murder, which shows up in this piece. And I wrote a draft, and it wasn't a very good draft, in January. And then the pandemic kicked off in March. And, you know, I'm the primary victim of the pandemic, of course, as the main character [laughter]. But no, but it was thing where it was like, you know, I finished the book thinking, hey, this is my personal interest, and like, very -- my friends will smile and nod at, but like, no one else will get it. And then all of a sudden, it was -- it was like this Kafka scenario, of like I woke up inside my book, kind of. And obviously, that's a small scale harm compared to all the other harms of the pandemic. But it was this thing where suddenly, it came -- I was like sort of done with the topic, and then the world changed. And I was like, I'm really not done with this stuff. Because understanding the mass distribution, you know, the allocation of killing and harm, and the political responses to it through law took on a new urgency. And so that, it sort of -- that essay is threads coming out of the book, and then, you know, kind of future work where I want to go. And I don't know if I say this directly in the book -- I know I tried to imply it in the book -- but you know, the kinds of harms that I talk about in my book will happen in any version of capitalism, like some general version of those harms will happen. But I don't prove that in the book. And then lately, I've been trying to do some work on kind of going back to Marx and really kind of theoretically establish that case. So rather than just assert it force -- you know, I think the book asserts it forcefully and kind of rhetorically and has some really sad examples. I think people who read it sympathetically will come away with a gut sensibility that I'm right. But I don't think the book proves it. And so what I'm trying to do since is sort of say, like, actually, you know, theoretically, here's why capitalism is a lethal social system in any version of it, though the differences in how that lethality is organized change. And so that's part of what this new essay is trying to do, is try to think through a particular moment in response. And you know, hope you all know, it's informed by the work that you've done, and other friends of Death Panel as well.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 5:45
No, and I really appreciate the sort of way that you framed how you were setting that up, right, like part of it is that yeah, like things change, policies change, laws get passed, laws are implemented. And we like to tell the story of sort of like bad things happen, studies are done and people start to realize all the harm that is happening. And they're like, oh no, time for a policy, policy or law is passed --
Artie Vierkant 6:13
That there's some sort of like technocratic control mechanism to automatically like the -- yeah, knowledge production is done, and then we learn from it. And then I guess capitalism gets cuddlier or something.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 6:28
Right, problem solved.
Artie Vierkant 6:29
Yeah, the immiseration that people sense is blunted by progress, I guess. Right?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 6:39
Yeah. And there's this kind of tendency, right, to sort of -- to engage in this magical thinking where history proceeds in a straight line, in sort of one chronological direction, both in terms of ideology, in terms of knowledge production, in terms of like liberty, and freedom, and survival, and the right to not have a, you know, short and cruel and painful life. That these things are kind of solved as we step into like the history that becomes closer and closer to our present, right. And there tends to be this romanticization of past victories as being these moments that, you know, these monumental change happens. And it's -- I think it makes people feel very discouraged in the current moment that they live in, to sort of square that vision of how history happens and change is made, and the sort of social is built around us in real time, with, you know, the kind of idea of like how any change could be made right now, and how anything in their life could be improved now. And what I really appreciated about, you know, not only your book, but also the work that you've been doing since is that, you know, I really feel like that kind of disconnect, where that disconnect lies is like a area where you're trying to make that known to people, right? Make something that's like very difficult to grasp, very tangible. And so part of what you talk about in this piece, which is Depoliticizing Social Murder in the COVID-19 Pandemic, is you talk about the idea of social murder, which is more of a kind of process than it is anything else. And I think it's a really important lens, and I've said this often, and we've brought this up on the show, but we've never sort of sat down and actually just like discussed what it conceptually is.
Artie Vierkant 8:32
Had a nice, long conversation about social murder.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 8:34
Yeah, exactly. And so I thought maybe we could sort of start with talking through social murder. And you bring this up, you know, obviously right in the beginning of the piece, and it connects to this idea that you just mentioned, of the fact that, you know, part of the problem with the pandemic response, and with all sort of health and extraction and structural violence in general, right, is that there is no way to engineer capitalism to end social murder, because it is part of the system itself.
Nate Holdren 9:07
Absolutely. So I always like to foreground kind of my own journey to things and my process, partly my disposition as a Midwesterner, I don't like to be fancy, but also, I think it's important because the world -- the world is hard and confusing. And I think that when it feels like other people just magically get it, that's -- it's like, oh, I'm the only one who doesn't get it. So I always like to kind of foreground my journey to things. And so I wrote this book, and I have a footnote where like I wanted to understand this stuff, and it felt really urgent and I didn't know how to understand it. So I threw everything I had into the book. And so I have this footnote where I talk about this comedian who was talking about the Grenfell Tower fire in the UK -- and if folks aren't familiar with that, basically, it's a public housing development that had flammable insulation and residents, activists -- activists who were residents and had lived there for decades, saying this is dangerous, you need to do something. And the local council just never did anything about it. And it finally burned up and a bunch of people died. And this commentator said, you know, this is social murder, and he was quoting a UK politician. And I was like, that's an apt phrase, and so I threw that in. And then I finished the book, and I was like, you know, I'm going to finally get around to looking that up. And it actually comes from this book that Friedrich Engels wrote in 1845, you know, Marx's close collaborator. And I've been a Marxist for like longer than I've been an adult and -- but I've never really taken Engels especially seriously. Like Engels was the funder and the facilitator, right, Marx is the intellectual, was how I thought about it. So I'd never read that book. I read that book, I don't know, sometime in 2020. And it's The Condition of the Working Class in England, and it's a phenomenal book. I wish I'd read it years ago. I highly recommend it to everybody.
Artie Vierkant 10:46
Classic.
Nate Holdren 10:47
Yeah, right? And a classic that I had neglected because I was a bad -- had a bad version of Marxism. So I've got a chapter that I'm working on for an edited volume, which is not done yet. But that's trying to theorize social murder, and I try -- I won't get super into the Marx nerd weeds here, but basically, Engels writes this book in 1845. Engels also did some work on investigation of the economy that kicked off Marx's inquiry into the economy, and Marx is very, very clear about this in Capital, where he's like, Engels wrote this thing in the 1840s and that's why I started studying the economy. And so like that's a key part of how Marx comes to write Capital, is because of Engels' writing and then, you know, they're close collaborators, and in deep dialogue with each other. And some of the key chapters in Volume One of Capital are chapter 10, and chapter 15, which are on the working day and machinery respectively. And in those chapters, Marx is closely reading factory inspector reports, so basically, the public health authorities of his day. And he cites heavily to Engels' book, and he's like Engels covered up to 1845, I'm covering 1845 to present, basically -- 1865. And so I argue that between those works, Marx and Engels offer us a theory of social murder. It's not just a rhetorical phrase, but it's an account of why capitalism will kill. And I think that that is -- I think I'm right about that. I think that those works -- this is wonky, but one way to -- I got this from a philosopher named Tony Smith, who wrote a superb book I highly recommend, called Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism. And the phrase is wonky, but it's important. He says that what Marx offers us is an analysis of the social ontology of capital. And what that means is like, in capitalism, there's a particular kind of social process that's real and exists, even though it's hard to touch and hard to perceive, called capital. And so like, you can think of it like a chessboard, there's certain pieces on the board, but some of them are hard to perceive. And so I'm arguing that social murder is one of the pieces on the chessboard, it's part of the social ontology of capital as social system. And so it's not an accident. It's baked in, is basically the claim. And I think Marx and Engels say that, and it's very, very clear if you're reading those chapters, but they don't harp on it in the way that I'm starting to harp on it. And basically, I mean, Bea, you put this really well, I've been quoting you -- I think I quote you in this chapter, actually -- you know, in capitalism, you're entitled to the survival you can buy. And which means, when you run out of money, you run out of access to survival. And access to money in capitalism is conditional, which means survival is conditional, let alone thriving. And so what Marx and Engels do is they lay out like all of these facets of life very concretely, like enough food, or enough high quality food, you know, poorly regulated, cheap food that harms your body versus high quality food. And then they do that for housing, having enough leisure time, and enough high quality leisure time and time to sleep. So work, you know, work hours and commute times. And then dangers in the workplace, you know, like the various things in work that hurt people's bodies, whether it's overwork or the dangerous machinery, or high temperatures, or chemicals, etc.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 10:47
Or COVID.
Nate Holdren 11:12
Or COVID, 100%. And they also talk about the kind of spilling over of the -- what's the word -- like the effluence, like the pollution of labor processes into everyday life. So like if you live next to an incinerator, and incinerators are disproportionately located in low income communities of color in the United States, and it's a lot of hospital waste. Polyvinyl chloride is in a lot of hospital -- like the tubes for IVs and stuff. It's a good material for making certain objects from for hospitals, and then it gets gathered up and burnt in incinerators. And those incinerators are often located in communities of color. And so if you live next to that incinerator, like the labor process of that incinerator spills over into your living room, and you breathe that shit in. And there's a lot of examples like that, and Engels and Marx talk about train accidents, like the train derails and it hits your house. And so I sort of walk -- in this essay, I sort of walk -- I think I'm writing a walk through all of those, and say these are predictable sites of killing. And then the depoliticizing thing, that essay is sort of me trying to run with that analysis. But I think, you know, a key element there is, again, sort of underlining, you don't have a right to money, and your way to get stuff only passes through money. Like, you can't get sufficient stuff without sufficient money, and you don't have a right to get sufficient money. And that -- that just is a lethal arrangement. Like there's no two ways around that.
Artie Vierkant 15:26
Absolutely. I think before we get to the depoliticization element, I want to dwell on all of the stuff that you're talking about around social murder here, because I think this is -- first of all, I think this is really important. I'm glad that you're working on it. Obviously, I'm biased, because one of the things that we talk about in our book, Health Communism, at length -- in some ways, the entire thing that the project is about -- is about social murder, or what you might otherwise call like statistical genocide or demicide, or what Lauren Berlant called slow death, for example. And it's interesting, because I think, you know, despite the fact -- despite all the things that you're saying, and how prevalent it is in -- or how much -- I guess how developed the theorization is potentially in the writing of Marx and Engels, it's interesting that it remains this extremely undertheorized, I think, aspect of the whole thing. Obviously, there's -- you know, I don't want to -- not to go into the whole like history of things. I'm not saying that like no one has talked about this. Obviously, there is a long literature of what is otherwise, like elsewhere called the social determinants of health, and what we call the political economy of health, and things like that. But I want to read actually a snippet from Engels, the same Engels piece that we're talking about, that actually is like I think the first thing that we quote in our book. I'm just gonna read this, because this is, I think, in my mind, the best way that Engels ever distills what is meant by social murder, at least in Marx's and Engels' texts, which is, "its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offense is one more of ommission than of comission." And I think that's -- you know, this is a essential piece, I think, of understanding, I mean, frankly, a lot of the political economy. But I think this is an essential piece of understanding COVID and everything that has happened with COVID. And I think that without having some analysis of this, some understanding of why the policies, like Biden, for instance, Biden administration COVID policies that have failed so abjectly, have failed and who they have failed, I think you cannot understand the urgency and the frankly, depravity, I guess, of what has happened here in the United States, without that analysis.
Nate Holdren 18:12
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Two thoughts. One, I was thinking about what Bea said a little while back, about kind of liberal progress stories, and then you have a kind of story - oh, well, history's just this neat, clean process. And really, we're all on the same team, ultimately. And like, you know, there's some regrettable things, but if we all just think together, and then we solve them -- and how that story encounters reality and generates this deep disappointment. And I think that one, I hadn't really thought about it this way before, but that version of -- one direction that that disappointment goes is this deep resignation, where it's not like -- like I feel like for us, we were talking before we get started about kind of like disappointments with various institutions. There's a version -- there's like an angry disappointment of like this is unacceptable, but I think a lot of those narratives breed a kind of like quietly resigned -- I feel so bad, I forget her name. There's a sociologist who just wrote a piece about moral calm and like parents not vaccinating their kids because they feel moral calm about it, like it doesn't feel urgent. There's this kind of like resignation -- there's this resigned disappointment that these narratives bring. And I think that thing of like, hey, it's no one's fault. It just seemed, you know, it's just -- you know, like, that's just the way the world is. Like, that's how I think -- I think that's a key piece of how like a lot of the people who you all, you know, rightly rail against, and like friends of the panel, like Justin Feldman and Abby Cartus wrote that beautiful piece of Emily Oster, I think that part of the way that those people live with themselves is that they just have a deeply attenuated sense of human capacity, where they're just like, hey, you know, like, societies are lethal and like nobody loves it, but like, you know, let's be real. Let's be realists. And like that's not a realist position, because we're right. Like as communists, we're right that human capacity is so much greater than what it's reduced to in this society. But I think like that piece of like how it just feels like no one's fault, and like that breeds this kind of quiet, resigned acceptance for certain responses, especially when it goes unpoliticized, where it's like, oh, you know, nobody's happy about all those dead kids, but like viruses are real, what are you going to do? And I do think that's a key part of why it's so important, and why the -- of why these social phenomena -- I think it's an important piece of why these social phenomena persist, and I think that's part of why the analysis, you know, like I'm trying to do here in this kind of small intervention and then the larger work that you all are doing, of like saying, like, these things that see -- that you didn't see, that are out of sight, that seem natural, if you actually understand the process, you know, again, using the Tony Smith thing, if you get the social ontology of these processes, which are genuinely hard to grasp, once you get it, it's like you're through the looking glass, and it looks really differently. But I really -- I mean, again, I'm a convinced person talking to the convinced but like, we're right about this. We've got the They Live glasses and the skull people are real. [laughter]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 20:57
Yeah. And they have been, too. And it's sort of like a -- I think that there's like all of these moments, one of the things that becomes clear, you know, when you start looking into like -- when you start having these moments of realizing, of seeing through the They Live glasses, right, and being like, wow, what I am, you know, seeing is basically -- sorry, what I'm hearing is not lining up with what I'm seeing, right? What I'm being told is reality is not the reality that I am experiencing, right? And sort of dealing with trying to reconcile your version of reality with the sort of dominant narrative. This is like a process that's obviously always ongoing, right. And we always talk about things as sort of being settled debates. And I think there's this idea that you could come into the pandemic, and starting from the position that we did, right, knowing very little about the virus, that you were able to make decisions, right, that would have a lasting durational impact on how the pandemic response would be shaped, right. And what we've seen, right, is that those persistent sort of ideas, even though they're proven wrong over and over and over again, they are still remaining as sort of structural components of the pandemic response nonetheless, even though they don't seem to make any sense. And I think part of this is, you know, one of the most important things about understanding the concept of social murder and why it becomes useful, right, is that it immediately provides actually not an explanation as to why this stuff remains, but it actually does give you some insight into where it remains, right, into where these kinds of sort of built in requirements that cause so much suffering and extraction and disease and, you know, needless withholding of resources, right, and sort of under-utilizing our total capacity, in order to direct those activities more towards like profit making than care, you know, all of these things, right, they -- it's like, the question is not just are they happening, but like how are they happening, like, what are the systems that facilitate it? And looking at the concept of social murder starts to give you that idea, right, because the kind of death making itself is often naturalized, right. And this is a lot of, you know, what I think we've been pushing back on for many months now, during the pandemic, which is the idea that, oh, well, many of these deaths were just baked in. And you're seeing this now with discussion of the new, you know, coming next wave, you know, whenever it does like sort of become acknowledged, there have already been people saying, well, you know, this next wave, it's not going to be so bad, because all of the people that were gonna die have already died, and this is gonna be great, you know, we've culled -- you know, just a million more infections, and all the vulnerable people will be gone, and everything will be like, we're going to be good to go. And this is -- you know, waves will become milder going forward. And this is the gift of the virus that it's brought us. And I mean, this is a kind of heinous comment, right? And you're like, why would someone think this? And it's like, well, you know, because this person is totally bought into the idea that these are the necessary processes of how a society organizes itself, which is entirely influenced by the ideology of capitalism, and you know, actually does not reflect the reality that we all believe in at the end of the day.
Nate Holdren 24:29
100%. And also I think it's, you know, that these are -- all of these processes play out in concrete ways. And so like you said, not only that it will happen, but where it'll happen and how, and that a tweak is moving around the deaths and maybe moving from one large number of deaths to another, smaller, but still large number of deaths. I mean, it's interesting thinking about like the work you all have been doing and like friends of the panel, you know, from like a year ago, like, you know, we've seen all of these mitigations go away And like one of the things that's really valuable in you all's voices is you're not like, remember the good old days when we masked, you know? [laughter] But it's like, man, like shit was fucked up before, and it's gotten even more fucked up now. And so like, we were outraged before and we're even more outraged. And so I think like -- but like noting that like we make a tweak, and it's a variation on a theme, and the theme doesn't change. And so like the fundamental capital of social relations are lethal, those relationships are organized in institutionally concrete ways, and tweaking those institutions can be really consequential. Like it's a nightmare, what's happened with pediatric deaths since September to present, that's way worse, but that doesn't mean it was good before. And so like knowing that like the -- knowing that the pattern will be what are fundamentally avoidable deaths,because we could have a different kind of society, and then knowing that any rearrangement that's not -- that falls short of a fundamental social reorganization, is going to be moving deaths around. I mean, and maybe lowering them, and that's -- I don't want to minimize the tragedy there. Like any -- every single unnecessary death is absolutely a tragedy. But it maybe also just sort of -- I think this speaks to your point at the very beginning, Bea, about like sort of not being surprised. So like, you know, while we wish the mitigations that they've rolled back were still in place, that was still a world of tons of unnecessary death. And if we win some political fights, and they introduce some mitigations, amid, you know, a still inadequate pandemic response, we'll be glad, sort of, that there aren't more unnecessary deaths, but we should remain angry about the reality that there will be more still unnecessary deaths in that new organization. I think that's a kind of really key point here, because it says like, don't settle for like a smaller pile of corpses. Like this is unacceptable in all its variations, know that it will vary, and retain both of those thoughts.
Artie Vierkant 26:52
I think this would be a good time, actually, for us to get a little deeper into your piece, this piece that you wrote for Petrie-Flom, because I think so much of it is actually looking not at -- you know, we've been talking about social murder and these processes that happen, or this process that is managed by the state very directly, the state, and its' representatives, I suppose. But I think so much of this piece that you're --what you're trying to say, or trying to point to is not just social murder, but how social murder has gotten away with -- well, so I'll just quote you actually, because you write this a little bit more eloquently than I think I'm setting it up, which is -- this is just quoting from your piece, "The tendency to social murder creates potential problems that governments must manage, since states too are subject to pressures and tendencies arising from capitalism. They find themselves facing the results of social murder, results they are expected to respond to, with their options relatively constrained by the limits placed on them by capitalism. Within that context governments often resort to a specific tactic of governance: depoliticization. Depoliticization is an attempt by government 'to place at one remove the politically contested character of governing,' in the words of political scientist Peter Burnham. This might be called rule in denial: making decisions without seeming to make decisions, treating consequences as inevitable, and trying to displace authority elsewhere so as to avoid accountability for what occurs." So I just wanted to ask you about this and I think kind of get into -- maybe even ask you kind of what exactly you sort of mean by depoliticization here, because I think reading that, I'm thinking, there are so many -- I mean, those like two short paragraphs, I think, explain to me so many of the decisions that, you know, we day by day, week, by week, analyze in granular detail here, and the sort of like contestational relationship that we talk about frequently, for example, between like, oh, the Biden administration, who therefore say, like, oh the CDC just has a messaging problem, or the CDC and the Biden administration who then say, like, oh, well, you know, now that even though we're doing a really bad job at this, we're gonna message about -- we're going to shift our message so that like the big bad guy is actually Congress now, because even though we're doing a bad job, like Congress isn't funding this, in part because we kind of sent the all clear signal, etc. And the kind of like endless sort of bureaucratic dithering -- not even dithering -- the endless sort of like ways in which things are either pushed off to sort of like either somebody or nobody's problem, or as though they're just sort of like, oh, we could -- you know, we could maybe do something about this if we wanted to, but actually, like you know, we're all technocratic here, you know, we're following the science. And you know, the science says, actually, like we don't have to do any of this shit, so um, you're on your own, I guess.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 30:01
The science says one way masking works, and we're good to go.
Nate Holdren 30:04
Don't blame me, blame the virus. Yeah, totally. Well, so, one way to think about this is a metaphor that I really like, that I got from this -- the Marxist sociologist, Erik Olin Wright, and he says, think about gameplay, and there's three kinds of questions you can ask in a game. What's the best move right now? What's the best variation on the rule we could introduce? And then what game should we even play at all? [laughter] Those are three different levels of analysis in any kind of concrete situation. And at the like broad social level, we've been talking about social murder, I've been saying like social murder is built into the social relation to capitalism, it's kind of -- it's built into the game. If you eliminate social murder -- to eliminate social murder, we have to play a different game entirely. And I think a related element is that in capitalism as such, there's an area of life that's just taken as given, and the Engels quote you read out really speaks to this. Like there's broad areas of life that are just like taken as natural and not revisable. And so there's a large chunk of life is seen as not political. And I think for those of us who are on the far left, we think that -- we have a disagreement about what politics counts as. And so like, actually, a great deal of social life is political. It's a matter of power relationships that are fundamentally revisable. And through collective action, we can, and should, and I believe, will eventually revise them. And so there's like a kind of deep underlying depoliticization, in a sense, at the kind of level of the game, but in this piece, what I'm talking about from Burnham is really depoliticization as statecraft, specifically, as a move that governing authorities do. And I just, I read the -- this is all on my mind coming out of my book, because this is -- these are themes that were present in my book in various ways, and I think I, to some degree of success, but only to some degree, managed to evoke them. And so I read the Burnham and was like, wow, I wish I had read this four years ago, this would really help me. And I think that, you know, it's a -- for me, one of the things that that category answers is this apparent puzzle of like, why would a governing authority want to be subjected to a higher authority? Like, why wouldn't they want to remain the most powerful actor? And that, for me, has been a puzzle some of the time, and reading the Burnham, it was like, oh, well if you're in charge of it, then you're accountable for it. Whereas if you can go, hey, you know, and again, that Engels quote, hey, I'm not in charge of this. Because no one did it. It's just natural. It's just natural. Don't blame me, you know? Of course no one feels the deaths in Katrina more than I do, but you know, natural disasters aren't created by human action, right. And I think that move is one that is really convenient for them. And I think that it's -- I think it's some of the time, probably is cynical. But I also think it's probably some of the time just very sincere, because they don't want to -- nobody wants to be the villain in the story of their own life that they tell themselves. I think a lot of people go through incredible cognitive dissonance, you know, basically give them -- they basically become kind of incapable of critical thinking, in order to tell themselves --
Artie Vierkant 33:12
It's like self preservation.
Nate Holdren 33:13
Yeah, totally, totally. And there are people who will abandon their commitment to truth and thinking before they'll give up that self preservation. But I think that, I mean, just that seems, to me, to be all over the place. And there's this sort of, within the pandemic of like, and the Biden response particularly, like, hey, it's out of my hands, you know, like, don't blame -- and they've blamed -- they've blamed the unvaccinated, they've blamed Trump and Trump supporters, they've blamed Republicans, they've blamed the Supreme Court, as you said they've blamed Congress, they've blamed, you know, the variants. Oh gosh, we didn't know how virulent Delta would be, no one could have seen it coming. And nothing is their fault. And what I think is really striking is, you know, looking at things that they -- that Biden, candidate Biden was saying about the Trump administration, because the Trump administration did -- had a fairly similar response. So they also, in a sense, kind of owned some of the politicization, like there was that -- Republicans who were like, look, grandma's had long life. And so there's this, you know -- and I feel like the Trump administration politicized some of this, and also did the kind of it's out of my hands thing a little bit too. And candidate Biden really strongly attacked this stuff, you know, they didn't go far enough. But the things that were -- Biden as candidate treated a lot of things about the pandemic as political and then he gets into office, and as you all know better than I do, a lot of what I know about it comes from you all, and friends of the panel, being like, oh well, hey, you know -- there's that quote from very early on, nothing we can do is going to change the trajectory. And it just seems to be all -- like that seems to be their response boiled down. Someone else who read the piece said to me, that's center Democrats, maybe the Democratic Party has a whole, boiled down, which I think is also possible.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 34:53
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a long history of sort of trying to naturalize inaction through either analytics, like -- you know, I think this is a thing I think about all the time, right, why did cases become the metric for recommendations, right? Because in one sense, yes, you can absolutely tie overall infections to like what's going to trigger pandemic mitigations, or you could like just decide what the pandemic mitigations are going to be, right? But we made this sort of system where the responsibility was tied specifically to the analytic, right, which actually put the whole response in jeopardy from day one, because it meant that if you, you know, made testing inaccessible, you could make mitigations go away, which is what we're seeing now, right? And you know, it always sort of like frustrated me early on in the pandemic to be like, well, why wouldn't you just sort of approach this from an affirmative angle? Why would you tie things like a pandemic response where you, you know, have this opportunity to, for example, provide people with sick pay that they don't get it their job, or mandate some sort of like, you know, paid sick leave for childcare workers or, you know, whatever. All these sort of other frameworks for making the political, right? But instead, from day one, we went with the very, you know, traditional approach of passing through both the authority and the kind of naturalized almost like point of something, from the seat of like, the point is to, like, govern and manage the pandemic, to like this sort of third object, right. It's like, we've been talking about this over and over as sort of moving the goalposts, right, because as pandemic conditions have like remained largely the same, right, our protections have actually changed drastically throughout the course. And expertise is often used as this way to, you know, intentionally depoliticize issues, right? If you say, you know, it's not that we've made a decision not to respond to the pandemic, it's just that we're following the science -- that's like a really -- you know, that's a powerful way to sort of take any legitimate claims on like why something else should be different, and defer that to this kind of disembodied institutional expertise. And that as a sort of powerful force is, I think, what keeps people looking away from processes of social murder. And that combined with our tendency to sort of blame people for their own fates, right for the terrible things that happen to us, oftentimes as a result of social and structural determinants of health, of capitalism, of working conditions, of living conditions of, you know, access or inaccess to care. And these things become naturalized as sort of our own economic decisions, our personal decisions about our own personal health that go awry, because we didn't make them right. And that's this kind of same process that you see, I think, in broader political frames of like health care, right, which as they were incorporated into the pandemic response, failed in exactly the same way we see them fail every day.
Nate Holdren 38:13
Absolutely. So one thought I have in response to that, is as I was saying, you know, these processes are organized in time-and-place-specific concrete ways, and there's a through line. And part of the -- you know, that's what the analysis of capitalism does, is give us a through line connecting those time-and-place-specific concrete organizations, of capitalist social relations, and so how we get from point A to point C over time. And, you know, like I said earlier, you know, late 2019, I was finishing my book about the early 20th century. I've got young kids, I teach a lot. You know, I'm not super up on neoliberalism in the recent past. I'm a historian of the early 20th century. But as this has unfolded, I've tried to understand those things a little better. And my hunch is -- and there are people who would be better at this than me -- my hunch is that like, 2000 to present, I don't know when the beginning is, but the kind of like Obama, Obama era, maybe the Clinton era, there's a set of kind of pieces, kind of game pieces that get generated, that set up the board, so to speak, and then the pandemic comes in, and that's what we're playing with, so to speak. Like, I live in Iowa, which is very, very red politically. And we had an awful inland hurricane in August of 2020 called a derecho, and my power was out for five days. Cedar Rapids, Iowa was wrecked. And we didn't see a single state official the whole five days, like we saw like the power company once. And there were all these people on Twitter being like, [aggressive voice] well, that's what you get for voting Trump, enjoy climate change. And it was like, first of all, not all of us did. Second of all, like, you know, I think my sister in law maybe voted Trump, you know, she's a mixed race woman from southern Texas, and like I don't agree with her on that, but like fuck you if you think that she should like die of deprivation because of how she voted. Who the fuck do you think you are to say that shit? And I think there's like some culture war stuff that came out of the Trump era, that's not only Trump side culture war, but like, you know, there's Trump chuds and MAGA chuds, and then there's Biden chuds as well. And I think that like some of that culture war shit helped set up some of the -- you know, the Deplorables. Like I think there's like some -- there's like some discursive work, they built those moves, so to speak, that helped set up the oh, well, you know, if the unwashed people in Texas aren't going to get vaccinated, well then fuck them and let them die, they chose to die. And so I think there's like a number of moves like that, like there's a series of games being played with our lives, you know, by elites and their base, prior to the pandemic, that then become kind of the baseline set of moves that a lot of the pandemic has played out on. And people who are more expert in kind of recent -- you know, Phil, I'm sure would know this stuff -- I think could kind of lay that out and sort of how there's this transformation of like the Republican contempt for Democrats and you know, blue chud contempt for Republicans, how that, you know, becomes a kind of contempt for the unvaccinated, how that becomes an ideology of no one can tell me to mask. And I think that that stuff, it would also sort of set up the larger picture. And myself just sort of looking for resources, partly to understand the pandemic and also looking for resources on the continued lines of sight that I'm recalling come out of the book, I've been really drawn to this Peter Burnham piece that I mentioned, and Burnham is part of -- I'm a bit of a partisan here, Burnham is tied to a particular corner of a very niche but wonderful corner of the Marxist tradition called Open Marxism. And there's a writer named Simon Clarke, who's amazing, and Werner Bonefeld, who's amazing. And they are in the UK, and in the late 70s through the 90s, trying to understand Thatcher and the Major government and the shifts to neoliberalism. And there's a wonderful book that I've been reading now, that I wish I had read before I wrote this piece, by Jack Copley, called Governing Financialization. And he argues that there's this tension between palliative care by the government and then what he calls depoliticized discipline, and it's really on point to this stuff. And so those are the resources I've been looking looking toward. And I think what they're trying to do is really understand the world pre-pandemic, and how we got through the door in a pandemic, so to speak. And those patterns I think are really powerful. And then, you know, I think what we're all trying to do, living through this and trying to think critically, is trying to figure out how that immediately pre-pandemic neoliberal world has sort of baked in some of the immediate gameplay. And that's why I think why the depoliticization thing is so -- for me, was so powerful and explanatory, because it was like, oh yeah, that's totally what they're doing. And they're good at it, because this is how Democrats ruled, you know, in the Obama era, and they're ready to do it. We depoliticized all kinds of things; we'll depoliticize the pandemic. That's the move we know how to make. If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so they have the hammer of depoliticization and that seems to be their main move, at any cost, you know, no matter the deaths.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 42:59
Yeah. And it's also seen as a way of sort of making I think the processes of social murder seem value neutral too. I mean, I think it's interesting that you brought up these people who are working and thinking about Thatcher's government in the UK, because it's like these kinds of concepts that I think we've seen throughout the pandemic that have contributed, for example, to the framing of that deaths in older people don't matter as much as deaths in younger people, or that deaths in people with comorbid conditions were always predestined to happen, and therefore not as much of a big deal as a death in someone who's "healthy". These are, you know, ideas that are influenced by stuff like, you know, Quality Adjusted Life Years, or QALYs, which, you know, was developed by British health economists in the 1970s. And it's an idea of basically essentially discounting someone's life based on their abilities and their sort of cognitive abilities and their ability to work, right. And so, the less you can work, whether by age or by disability or other impairment, the less your life is worth in sort of simple monetary terms for the purposes of policy evaluation. And, you know, this is the kind of idea, right, that is naturalized as like a totally normal way to judge whether a policy is cost effective or not, right.
Artie Vierkant 44:26
And I think it's a perfect example of what we're talking about, because it's a technical apparatus used to divert attention from a political process off into what is therefore some sort of like objective metric, right?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 44:42
Right, right. Exactly.
Artie Vierkant 44:44
Putatively objective.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 44:45
it's always talked about almost too as like a necessary counter to some kind of like intrinsic irrationality in the general public, that there are these like intrinsic irrational beliefs in the body of the nation, in terms of what they value and prioritize, that are irrational to the needs of the state, right? That if given to the whims of the masses, right, that there would be sort of these investments in social services that would go above and beyond what the state can afford, leading to some kind of like broader social collapse. And so I feel like these mechanisms that we're talking about, right, the sort of depoliticization via expertise and deferring to expertise, or via like deferring to systems, or deferring to history, these are all ways of kind of like countering this idea that like the irrational public is always going to be asking for way too much than we can ever afford. And it kind of puts us in this position where also these like processes are made to be sort of almost like neutralized through the separation as well. And they, you know, kind of -- I think you see that in the pandemic response, in anything from like, you know, people like David Leonhardt, who say that, you know, people who are advocating for protections are like irrational or crazy, or you know, whatever. But you also see that sort of just structurally reflected in, I think, the discussion of like what the sort of priorities should be in making demands during COVID, and pushing back. It's kind of embedded not just in the subjective and oppressive frames, it's also embedded in the frames of like what we use actually to try and fight these policies, or what maybe not we, like specifically us, but people in general use, to fight back against these very same systems. And it's almost like no wonder why that's not effective, right? Because it's like, you cannot use these kinds of tools to undermine these like bigger systems, because they're built to support it.
Nate Holdren 46:54
Thank you for that. Yeah, totally. Super thought provoking. You were talking about the quality of life stuff in the 70s, and I was thinking about your episode you did with Frank Pasquale, about cost benefit analysis. And it occurs to me that like, in a social system, where I was saying earlier, there's just a large chunk of life is treated as apolitical when it actually is political. And who has power over whom, in what ways, is a political question. It's not natural, but there's this naturalization of those power relations. And there's this kind of treating of people as objects for technical manipulation, and so you get kind of social engineering. And then there are these think tanks and various institutions that generate small innovations, and like, oh, here's a cool way to tinker at the edge of social engineering, you know, like the quality of life stuff in the 70s. And those things lay the groundwork for like really barbaric things later. And I think that's interesting for sort of thinking through like that that fundamental notion of like society is just a block of wood, people are just objects, you can just manipulate it as you want, develop techniques for specific interventions for specific kinds of manipulation, which in specific context -- in particular context, then get mobilized in really deadly and brutal ways that we're seeing now. And I think a ton about this line from The Internationale, the old communist song, so "We want no condescending saviors to rule us from their judgment hall." And I think that sort of -- the technocrat view is one -- just totally by condescending saviors, who are just like, you people need to shut up, we'll figure it out, we know the science, and like you just sit and be a pawn and we'll move you around on the chessboard. And I love your point, Bea, about that our needs as pawns are irrational. I mean, literally, like if you're playing a game of chess, and you're like, well, this pawn told me it doesn't want to die, like you're being an irrational chess player. But like that's sort of the world we're in, you know? Like my mom quit a job. My mom had Lyme disease a few years ago, a while ago, and was fucked up for years. And so she's been very COVID safe. She's in her early 60s. She isn't old enough to retire yet. And she quit a warehouse job that paid okay, because of the fear of COVID exposure and she's like, I'm just gonna ride this out with my savings for a while, and now she's back in a job that's a little bit safer. But you know, she's still being more careful and is real scared. And you know, this talk and the Great Resignation and all this kind of, you know, why don't people want to work? Like that is an irrational -- our wants are irrational within their frameworks, and like you know, people like Leonhardt and so on, want to think that that's a reflection on us. And it's like, no, that's a reflection on your framework. Like the fact that our love of life and wanting to continue to see our loved ones and so on sounds like noise to you, I'm not the one who that's a judgment on, Dave. [laughter] But I think that's a really, really important point is like, and I think this also goes back to what you said a while ago, like the I'm not -- what I'm hearing doesn't square with what I'm seeing, is in a certain sense like we're listening in on a conversation that we're not actually invited into. Like Leonhardt pretends he's talking to us, but he's really talking to the people who want to -- he's talking to the people who are playing our lives as chess pieces. He's not actually talking to us on the board. And he may think he is but like, you know, he's not saying directly, shut up pawn and take it. Like he's saying like, but don't you like to move forward toward the end of the board, you could become a queen. [laughter] But he's not really talking to us, he's talking to the people who victimize us. And that's part of why I think there's so much cognitive dissonance and part of you know, the service that you all and other friends of the panel do -- again, that Oster piece that Justin and Abby wrote, is really valuable for helping like decode that and also like push it out of our heads, to be like that doesn't square because they really do see our needs as just noise. And that's why we can't see ourselves in that discourse. And in a way, I think there's a thing where like we overestimate the degree of reciprocity and their degree of humanity. Like they -- you know, I sort of had this fantasy that if I could just look my big boss in the face and explain this, then maybe, you know, maybe they would stop putting me at risk in my workplace. And like they're not capable of giving us a real look in the face. Like they just -- they look through us, and in a way they're not able to not look through us, I think.
Artie Vierkant 50:57
Right. And I think because the other part of the condescending savior thing, right, is it's not just you know, oh shut up, pawn, as you're saying. It's not just like -- it's not just the oh, you're being irrational, just take it. I think the other kind of form that you see the condescending savior manifest itself, I think I'm thinking particularly right now, is in positioning -- repositioning basically a broader societal responsibility as a matter of personal responsibility, and thinking now specifically of considering that basically like masking has been like mostly done away with in most of the country, considering that now that like straight up anti-mask sentiment is pretty much normalized among liberals, for example, after you know, a long fight, frankly, I think to get to that point, like we have arrived at this point where after the transportation mask mandate was struck down, what happens but like Vivek Murthy, right, like the Surgeon General of the US, Vivek Murthy, like posts on Twitter like a little selfie video or whatever, saying, like, so here's why I [emphasis] choose to mask, right? Like making it all a matter of personal responsibility, like inviting one to like choose to protect yourself with resources you may or may not have, and in an environment that is just, you know, absolutely teeming with COVID because everyone else has been told like it's all clear, right? And so much of this was predicated on -- like the way that we got to the point where like anti-mask sentiment was so common among liberals was basically that like, over time, over the last couple of months, the very real fact that a surgical mask protects you less well than an N95 was sort of militated toward this line that like, well, Omicron is so transmissible that like masks don't do anything anyway, because most people wear surgical masks and therefore -- as though like imperfect protection is equal to no protection, right? As though like -- basically saying that like because surgical masks or whatever, are imperfect, that means okay, well, you know, like, we might as well just like give this whole thing up anyway. That like, oh, it didn't do anything all -- like this didn't do anything all along, right? And that's just such a -- I can't help but sort of see it through the lens of these things that we're talking about. It's like, again, it's not just the -- you know, the deferral of, as we've been talking about, it's not just the deferral of expertise, it's not just the deferral of responsibility. It's also, you know, this process of sort of normalizing what should be highly contestable things. Like it should be highly contestable that like we can just --that just like everything is -- like all masking is over, as though masks never did anything, as though even in times when masking was more prevalent, there weren't an astounding amount of deaths.
Nate Holdren 54:01
We talked about this last time, you know, like and we talked about my book as well, you know, like I think, again, what's a big stack of corpses? And I think like one of the things that goes on in all this is being like, well, you know, children's bodies are small, so they don't actually stack that high; that's a small stack of dead kids. [laughter] You know, that's a grostesque image.
Artie Vierkant 54:24
It's a mild stack.
Nate Holdren 54:25
It's a mild stack.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 54:26
A mild stack.
Nate Holdren 54:27
There's a mild stack of dead children. And you know, and I don't mean to be flippant about that. I mean, I've got kids, and my youngest was, pre-pandemic, hospitalized for 10 days with pneumonia. Like I take it very seriously. But you know, the joke is intended to draw that out. Like, they want us to look at things and go, oh yeah, that's not that many. And I think that from my other work on workplace injury, you know, I've been hurt myself in the workplace, and most of the people I'm related to, a lot of people I love still work in blue collar environments. I'm not from a white collar background. I think if you're like, those people over there, far away from me, who I am not one of, that is a sort of small stack of victims perspective. But if you're like, people like me, people I love, that makes the stack -- you know, you're standing closer to the stack of victims, and it makes it look larger. I think like that framing itself is just really, really important to be like -- you know, and that's a choice. And I think some people -- you know, you said liberals have been convinced to un-mask, that's true. And the richer and whiter and more suburban they are, the more they're convinced, you know, no respect intended. And I think like, you know, like that's a choice that people sort of make, and some people are sort of already on -- they're already in motion. Like, society's mobile, we're already on the bus, so to speak. And so some people didn't make a choice, they're just raised that way. But we can point out to them and be like, okay, but that frame of reference you're using could be set down, and you could pick up another one. And once someone's presented with the choice, then they become responsible for their own thoughts. And I think, you know, in the -- as you were talking, I was thinking about Leana Wen and you know, other folks from the kind of cast of characters -- I kind of want to start calling them the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants from Marvel Comics -- there's this like team of super villains. And I think that some of them really believe their stuff and are high on their own supply. Some of them are just liars, and know what they're doing, and are cynical, and are producing disinformation. And some of them, I think, are in the middle. Like, I think if you spend enough time telling lies, you start to believe it. And it warps your sense of reality. And I think that there's this sort of -- and then you know, and then the people who believe it, like you know, if you're -- there's other people who are none of those three, and they just follow the data they're handed and they deliberately don't think critically about it. And like they got a report written by the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and they're like, cool, we'll run with it because it's convenient. And I think there's this kind of like division of labor that goes on, and this division of head spaces. And I do think there are people involved -- I don't want to let them off the hook -- there are people involved who know exactly what they're doing, and are paid a lot of money to do it. But they're in this complex with other people who are in a range of other positions. And there's the famous Upton Sinclair quote, "It's hard to get someone to understand something that their salary depends on not understanding." And I think that the people who lie for a living about this stuff probably go through a lot of effort. I mean, like Leana Wen just blocked a ton of people on Twitter, because she doesn't want the cognitive dissonance, and it's easier to just think, you know -- one of my pet peeves on this is like, hey, this doesn't matter now, because people have access to the vaccine. And it's like but that's not -- like people are not safe because -- like, I'm not safe in a car because I could have worn a seatbelt, like I'm safe if I'm seatbelted or not. And that's a choice of interpretive perspective that they -- some of them know what they're doing. So I don't want this depoliticization stuff and the structural stuff to let anyone off the hook. But I do think this analysis explains why it becomes rational to lie, why it becomes rational to take a personal perspective and not think critically about it, why it becomes rational to just not think at all and sort of accept the data and be like, well, the map's green, so I'm not gonna -- I'm not gonna question it. I think that that's -- the background stuff, the bigger social theory, explains why those are smart moves to make in a particular social location.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 58:17
Yeah. And I think you actually put this really well in your piece, to quote you, "Capitalism produces both mass death and people in positions of institutional authority who are able to live with mass death." So it's not just that -- you know, it's not just that, like, it's those one bad actors that we have to sort of get out of those positions. And if we just put the right person in the position, then the right results will come out of the inequitable and structurally, you know, violent system that is designed to do social murder, right? It's that it's a -- you know, you have to go after both components at once because it is a like multifactorial problem that is complex and that is, you know, dynamic and changing. But it does sort of live in the same places over and over. And it is easy to see once you have that lens, to start knowing where to look, right?
Nate Holdren 59:09
Yeah. And I think it's important as well that like we need to win a current fight, and we need to come out of it with capacity to win the next fight. Because the pandemic is an awful nightmare, and I lose sleep over it, I worry about my kids. The climate catastrophe is continuing to unfold. You know, after that, there aren't -- these won't be the final catastrophes, you know -- well, hopefully not [laughing]. There's only one scenario where these are the final catastrophes and it's one we really want to avoid. And so I think like as we're battling these catastrophes -- and I don't know that I'm battling -- but people who are battling these catastrophes need to come out of these battles set up to win wars, which is I think, where the analysis really matters, of like if it's just like a hey, stop the opioid epidemic, hey, stop the pandemic, hey, stop the climate catastrophe in like an isolated sequence, then we have collectivities that are not prepared for what's coming down the road. Whereas this analysis is saying like, these are expressions of underlying social patterns, is a way for movements to say, hey, like, we need to win this and prep for what's coming down the road. And the other thing I would say quickly on that quote, I like that bit, I'm kind of proud of it, but credit where it's due. I cut that bit and I didn't think it made sense. I didn't know how to do that piece. And I posted it on Twitter and was like, this doesn't fit and I don't know what to do. And Chloe Reichel edited the piece for me, for Petrie-Flom, and she was like, this is good, I'll figure out how to put it back in. So credit to Chloe for figuring that out. Because I was -- I was really happy it was in there and I didn't know how to do it as a writer. And I also think, if you'll let me be a cornball for a minute. I think collective thinking -- I think thinking is only collective and I think, you know, that relationship with Chloe, and the work you all are doing -- and we were talking beforehand about art and music and whatnot -- I think like spaces for people to think collectively about the world we're in and to square the -- you know, the difference, you said Bea, what I'm hearing doesn't square with what I'm seeing -- I think we can only do that through collectivity. Obviously, we need movements to force change, but I also think just to like live in the world and understand the world I think is, is bigger than one person. I think it's really, really vital to --
Artie Vierkant 1:01:13
Hell yeah.
Nate Holdren 1:01:14
Yeah. Because I think if we think like hey, I don't get it myself, everyone else gets it - the isolation is cranked up and we're saying like, nobody gets it alone. That's why we need to talk with each other, I think is really important.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:01:24
Thank you, Nate. That was beautiful. And I think that's kind of like the perfect note to leave us on for today.
Artie Vierkant 1:01:29
Yeah, I agree.
Nate Holdren 1:01:29
Rock n roll.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:01:30
And I really appreciate -- yeah, thank you so much for coming on to talk with us, and vent, and talk about this piece, and shout out to Chloe for doing a great job as an editor and for you know, moving this piece forward. And if people want to follow you, they can find you on Twitter at @n_hold. Nate, thank you so much again for joining us.
Nate Holdren 1:01:49
Thank you. It's really nice to be here.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:01:51
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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)