Libraries Between the State and the Multitude

Controversy over “Little Free Libraries” has arisen once again, this time in the UK. I don’t want to go into the specifics of the problem with Little Free Libraries (officially branded or not). Jane Schmidt and Jordan Hale have written a foundational article about it, which everyone should read.

What I want to get at in this blog post is what I see as a fundamental contradiction (in the Marxist sense) that keeps cropping up in the discussion. What defines a contradiction for Marxism is that the opposition it describes and the problems that flow from it cannot be resolved or fixed within the existing structure. The two poles of the contradiction are irreconcilable within the current social, political, economic, and cultural context. In the discourse around community book boxes there is an opposition between community solidarity, self-reliance, local support, etc, and public or common goods which need to be supported and maintained at a higher level, regional or national.

Defenders of the book boxes argue that they are a form of community self-regulation. Harmless at worst, helpful at best, they provide a sense of community support which is perhaps more about the affective or symbolic significance of freely sharing objects whose use-value is traditionally considered positive (books) outside the dominant structures of exchange. Looked at this way, book boxes are a form of local resistance to commodity exchange more generally, an attempt to recapture the ability of community members to relate to each other outside what Marx and Engels called the “cash nexus” of exchange. Taken to its limit, these book boxes could be seen as one element in a comprehensive network of mutual aid.

However, in a context of massive defunding and closure of state-run libraries, book boxes, like volunteer staffing of library branches, can give the state the ammunition it needs to continue to withdraw financial and political support for public good provided at scale. If book boxes can be considered libraries, then why should the government continue to support libraries? If libraries can be run by volunteers, then why should the government continue to hire trained library workers? One aspect of the geographical issue around LFL’s which Schmidt and Hale point out is that they tend to be most prominent in areas where public libraries are least under threat, and so the problem posed by LFLs to public library support is muted, obscured, or made invisible.

So the debate on Twitter often came down to the question of localism vs. state support: the benefits of communities acting together for themselves vs. the economies of scale and resource redistribution provided by a tax-funded national network of libraries. Many of the arguments tried to point out the benefits of one side or the other, without making much headway. I think the reason this argument is actually irresolvable in the current context is that it actually expresses a fundamental contradiction within capitalism itself.

Essentially, it comes down to the well-established contradiction within the capitalist economy over the question of the common/commons. Capitalism is predicated on private property, but it requires common resources in order to keep going. Control over resources is maximized by being privatized (i.e. the private owner of a thing has full control over it), but some things only work properly when they are held in common (ideological reproduction through schools and libraries, for example). One of the ways capitalism has tried to work within the terms set by this contradiction is to draw a firm distinction between the individual and the state: the individual is the private owner, the commons is managed by the state.

In Marx’s critique of civil rights, he argues that the individualization of rights serves the purpose of making the private individual the only agent in capitalist society. In the capitalist model, there is the individual and there is the oppressive power of Others (society). It makes sense that individuals should seek to achieve a feeling of community belonging through small acts of mutual aid.

If the individual is the only agent in capitalist society, then, it also makes sense for us to look to the one remaining corporate body capable of controlling individuals for the provision and support of public goods: the state. The pandemic has shown how, when we can’t trust our fellow citizens (separated from any community sense by capitalist alienation), then we automatically look to the state to step in to resolve problems: we have looked for mask mandates, government-legislated lockdown, harsh penalties for rulebreakers, etc. This is all of a piece with the expansion of the role of government into civil society since the 1970s. When people like Dominic Cummings break the law with impunity, it undermines the moral authority of the state to counteract individualism (or localism) in order to support and maintain the public good.

Localism and nationwide public services are both “good things”. They are coming into conflict because of the structure of capitalist society; they are in contradiction because of the structure of capitalist society. Capitalism forces us to think of the local and the public (identified with the state) as an either/or proposition. Either we can have local, community-driven solutions or we can have public goods supported by the reach and power of the state and tertium non datur.

In their book on the commons, Commonwealth (2009), Hardt and Negri challenge this dualism. In effect, the problem with localism is that, because it relies on individual choices and actions, and the individual in capitalism is by definition private (see the expression “a private citizen” meaning someone who is not a public figure), localism has to be understood as a form of privatization. There is an aspect of ideology here: arguments for the local, for the commons, for the community are meant to obscure the fact that individual choices and actions are a form of privatization. Hardt and Negri write that today “it is difficult to see the common, even though it is all around us”

Neoliberal government policies throughout the world have sought in recent decades to privatize the common, making cultural products - for example, information, ideas, and even species of animals and plants - into private property. We argue, in chorus with many others, that such privatization should be resisted.

But the capitalist form of society forces to see only one alternative to privatization: the state.

The standard view, however, assumes that the only alternative to the private is the public, that is, what is managed and regulated by states and other governmental authorities, as if the common were irrelevant or extinct.

But the state cannot protect the public or the common. The state, for Marxists, is a “committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie”. As we have seen under the last forty years of neoliberal austerity and privatization, the state is not in fact opposed to privatization, but serves it.

What Hardt and Negri argue for is a vision of the common that is distinct from the polar-opposites which are the only options for us under capitalism. Their argument - throughout the Empire trilogy, of which Commonwealth forms the last part - is in favour of the constituent power of the multitude, a social form that overthrows capitalist social and political relations in order to “win back and expand the common and its powers”. Under capitalism, the contradiction between local and public goods, between privatization and state control, cannot be resolved, and we can argue about the relative merits of one side or the other until we are blue in the face. What will be needed to overcome the contradiction is a fundamental change in our social relations as individuals and as members of the “many as many”, the common multitude or the multitude of the common.