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Alienated dependence: The unfreedom of our social relations

2023; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/josp.12551

1467-9833

Tatiana Llaguno,

Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism

Modern individuals grapple with a paradoxical reality: their lives are characterized by a strong feeling of independence as well as by an intense social interconnection. In Karl Marx's words, this paradox is best described as individuals achieving “personal independence” under an “objective dependence” (1993, p. 158). This paper focuses on the notion of objective dependence, which has been insufficiently problematized in recent debates about social interdependence. By bringing to light a distinctively Hegelian-Marxist approach to the problem of dependence and to the problem of objectivity, the article aims at contributing to the ongoing scholarly debate on the ethical and political consequences of dependence as an acknowledged social condition. Starting from the inevitability claim, I push for an understanding of dependence that avoids its reduction to domination and that instead presents it as a complex reality that can be actively and freely experienced. Contrary to what a considerable number of political theorists have argued (see Macpherson, 1962), I hold that dependence per se does not lead to unfreedom; although, at present, many relations of dependence do. To understand why this is the case, I defend that the analysis of social dependence must be brought together with the critique of political economy. In fact, when looked from the perspective of our economic relations, the rejection of dependence is not entirely misguided: it points out to defective social relations that we need to untangle in order to criticize. In doing so, I respond to Renault's invitation to deploy dependence as a critical concept (2018, p. 36). In what follows, I will delineate my own approach by way of a critical review of the accounts of dependence circulating in contemporary social and political philosophy, focusing on their failure to integrate, to a greater or lesser degree, the specificity of modern relations of dependence, that is, their objectivity. I classify current approaches in two groups: one informed by discussions around care and vulnerability (which tends to provide little systematic understanding of how actual forms of generalized dependence are experienced under capitalist relations) and another informed by the critique of political economy (which tends to downplay the importance of dependence's objective nature). While the former risks offering a defense of dependence that remains blind to important axes of domination, the latter might appear oblivious about the specific nature of modern forms of social domination. The focus on the objective nature of dependence is sanctioned by two theses. First, I claim that when objectivity is taken into account, specific normative failures arise. Second, I believe that the emphasis on objectivity enables important conceptual distinctions. Thus, I will suggest that we need to criticize alienated objective dependence, rather than objective relations of dependence as such. In short, I will argue that the objective domination characteristic of capitalist societies is not the same as objective or objectivized dependence. I present my argument in three sections. In Section 1, I review how dependence has been discussed in contemporary social and political philosophy. I present the arguments made in care and vulnerability studies, in order to understand the ways in which the lack of engagement with political economy undermines the critical potential of dependence as an analytical concept. Then, I survey the attempts at bringing together the study of dependence and the analysis of capitalist relations, including, among others, the work done by labor republicans. I delineate their contributions, as well as their limitations, and explain the explicit intervention that this paper aims at making in those discussions. In Section 2, I introduce Marx's notion of objective dependence and develop an account of the three forms it takes: the objectivity of exchange or money, the objectivity of capital, and the objectivity of machinery. In Section 3, I draw on recent developments in critical theory and contend that the issue with modern societies is that they promote an alienated and reified objective dependence, transforming our unavoidable social dependence into forms of objective domination. Although I am not able to work out a detailed alternative to that form of dependence here, I present some preliminary thoughts on the possibility of free, non-alienated relations of dependence. Finally, I sketch some reasons why, given the dialectical relation between independence and dependence, even those worried mostly about the former should also care about the latter. In the last decades, theorists have attempted to demystify the liberal imaginary of individual independence, suggesting instead a paradigm in which a shared condition of vulnerability and interdependence predominates. A first important milestone is Robert E. Goodin's book, Protecting the Vulnerable, in which we find a dependence- and vulnerability-based reformulation of social responsibility. Rather than a voluntaristic model of self-assumed commitments, Goodin advances a framework in which our social obligations toward others emerge from the fact that others are vulnerable to our actions and choices. Goodin understands that what is crucial in ethical terms, “is that others are depending on us” (1985, p. 11). In Love's Labor, Eva Kittay engages with the work of John Rawls and concludes that the norms and values underpinning liberal egalitarianism exclude “concerns of dependency” in a problematic way (2020, p. 10). Informed by her own experience as the caretaker of a disabled daughter, Kittay explores the theoretical implications, both for political and social life, of cases of fundamental dependence—cases in which the dependent person is unable to reciprocate and where the relationship between them and their caretaker is hardly one of equality (2020, p. xii). From that standpoint, Kittay enacts a dependency critique of equality and of society as an association of equals, suggesting that such individual and collective self-understanding ultimately “masks the inevitable dependencies and asymmetries that form part of the human condition” (2020, p. 18). Kittay's alternative proposal is a conception of equality that emerges from our inevitable human interdependence, rather than from properties formally attached to individuals (2020, p. 58). Legal theorist and political philosopher, Martha Fineman, argues in her book The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency, that dependence has been longtime stigmatized due to the foundational role that independence plays in our political discourse. According to Fineman, our veneration of notions such as autonomy and self-sufficiency has rendered the “specter of dependence” incompatible with the structuring myths of contemporary societies (2004, p. 34). In her work, instead of a negative assessment, Fineman offers a view of dependence as a multi-dimensional and multi-faceted phenomenon (2004, p. 35). She suggests a distinction between inevitable and derivate dependencies, whereby the former refer to the biological and physical dependencies characteristic of all human beings and the latter to the dependence experienced by those in charge of a dependent person (2004, p. 36). For Fineman, this second type, unlike the first, does not entail a universal experience of dependence. Such form of dependence is mediated by economic and structural dimensions and shows a tendency to assign correspondent responsibilities to private spheres such as the family. In lieu of the privatization of derivative dependence, Fineman proposes seeing caretaking as creating “a collective or social debt,” toward which all members of society are obligated (2004, p. 47). An important recent addendum to the scholarly debate around vulnerability is Judith Butler's book, The Force of Non-Violence. In it, Butler claims that social interdependence is one of life's unavoidable traits, as well as a useful concept to understand how violence works: indeed, the latter is theorized precisely as an attack to the bonds that constitute our interdependence. The non-individualistic vision of equality that unfolds from Butler's position, akin to Kittay's, is not one that precedes the constitution of the self, but one that speaks to the fact that we are all interdependent and co-constituted. In Butler's words, “equality cannot be reduced to a calculus that accords each abstract person the same value, since the equality of persons has now to be thought precisely in terms of social interdependency” (2020, p. 17). In earlier works, Butler had contended that we needed to grapple with this fundamental dependence because, ultimately, “no security measure will foreclose” it (2006, p. xii). For Butler, this embodied dependent subject must constantly confront the paradoxical nature of the social bond and the fact that this very condition of interdependency which enables life, holds in it a destructive potential, because it is simultaneously the condition of possibility for cooperation as well as for exploitation and violence (2020, p. 46). Finally, Butler is careful enough to admit the existence of a differential distribution of vulnerability, as well as to expand the notion of dependence, so that it includes social, material, and environmental requirements (2020, p. 41). Despite the important insights of all these accounts—the starting point of all humans as dependent, the recognition of dependence's ambivalent nature and the inequalities that permeate it—not much is said in any of them about the specificity of dependence under capitalist relations. Goodin's contribution is certainly on point when it claims that because complete invulnerability is neither an ideal nor a realistic alternative, we must pay attention to how specific social arrangements create and maintain dependency relationships. He reveals an implicit danger in asymmetrical relations and concludes with the need to protect the vulnerable from instances of exploitation—preferably, by preventing discretionary control over resources and power abuses from those in positions of power (Goodin, 1985, p. 202). The attention paid to economic relations of dependence notwithstanding, not enough is said in his approach about the specificity of relations of dependence under the capitalist mode of production. However, in my view, at the heart of any attempt to decenter independence lies the need to disrupt what we could call capitalism's fetishistic disavowal of dependence, that is, its enhancement but concurrent negation of social dependence. By being reliant on a system of social cooperation but also on the ideological figure of the independent individual—what Weeks has called capitalism's “dependence on independence” (2011, p. 56)—capitalist societies reproduce a profound contradiction. To fully understand it, our analysis of dependence needs to integrate the much-needed critique of political economy and pay more attention to the specific nature of our social relations. That is precisely what a second group of authors, that I will now proceed to discuss, has done. The most serious attempt at theorizing dependencies as embedded in capitalist relations comes from Patrick L. Cockburn (2021), who by revising and extending existing terminology, has managed to build a serious conceptual framework capable of capturing the varieties of economic dependencies characteristic of contemporary societies. With the ultimate purpose of clarifying the moral and political debate on dependence, Cockburn proposes distinguishing between four senses of economic dependence: personal versus impersonal and structural versus practical. While personal relations of dependence refer to one's reliance on a particular individual, impersonal ones allude to one's reliance on unspecified or anonymous others. And while structural dependence explains how the need of a transfer of value is embedded in society's systematic institutional design, practical dependence describes relations in which one's access to a resource is directly determined by the discretionary power of another individual, their judgments and decisions. There is a relative overlap between the research on which Cockburn's account and my own account are based. In particular, I share Cockburn's call to broaden our view of economic dependencies and to make explicit the normative weight implicit in current understandings of who counts as independent and who does not (2018, p. 28). Also, by contesting “the usual suspects” of dependence (such as welfare recipients) and shifting the analysis to the economically powerful, his study provides an excellent starting point for ideology critique. Finally, I agree with his take on the limited usefulness of interdependence as an alternative term to dependence. As Cockburn explains, the emphasis of current literature on interdependence as a substitute of dependence risks replacing qualitative differences between our forms of dependence with an abstract notion of relatedness (2021). Radical republicans have also produced valuable contributions to the examination of our dependencies in the context of capitalist relations (Casassas & de Wispelare, 2016; Cicerchia, 2022; Gourevitch, 2015; Leipold, 2022; Muldoon, 2022; O'Shea, 2020; Roberts, 2017; Thompson, 2019; White, 2011). By distancing themselves from conservative and centrist iterations of the republican tradition and by unveiling alternative genealogies, they have opened up a space for the emergence of a new republican theoretical apparatus, capable of grasping structural concerns and impersonal forms of domination. What differentiates labor republicans from traditional republicans is that while both remain preoccupied with freedom as non-domination, that is, with the possibility of falling under the arbitrary power of someone else's will, labor republicans amplify the scope of the analysis. Interested, above all, in challenging the assumption that because no intentional agency appears to be behind capitalist relations, no domination occurs therefrom, they set up a framework in which abstract and impersonal forms of domination are scrutinized as much as concrete and personal ones. As a matter of fact, labor republicans see workers, prior to contract, as impersonally and structurally dominated by capitalists, but also personally dominated both at the moment of signing the contract and after it, at the workplace. Thus, Gourevitch identifies a “structural dependence” suffered by workers, who by virtue of not having access to society's productive assets, remain dependent on capitalists. For Gourevitch, this dependence is structural because it pertains to the background structure of property ownership, which forces workers not to work for a specific individual but to work for property owners nonetheless (2015, p. 596). In his contribution, Roberts also explores impersonal forms of domination, such as the market, directing our attention to the arbitrary power that it exercises, affecting “capitalists and laborers alike” (2017, p. 102). In doing so, he addresses some of the critiques raised against republicans, targeting their alleged inability to perceive that, under capitalist relations, personal domination is connected to but also different from social domination. Roberts also makes substantial claims on the topic of dependence, which brings him closer to my argument. For instance, he asserts that Marx's project is better identified as “a republic without independence” and that workers' separatism relies on a fantasy of independence, “wholly internal to the Hell they seek to escape” (2017, p. 192). Importantly for my purposes, Roberts contends that it is precisely Marx's examination of objective dependence what distinguishes his position from his contemporaries, more prone to moralizing critiques of capitalism (2017, p. 57). Finally, I identify in Thompson's analysis of capitalism as a defective sociality, the republican position closest to the one I wish to put forward here. Thompson even claims, as I will do here, that “distorted relations of dependence” lead to alienation (2019, p. 400). Let me now enumerate the reasons why the approach of this second group of authors—who do an excellent job in bridging the gap between the critique of political economy and the discussion of social dependence—seem to me analytically and normatively limited. Shortly put, these authors tend to pay too little attention to the objective nature of dependence. Cockburn's rich conceptual framework does not provide an analysis of dependencies' objectification. Although impersonal dependence explains how at times we depend on unspecified others, and structural dependence refers to the transfer of value from one group to another secured by institutional designs, none of these terms captures the specific objectification of social relations that occurs under capitalism. Gourevitch's structural dependence only captures the dependence of one group of individuals (workers) toward another (capitalists), leaving the dependence of certain groups (unwaged workers or capitalists themselves) unaddressed. I find the republican discussion also partially unclear in its own terms. Although radical republicans have criticized neo-republicans' emphasis on intentionality, they seem more committed to enlarge what counts as an intention than to assume the limits of the framework of intentions as such. Thus, Gourevitch claims that “the labor republican view takes a broader view of domination, both in terms of the relevant agents and the relevant sense of intentionality” (2015, p. 41). Although the structure itself cannot be said to be an agent, Gourevitch tells us, behind structural arrangements, there are dominating intentional agents. They might not intend to subjugate specific individuals or even a specific distribution of society's productive assets, but they must intend the defense and legitimization of a structure of property relations based on unequal distributions of private property (Gourevitch, 2015, p. 602). Cicerchia (2022) complicates the debate on intentionality by giving it a structuralist turn, explaining intentions (the fact that we know what we are doing and why, even though we might not know the total social effects of our actions), through the incentives produced by social positions themselves. Although this discussion lays beyond the scope of this paper, I take the problem of intentionality to be philosophically underdeveloped in republican thinkers (Artiga, 2012, p. 42). While the problem of imputability is certainly relevant for political reasons, it is not clear that it constitutes the most useful framework for a critical analysis of contemporary societies. Roberts seems to be less preoccupied with intentions and discusses objective dependence in a direct manner. However, he also claims that Marxists authors' emphasis on impersonal and objective forms of domination, such as Postone's and Heinrich's, forgets that behind the domination of things, there are people dominating people (Roberts, 2017, p. 91). If that were the case, then both Postone and Heinrich would be falling prey to Marx's own critique of fetishism. I find that view rather implausible. As Heinrich explains, what Marxists theorists are trying to underline is Marx's attempt to understand not only what capitalist societies have in common with all societies (i.e., that economic relations and categories are ultimately expressions of relations among people) but rather how capitalist societies differentiate themselves from other economic and social arrangements (Heinrich, 2021, p. 159). Their specificity consists precisely in human and social relations being mediated by objects. Grasping the objectivity of these relations might allow us to see that they are not entirely reducible to relations among people. Claiming that they are not reducible to relations among people does not amount to claiming that they are not carried out by people themselves; but rather, that they embody an excess that the mere aggregation of relations among people cannot provide. For that reason, they cannot be simply traced back to them. My intuition is that labor republicans focus on intentions, agency or people as important for the purpose of social analysis, is due to a specific concern: that without such claims, we end up mystifying social relations and maybe even deactivating social critique. Cicerchia declares that the problem with emphasizing unintentionality when talking about social structures that reproduce domination is that it “can actually mystify the social processes that lead to it” (2022, p. 12). Roberts further claims that “the critical theory of social domination has never clarified how abstractions can dominate people, or why we should care about abstract domination” (2017, p. 83). If this is the case, republicans' reservations are fair ones. Nevertheless, I would like to highlight two recent attempts at explaining the sort of power behind capital that despite not relying on agential accounts, enable a valuable critique and demystification of capitalist relations. The first is Vrousalis' contention that “structural domination under capitalism presupposes collective power but no joint agency or shared intentions on the part of the dominators” (2021, p. 40). According to Vrousalis, the capitalist economic structure is characterized by a triadic structure of domination, involving the dominators, the dominated and regulators—the latter being “any role holders or norms that contribute appropriately to the constitutive domination dyad” (2021, p. 52). He concludes that capital is “collectively power conferring but agentless” (2021, p. 50). Mau's recent theory of the economic power of capital also sees the impersonality of the domination as referring to “the power of a social logic rather than a person or a group of persons” (2021, p. 21). Mau explicates the mute compulsion of economic relations through the notion of emergent property, which is “a property of the system resulting from the organisation of its parts” (Malm cited in Mau, 2023, p. 44). Capital would then be an emergent property of social relations, irreducible to its parts but capable nonetheless of exerting causal power. The understanding of domination that unfolds from this view involves studying power “not only as a relation between social actors” but also as “a relation between actors on the one hand and an emergent property of social relations on the other” (Mau, 2023, p. 45). In sum, radical republicans contribute to a better understanding of how dependencies are organized and experienced by contemporary subjects, but they tend to dismiss or downplay the objective nature of this dependence. Here, my aim will be to explore a concept that can help us illuminate the problem of social domination from the perspective of the social form rather than from the perspective of the intentions of specific actors. Note however that I do not mean to suggest that the lenses of objective dependence are the only ones capable of addressing relations of dependence. I do, however, maintain that an abandonment of the concept of objectivity forecloses alternative ways of interpreting and transforming our dependencies. Finally, my normative critique of objective dependence will not stem from a republican notion of freedom, that is, it is not only concerned with domination from an arbitrary will. As Kandiyali (2022) has demonstrated, freedom as non-domination, while being useful to argue against personal forms of domination, is not always the best candidate (and certainly not the only candidate) to explain problems such as social domination. These objective dependency relations also appear, in antithesis to those of personal dependence (the objective dependency relation is nothing more than social relations which have become independent and now enter into opposition to the seemingly independent individuals; i.e. the reciprocal relations of production separated from and autonomous of individuals) in such a way that individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another To begin with, under capitalism, objective relations of dependence appear as having acquired an autonomous life, separating themselves from the very subjects that bring them forth in the first place. Second, they confront subjects in a hostile manner—an important point if we aim at assessing, as I hope to do, what is normatively at stake. Before getting there, let me turn to Carol C. Gould's study of the Grundrisse and in particular, to her discussion of the notion of objective dependence, which I shall use as the basis of my own account of the term. According to Gould, dependence under capitalism takes three objective forms: the objectivity of money or exchange, the objectivity of capital, and the objectivity of the machine. Let us survey first the objectivity of money or exchange. As we know from Marx, products can be put in exchange with one another only by being related through an equivalent value, which to be truly universal inevitably needs to abstract from the concrete characteristics or use values of the products themselves. The “universal language” capable of bringing commodities in relation to each other is, through abstract labor, “value or its embodiment in a symbolic form of money” (Gould, 1980, p. 17). But money, Marx tells us, functions only under the presupposition of “the objectification [Versachlichung] of the social bond” (1993, p. 160). In a society characterized by a social division of labor, where individuals require and are dependent on a great number of interactions to survive, the self-perception of individuals as independent seems, at first sight, puzzling. Yet this need not bewilder us. First, because producers are indeed made to labor privately, independently from each other. Second, because as authors, such as Georg Simmel, have explained, it is precisely the scenario of objectified dependence that allows for the emergence of the modern feeling of independence. Indeed, for Simmel, the consolidation of the money-form entails a process of abstraction of our dependencies, that ultimately makes us “remarkably independent of every specific member of this society” (2004, p. 298). It is precisely this form of independence that Marx regards as an illusion (or rather, we should say, a necessary appearance); an illusion that passes for a reality only for as long as the conditions of possibility of independent existence remain unproblematized (1993, p. 164). When we avoid such abstraction, what we get is an image of our dependence objectified in money, of the social bond itself expressed in exchange. The individual, Marx famously declared, “carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket” (1993, p. 157). Exchange, or its embodiment on money, is thus, the predominant form in which our social reliance on each other unfolds in capitalist societies. Not only our social dependence is objectivized in exchange; under capitalist relations, we are objectively dependent on the market. The idea of market dependence might sound counterintuitive, considering how often the market is presented as an opportunity instead of a compulsion, as something with which we can freely engage instead of something with which we are forced to engage. But instead of assuming the market as the freedom-oriented institution par excellence, let us explore how we are rendered objectively dependent on it—at least within what Karl Polanyi has called “market societies,” that is, societies in which the market has become the predominant principle of social organization.1 In such societies, we witness an isolation of economic activity, as well as the transformation of its raison d'être from subsistence to gain and profit (Polanyi, 1957, p. 71). Not only do market societies presume a gain-oriented behavior from individuals; they also demand trust, for the establishment of an “order in the production and distribution of goods,” in a self-regulating mechanism; that is, a vision of the economic realm as preferably controlled, regulated, and directed by market prices (Polanyi, 1957, p. 68). While Polanyi is interested in understanding how the commodification of all goods and services (even “fictitious” ones, such as labor, land and money) lead market societies to produce unsustainable effects that no society can endure without damaging its human and natural conditions of possibility, I am primarily concerned here with the emergence and the maintenance of an objective dependence on the market. To understand the origins of this objective dependence, we can turn to Ellen Meiksins Wood's investigation on the role that the market played at the development of capitalist relations. Following Brenner's contributions, Wood claims that systemic pressures coming from the market “operated before, and as a precondition for, the proletarianization of the workforce,” suggesting that economic actors could be dependent on the market (that is, estranged from non-market access to the means of livelihood), “without being completely propertyless and even without employing propertyless wage labourers” (2002, pp. 51–54). What is important to note here is that the market is not taken to be a mere sphere of circulation; rather, the market is understood as a social-property relation. In that sense, what differentiates capitalism from other modes of production is that “the relation of producers to the means of production, and of appropriators to the means of appropriation, as well as their relation to each other, is mediated, indeed constituted, by the market” (Wood, 2002, p. 85). Because the market is not a mere mechanism of exchange or distribution, but the general regulator of social reproduction, we achieve an unprecedented level of market dependence. This market dependence