Objective and Subjective Conditions

CW: racist epithet

Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish.

There’s a tendency in non-Marxist social justice discourse to see to “belief” or “understanding” as the cause of oppression, with the solution to oppressive practices lying in “changing our perspective” or prioritizing things like care, justice, wellbeing, kindness, etc. We often see this in prescriptions to “just” look at things differently, “just” value things differently, or “just” make different choices.

I’ve criticized this view in the past by referring to the idealism/materialism distinction. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels criticized the idealism of the Young Hegelians, charging them with thinking that simply by exchanging one set of ideas, worldviews, or phrases, for another, that social justice could be achieved. By contrast, Marx and Engels understood that there are very real material considerations which are independent of ideas or phrases. These material considerations are not merely constraints on subjective action, they produce the conditions under which that action can even be considered. “[People] make their own history,” Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,

but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

In this blog post I want to take a different approach than the idealism/materialism distinction, partly because “idealism” has another meaning in English - as an antonym to realism or pragmatism - and partly because idealism/materialism is a philosophical distinction that perhaps gets away from the heart of the matter which I want to dig into here.

For Marxists, there is no pure, individual freedom, no autonomy, no unconstrained self-determination, as there is in liberalism (deriving from natural law and the social contract). Human beings are socially produced, are “always-already” social and socially constructed. Because of this, everything that seems or feels open and contingent at a given moment is constrained by what came before it, and every open and contingent moment in the present becomes a necessary one the moment it is past. If I “freely” choose to make a left turn instead of a right turn one moment, that decision becomes a necessary part of my life and experience in the next moment; I can’t go back; the left turn I chose is now something necessary, an objective constraint on all my subsequent subjective decisions.

That’s a fairly trivial example, but it serves to illustrate the basic idea. Now imagine all the unequal, oppressive, structural decisions “freely” taken in the past, and we can see how all of these create substantial material constraints on our actions, behaviours, and perspectives. Marx spends a lot of time talking about competition as a material constraint on the “freedom of action” of individual capitalists. No matter what any given capitalist wants to do, and irrespective of their values and choices, competition is a real material condition which limits (indeed, produces) actions capitalists have to take in the real world.

Saying that social justice can be achieved “just” by seeing the world in a new way, or changing our ideas, “thinking differently”, or adopting different values (or tables of values) repeats the mistakes of the Young Hegelians. These things are all necessary, but they are not sufficient, to achieve a just society. These are subjective things that we have to accomplish, but we must also challenge, attack, and dismantle the objective conditions that don’t just limit but produce our frames of reference and options for activity in the first place.

Another way to look at this is with changes in language. There has been a tendency, especially since the “linguistic turn”, to think that changing language will change objective conditions. I’m not saying we should not change language, that we should not respect pronouns, and names, and self-descriptions. But if we don’t also address the objective conditions, then the new words will end up having the same drawbacks as the old words.

This is because words do not objectively describe something in the real world. They are not connected to real world phenomena in an objective way. Neither are they purely subjective self-expressions of an individual world view. They are a social phenomena, and they are reflective, not of things but of social phenomena. We can think of words as occupying representational slots in a conceptual map of our social world. If we change the words without changing the map, then we just put new words into existing slots without anything changing. Because the new words are in old slots, the social structure remains the same: oppression and injustice in our social relations continue to be reflected in our language. Over time, the new words take on the same social connotations as the old words.

Take the word “Indigenous”, for example. As settler-Canada has tried - partially and unsuccessfully - to deal with colonialism and settler-Indigenous relations, there have been attempts to change the word that we use for First Peoples, in order to get away from settler-colonial and racist connotations attached to the word. I’m old enough to have seen “Indian” replaced by “Native”, replaced by “Aboriginal”, replaced by “Indigenous”. In some ways, this is an attempt at what Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang have called a move to innocence - the replacement of a “corrupt” settler-colonial word with an “innocent” new one. But these kinds of language changes are also a legitimate social justice attempt to move away from words with racist or colonial connotations towards fresh words, words which seem more legitimate or apt because they don’t have the connotations of the earlier word, words which are less harmful.

But because settler-colonial Canada has never succeeded in changing the objective conditions of racial capitalism here, because the racist social, economic, and political structures remain unchanged, each subsequent word by necessity takes on the connotations of the old word because it occupies the same slot in the settler-colonial conceptual map. I am not saying we should not adopt new and appropriate terms, but we should do it in full awareness that changing our language is no substitute for changing our real material social relations.

The idea of “objective conditions” is so ingrained in Marxism that is has almost become a stereotype and ripe for parody. But it is an important point to make in the struggle for social justice. Donna Haraway once described a question put to her in terms of “belief” (“do you believe in reality?” or something) as “protestant” as being a question of faith, as if faith could alter the material conditions, as if it could move mountains.

These ideas connect with librarianship in numerous ways, but I want to single out just two. Firstly, Intellectual Freedom’s social-contract/liberal individualism is committed to idealism over real change, because it thinks individual freedom really exists. It will always be satisfied with discursive or idealistic or subjective change because that can and will never seriously trouble the objective conditions of the status quo (cf. Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach about changing the world rather than just interpreting it).

Secondly, the recent Library of Congress removal of the “illegal aliens” subject heading is important, and the work to change subject headings - like the Decolonizing Description project at University of Alberta - is vital political work. But “illegal aliens” is a really good example of what I’m talking about. The headings “noncitizens” and “illegal immigration” continue to occupy the slots in the conceptual map for citizenship, law, and immigration, and therefore the entire structure of borders, statehood, and the racial constructions based on them. Without changing the objective conditions that produce noncitizens and the phenomenon of illegal immigration (that is, in my view, abolishing borders and nation-states, and destroying the racial hierarchy of labour and exploitation), the new subject headings will end up taking on the connotations of the old. As I say, however, the work of challenging the existing languages, discourses, and descriptions, is still vitally important; it must be done, however, in the full understanding of the objective conditions that make political action possible in the first place.