Capitalist normativity: Value and values

Values

Normativity consists of practical orientations and standards of judgment characterizing a given society or institution. Values are a distinct and rather unusual form of normativity. Unlike law with its claim for universal validity, values are self-referential, yet they are not whimsical since their meaning is located in reference to a real or virtual community that shares them. Unlike virtue, they are not character traits: they allude to deeds rather than subjectivities. Unlike a religious code, they are not invalidated by failure to enact those deeds, since failure can be attributed to weakness of will or inhospitable circumstances without rendering the very possession of values suspect. Values are defined against material interests or egoistic desires, whose presence violates them. Values are deliberate rather than impulsive, freely chosen rather than imposed. They are plural, existing always as an array of possible values. And they are vague or abstract: one can assert the possession of values without specifying their content.

The peculiarity of values comes into relief when compared with other forms of normativity. Especially with those in which norms are inseparable from reality: a harmonizing of nature, interiority and interpersonal relations, asserting the way things essentially are by assuring that they are governed according to shared needs (Polanyi, 1957). In some social systems, interpersonal dependencies and obligations are the frame of reference for socially sanctioned and codified behaviors and exchanges, the grid upon which they are organized. Norms of conduct, social hierarchies, and personality structures, often converge in ways that render them legible to – and possibly contestable by – each member of the social system.

Anthropologists have long documented these forms of normativity at the peripheries of capitalist societies. To show how they differ from values, I will briefly sketch two classic studies thereof. In one, Meyer Fortes (1965) regards the duty of worshiping one’s ancestors among the Tellensi as consolidating this group’s structures of authority among successive generations. A son is duty-bound to serve his deceased parents-turned-ancestors regardless of the nature of his relationship with them when they were still alive. Deceased parents, in turn, punish living sons for failures in worship, irrespective of how lenient they might have been when they were still alive. Ancestor worship correlates with codes of conduct which reproduce the Tallensi social structure. The codes operate legalistically, but they are also instantiated in habits and sentiments, outlasting the instances in which they come to play, for example in the experience of filial dependence. Parental authority might come across as coercive, yet the affections expressed by children, as well as the protectiveness and benevolence displayed by parents, mostly harmonize with the lines of generational authority.

Another example is Monica Wilson’s (1951) analysis of witchcraft accusation as an aspect of social structure among the Nyakyusa. She observes how misfortune correlates with wrongdoing through the retributive powers of witches. The Nyakyusa live, not with their kin, but among their age-sets. Their family resources nonetheless determine their cattle-wealth. Because non-relatives live together, inequality in wealth provokes jealously. To avoid it, the Nyakyusa lay great emphasis on food sharing, and disapprove of conspicuousness and boastfulness. These norms are reinforced through their belief in food-obsessed witches, who smell excess food and attack those who consume it, unless stopped by neighbors who see the witches in their sleep. Neighbors, in turn, are more likely to defend a person who is humble and generous with his resources.

Such personally compelling and socially efficacious normativity has largely disappeared, in modern Europe, with the emancipation of individuals from direct and personal bonds. When the market, rather than structures of authority and power, regulates society, mechanisms of production, reproduction and exchange appear to result mechanically and independently from the actions of countless autonomous individuals on each other. Actions issue from private interests and motivations rather than from reverence to authority or obedience to an external force. Human activity comes to be oriented toward general guidelines rather than particular circumstances, which could conceivably be overcome or downplayed. A unique and indivisible individuality is posited as the ultimate source of one’s actions; consciousness as the absolute source of what one knows; and a social contract between autonomous agents as the accepted source of their social power. Together, these factors generate an experience of individual freedom (Goldmann, 1973: 18–20; Williams, 1976: 133 –6).

This freedom forms the backdrop for the ascent of values as a dominant form of normativity. The concept of value has been taken over from political economy to the normative realm in late 19th-century Europe, with the divergence of norms of conduct from social structures mediated by the market. Featuring now in the plural, as values, it has come to reflect a shift towards subjectivity. This shift did not, however, imply pure relativism: philosophers saw the valuing subject as embodying and discovering values rather than producing them. Still, values were not bound to objective facts and universal principles, and they have become a new way of grounding morality and meaning (Joas, 2000: 21–2; Schnädelbach, 1984: 164–6).

Subject-oriented yet abstract and general values channeled two novel freedoms to form an image of society as the interplay of individual liberties: (1) the freedom of choice: values are unconstrained by necessity or predetermined contents. They can be chosen, left vague, or remain inactive. It is, moreover, the choice between different values that grants choosers a convincing sense of freedom (Robbins, 2007); and (2) the freedom from the necessity to be realized by fashioning society in their image. Values can be asserted even when devoid of content or consequence. Anyone can plausibly claim to be moved by values rather than interests, without bearing the burden of proof. And since values are essentially non-binding and non-compulsive, anyone can credibly assert their values, even when these values are inactive, overridden by other considerations, or unlikely to produce their projected outcomes. It is this quality that inspired Nietzsche to revaluate all values with respect to nonagency. In their self-exclusion from a hostile reality, he maintained, values ‘reek of impotence’, granting humans ‘the sublime self-deception that interprets weakness as freedom, and their being thus-and-thus as a merit’ (1992 [1887]: 482, 554).

Yet far from values being matters of personal whim, people expect others to value what they value (Appiah, 2006: 21, 27--9). Another way of putting this is that values presuppose a likeminded community. Values are categorized in a way that foregrounds the existence of other people who also recognize them as valuable. Categories of values presuppose the virtual existence of other, more specific values: family values, national values, religious values, military values, professional values, middle-class values, democratic values, liberal values and the like. Their elastic generality makes them ideal for empirical research that seeks to classify personal dispositions (Edel, 1988; Hechter, 1993). Thus, for example, the anthropologists running the Harvard Values Project in the 1940s and 1950s considered values as a meeting ground of individual and society (Kluckhohn, 1951). They found in values fertile ground for describing various social groups, and for linking orientations and judgments to cultural wholes, even if these generalizations diverged from individual beliefs or practices (Albert, 1956).

Values are further claimed in direct opposition to private interests, considered valid only if disinterested. They imply transcendence over one’s material desires or psychological inclinations, doing the right thing despite temptations to act in less commendable ways. This is in keeping with Inglehart’s (1977) famous thesis of values becoming more salient among those for whom material concerns are less pressing. Values are most conspicuous in the unpaid work of activism or volunteering. The economically privileged, shielded, or sustained, can easily transcend material concerns and desires. The ranks of activists and volunteers are thus occupied by teenagers supported by parents, women supported by husbands, students on a stipend, pensioners, sponsored interns, or public servants whose mandate includes public service. Values are implied by the material disinterest that these actors demonstrate. Despite their salience among activists and volunteers, however, values pose no serious threat to the existing order, precisely because the moral impulse they embody does not necessitate durable effect. They seem to imply it, however, which is why values are so paradoxical. To make sense of them, we must look to value.

Value

My argument in this paper is that values, as I have defined them, are socially and historically specific creatures of a capitalist mode of production to which they are limited, and which accounts for their unique features. What is it, then, about capitalism, which shapes normativity in the form of values? Capitalism differs from other economic systems in binding production to exchange. Exchange recovers more value than the value invested in the production process, fueling relentless accumulation. Since people make the expenditures that end up being accumulated in the economy at large rather than returning to them, they must be operating under some sort of necessity. This necessity issues from their removal from the means of producing and reproducing their living conditions, whether individually, communally, or hierarchically. To procure the stuff they need and want, they typically rely on the incomes they earn by selling their labor power. The prices of the goods they buy and of the work they sell abide by the laws of market competition. People can therefore procure stuff in accordance with their bargaining powers, but have no control over what kinds of things are produced, or their own relation to the production process. In other words, they cannot adjust the production of goods, infrastructures, services or institutions, to the satisfaction of their needs and desires, whether privately, collectively, or through some politically organized procedure. Rather, production is geared toward the surplus needed for accumulation, from which capitalists can pocket profits and set the next cycle of production into motion. This is structural necessity rather than personal choice. Just as workers must compete over jobs and incomes for the sake of their survival and wellbeing, capitalists must compete over exceptional productivity for the means of reinvesting to stay in business. This structural necessity puts upward pressure on productivity. Higher productivity, in turn, puts downward pressure on the value of productive activity, since productive activity constitutes an ever-smaller portion of the overall product. This holds true even as more and more stuff gets produced (Marx, 1990 [1867]: 434–7).

Moishe Postone (1993) points out that the incessant drive toward accumulation through ever-increasing productivity leads to an abundance of goods, including the knowledge and skills required to produce these goods. While the diminishing value of productive activity manifests itself in the dependency and disempowerment of the people who produce goods, knowledge, and skills, one the one hand; but cannot control what these goods, knowledge and skills are used for, on the other. Formally free individuals operating under competitive pressures have every incentive to put their capacities to use in potentially profitable ways. Yet a production process that is, for accumulation’s sake, increasingly rationalized and abstract, shapes these capacities and their uses. This means that people’s actions, however sophisticated, powerful, or rewarding, are not realizations of their freedoms. On the contrary: they fuel the very forces of production that reinforce their nonagency.

Nonagency gives freedom a fragile quality that tends to be asserted defensively and with nagging suspicion. M.P. Baumgartner (1988) describes, for a New York suburb, the tenuous freedoms of people living together without being bound to one another through external or interpersonal control. The pressures of keeping up what they consider normal lifestyles compel them to spend most of their time working for an adequate salary. They assert their freedoms after work hours when they return to their suburban homes, quietly minding their own business. They react negatively to confrontation, interference, or encroachments of others on these freedoms. Even family members, relatively independent and not obliged to authority, can only hold sway on each other through emotional connections.

Suburbanites, who had never experienced a wholly different form of life, hold dear the freedoms they enjoy. In contrast, the elderly subjects in Jane Collier's long-term study (1997) of a Spanish village, perceive them with great anxiety. The society they had grown up in was governed by rigid rules and conventions. After those rules had lost their hold, the elderly lost their bearings and felt insecure. They distrusted, for example, the care given by their adult children precisely because these children, however loving, were not beholden to them by bonds of duty.

Lacking control over the production of their social surroundings, people express their powers by pursuing competitive advantages in the things they acquire and possess. Those whose pursuits are incentivized and rewarded are likely to experience a sense of freedom that comes out of self-assertion. They might perceive their work and its products as expressions of freedom, or extensions of their selves, which only in the last instance are limited by abstract market factors. They might even perceive the market as a force that enables, regulates and rewards their assertiveness. The assertion of one’s self as a correlate of economic value goes as far back as Thomas Hobbes, who held that to value a man at a high rate of exchange was to honor him and vice versa (1946 [1651]: 57). In contrast, the thrill of self-assertion is a rare luxury for those without access to such opportunities, and whose work is insufficiently rewarded. They are more likely to perceive the market and related institutions as constraining rather than liberating. The experience of freedom and agency varies, therefore, between disempowered and underpaid workers and those who reap in the rewards of accumulation, as it does between those exposed to the pressures of competition and those who are relatively shielded from it by buffers like a nurturing family, a protective community, or welfare legislation.

Self-assertion is most generously apportioned to members of the middle class, in so far as they can and must wield resources for their own projects and protections. This is, in fact, part of what defines them as middle class. Marx opposes capitalists – who receive and use part of the accumulated surplus that they do not themselves create – to workers, who retrieve only part of the value that they create for others. Since these distinctions are only personifications of economic relations (Marx, 1990: 179), any one person could alternately occupy either or both positions. Marxian theorists (e.g. Carchedi, 1975; Carter, 1985; Wright, 1978) identify the middle class as a contradictory position, partaking in both sides of the dichotomy. As salaried workers they create more value than they retrieve, yet they operate as capitalists insofar as they appropriate some of the surplus created not by their work but by what they manage to save and invest. Middle classes are driven by the precariousness of their position in the social and economic system, to save and reproduce their advantages as capitalists, in order to be spared the competitive pressures that bear on them as workers. They have, therefore, the incentive to exercise competitive self-assertion along with access to the capital that can empower them to do so. They realize their value by their restless motion, like moving up and down the block (Martin, 2002). As I will soon show, middle-class self-assertion can also be expressed in the form of values.

Assertiveness also varies historically. This comes into relief when comparing the contemporary moment to the 1930s, as David Harvey does when he diagnoses both as eras of over-accumulation. He identifies them by idle productivity, a glut of commodities, surplus money capital, and high unemployment. Since the amount of capital in circulation must remain balanced with the capacity to realize it through production and exchange, over-accumulation is met by devaluation, the writing off of the value of capital and labor power. It is manifest in the diminishing value of work and its products through deferral or absorption of excess through debts, in geographical expansion and in flexible finance and accumulation; or more brutally in inflation, unemployment and falling wages (Harvey, 1982: 196–9; 1990: 181–3). When work is devalued, it becomes harder for workers to exert their powers in social institutions, or to control the sources and dynamics of profit-distribution. Society appears, then, to reproduce itself autonomously, without deliberate mediation (Hardt, 1995).

In the 1930s, Frankfurt School theorists, arguing from the perspective of devalued work and its outcomes, criticized the repressiveness of state management and administration of resources. They diagnosed an eclipse of the market by political domination. The era of neoliberal reforms is not merely the practical refutation of this perception – as Postone (2004) points out – but can be viewed as its existential pair, the primacy of market regulation over political governance. In both instances external forces, whether state or market, appear to frustrate individual freedoms and agencies. Analogies between the 1930s and recent decades are reflected in the normative realm by the recurrence of pragmatic egoism alongside self-negating zealotry (see Jay, 1982, with respect to Horkheimer, 1993 [1936]). Such incongruous duality has been relatively dormant in the postwar era, when markets and politics were perceived as incentivizing work, however unfairly, and responding to social demands and political interventions, however insufficiently. The similarities are obscured, in other words, by an intervening era of welfare capitalism, when there was far greater scope for self-assertion through collective bargaining. This was also the heyday of values.

Value and Values

I have used the term value to refer to a capitalist relation of domination that operates through the work of individuals who, in striving to satisfy their needs and wants in a production process that operates beyond their control, yield ever increasing wealth, knowledge and skills, without controlling their creation and use. I now want to link this social relation to normativity. The fact that people operating under capitalism exchange their capacity to work for an income that would buy them a living independently of one another obviates the need for bonds of duty or ideals of virtue to hold them together or keep them in check. Exempt from such overt powers and interpersonal obligations, they are free to make pertinent choices about how they want to lead their lives. Yet their reliance on the capitalist production process also means that they are removed from the means of creating the social environment wherein such decisions can be realized though their combined will and effort. Freedom therefore runs up against nonagency. Normativity, in this context, cannot be an active representation of sentiments or obligations. It is rather a counterpart of impersonal and indirect interdependencies under the sign of value.

Within a capitalist mode of production, individuals assert their powers first and foremost through their competitive pursuit of interests. Interests are tricky, though. If they were perfectly aligned with the opportunities and rewards that capitalism provides, one’s successes or failures would appear to be just, and the market would seem like no more than a formal framework for individual liberties to be played out. Instead, self-assertive as the subjects of capitalism might be, their skills and desires overshoot existing rewards and incentives. Similarly, the accumulation of wealth in the economy does not automatically translate into their wellbeing. When the pursuer of interests is always expending more than what she receives and is held accountable for more than what she controls, her domination lies in plain sight. If she nevertheless exerts a measure of influence over her immediate surroundings, she might chafe against this domination through protest and activism, or by breaking away from her self-interests in other forms of expression. These possibilities reach towards a rapprochement between her freedom and her nonagency, and they do so through the intermediation of values.

Values construe unremunerated exertion as willing forfeiture: a renunciation of self-interests for the sake of a higher, immaterial good. They stand in for freedom against a lack of opportunities to realize it. Values are therefore expressions of discontent with social domination, but also a coming to terms with it. They reconcile individuals with their circumstances by allowing them to rise above these circumstances in their imagination while making limited adjustments within the confines of what is socially given. Values give positive content to freedom just as it is undercut, granting their holders a sense that society does, to some degree, respond to their combined powers, even when these powers are greatly diminished.

To repeat: self-assertion through the pursuit of interests is an effective manifestation of agency only if interests are adequately rewarded. But when interests are routinely frustrated, they raise nagging suspicions about freedom and agency. Self-assertion through values is less vulnerable to refutation, precisely because values are grounded on disinterest, subjective orientation, and vague generality. Values renounce rewards and are not beholden to effects. Under the aegis of socially acknowledged values, the gap between what a person gives and what she might expect in return is largely considered a mark of her morality. Values thus redeem one’s truncated powers, extending freedom beyond and against interests, to meet necessity on more morally palatable grounds.

Even so, values are not infallible. For one thing, a person must live sufficiently above subsistence level in order to experience her unremunerated expenditures as free renunciation. For another, society must affirm her renunciations for them to be plausible. Values are credible means of self-assertion when those who possess them are afforded at least some material, social or political leverage for their values to insinuate themselves into the gap between effort and outcome. As indeed they often do for members of the middle class, or as they generally have for those who have operated from within the collective bargaining arrangements of welfare states. When these conditions do not apply, values yield ground to other forms of normativity.

The forms of normativity described by anthropologists of non-capitalist societies typically featured interpersonal dependencies and obligations that were immediately meaningful for members of these societies and efficacious in their social reproduction. In contrast, social relations under capitalism are shaped by an impersonal drive toward accumulation. Release from personal bonds engenders individual freedoms, but social production proceeds beyond anyone’s direct control: normativity has nothing to do with its guidance. Rather, it manifests a rift between subjective impulses and objective outcomes. When individuals are sufficiently empowered, they bridge the rift by a feat of their imatination, which I have described as values. They are tentatively supported by what leverage they possess to influence their immediate circumstances. In contrast, disempowerment and devaluation undermine the plausibility of values.

Values are adequate to a free yet nonagentive individuality striving to find meaning and manifest responsibility under given constraints through sufficient means at its disposal. The less necessary individual freedom is in the reproduction of capitalist relations, the deeper the chasm between them. Normativity then comes to reflect either (unmediated) individuality or (unmediated) necessity. In the first case, self-assertion becomes either irredeemably pragmatic, eschewing any higher ideals. Or it becomes solipsistically virtuous, eschewing any consideration of social generality or effect. In the second, freedom is traded in for duty in the form of adherence to norms and guidelines externally imposed by a protective identity group.

The decline of values

Values have prospered in the postwar era for citizens with the latitude to bargain for some of the collective spoils of production and to negotiate the terms of their political participation. Aspects of social reproduction and service provision were subject to criticism, the more so the less society was working according to its own established standards of growth, employment, and participation. Where expectations overreached opportunities, interventions and protests afforded credible outlets for self-assertion. The major social struggles of the 1960s were struggles of values, driving demands for improvement of organizations that served social reproduction without themselves being part of the exchange nexus, such as schools, public housing, health services, transportation systems, prisons, and communication (Offe, 1984). Activists were sufficiently empowered to negotiate greater welfare expenditures and better social services. They perceived these benefits as accomplishments of their struggle. This feat was harder to accomplish when services were privatized and social security diminished (Gough, 1979: 149–50).

The decades that followed were devoted to creating favorable conditions for individual competition, enterprise and self-insuring. They reinstated a pragmatism that emptied collectivity of normative content. Analyzing these transformations in the 1970s, Michel Foucault granted that governments nevertheless provide minimal existence to the poor and unemployed so that market mechanisms could inspire pragmatism among the rest of society (2008: 206). He did not live to see the wholesale integration of society into the market, including its weakest links. This integration entailed the transmission of baseline welfare onto civic, ethnic or religious associations. These associations, in turn, gave rise to different forms of normativity – namely virtue and duty – that coexist with pragmatism. Such forms are increasingly replacing values.

Those who are forced into relentless pursuit of basic subsistence needs might help one another out by exhibiting and enlisting loyalties from relatives, neighbors, or friends, as a buffer against the hostility of others, with a mix of sentiment and pragmatism (Dudley, 2000; Stack, 1974; Suttles, 1968). Alternatively, they might seek the protection of religious, ethnic or sectarian associations that procure independent resources to sustain their members. Since the ability of these associations to provide for their members depends on the commitments and loyalties of members, associations imposed duties and renunciations on their members. Religious zealotry, for example, grows for those whom, in their economic insecurity, rely on their religious community for their daily bread. It entails a normativity that cedes nothing to freedom of choice or action, inspiring good deeds or moral dispositions as matters of obligation (Berman, 2000; Chen, 2010; Weiss 2014).

Those with access to resources beyond their most pressing needs can care for others in less constraining ways. Such care becomes a pressing call on their consciousness as welfare provisions and services are cut back and delegated onto voluntary gestures and organizations. A host of civic movements rush in to fill the void left by retrenching states, and they grant their members the experience of giving and empathy. The responsibilities and solidarities invoked in the rise of voluntarism are constantly challenged by their insufficiency as they struggle for adequate expression (Muehlebach, 2012; Weiss, 2011). Their limited influence, combined with the social affirmations they afford their members, makes virtue replace values as the standard normativity of social privilege.

This is evident in Nina Eliasoph’s (1998) ethnography of civic groups among middle-class Americans. The activists and volunteers she studies are united by their broad concerns over their community and society. These values underlie their protests, petitions, lobbying, and volunteering activities. Yet the fragility of values becomes apparent as soon as activists are asked to present their concerns publicly. Unsure of their own power and untrusting of others’ motivations, they recast their goals as ‘close to home’ issues, to be pursued ‘for the children’. Their undertakings become smaller, more doable ones. They distinguish themselves from society at large through their virtue. They are preoccupied with caring for others and being good, but balk at imposing the same standards on an interest-driven public for fear of sounding arrogant or radical. Eliasoph describes an environmentalist group organizing to prevent the construction of a toxic incinerator. In presenting their cause publically, they rely on close-to-homeness, despite the fact that not all of them live near the proposed incinerator site, convinced that people are concerned primarily with property values. Even if activists are not just in it for themselves, their actions are shaped by the practical limitations they perceive.

If middle-class activists find solace in their virtue, the fired autoworkers from a Wisconsin Chrysler assembly plant, described by Kathryn Dudley (1994), are not so lucky. They used to have relatively secure and well-paying manufacturing jobs that allowed them to proudly assert values like family, hard work, and decency. But by the time Dudley encounters them, their jobs and safety nets have disappeared. Their values are discredited by social workers who fault them for having failed to educate themselves to meet the demands of the contemporary economy. Searching for new footing, the fired autoworkers’ moral world bifurcates into pragmatic self-interest and a sense of duty. This comes across clearly in Dudley’s account of former autoworker Joe Gordon. Having lost his job, he can either get an education that would help him transition into a low-paying service job, which he might nevertheless find meaningful, or stick with manual work that would allow him to continue supporting his family according to its present standard of living. Morally distressed in the face of their incompatibility, he comes to consider the first choice as throwing money at a college degree out of sheer self-interest, and he finally settles on a meaningless job that he will not enjoy, out of a sense of duty towards his family.

Conclusion

In their search for the sources of moral coherence among middle-class Americans, Robert Bellah and his associates famously elicited through multiple interviews a patchwork of incongruent views on freedom, individualism, self-realization, and community involvement. Values, they concluded, ‘turned out to be the incomprehensible, rationally indefensible thing that the individual chooses when he or she has thrown off the last vestige of external influence and reached pure, contentless freedom’ (1985: 79–80).

Like Bellah and his associates, I relate values to individuals’ freedom from external influence. But rather than end my exploration there I relate them further to individuals’ nonagency under capitalism. Even if values are too vague to cohere as moral guidelines, they are not perforce incoherent. My own approach to values offers insight, less into the moral orientations of those who possesses them than into the work they perform socially. I have considered values a creature of value – a uniquely capitalist form of confrontation between freedom and nonagency. And I have shown how values mediate these poles by allowing people with adequate resources – mostly middle classes, or those who had been empowered by the regulatory institutions of welfare states – to experience their freedoms while reconciling themselves with necessity.

Values also express defiance against the constraints of capitalist relations. Values are predicated on an idealized vision of society as the interplay of individual liberties, wherein ideals transcend the compulsive pursuit of self-interests imposed upon it. This defiance attenuates in the present moment. As the decline of state protections and regulations greatly diminish individual and collective influence, and the middle class faces ever intensifying competitive pressures, values no longer fill the mediating role they once had in the reproduction of capitalist relations. Consequently, normativity takes shape as virtue, which can flourish in privileged subjectivities despite bars on its manifestation; as pragmatism, which makes do with objective circumstances; or as duty, which adopts an externally imposed definition of the good and eschews the free guidance of one’s own practices. Where values reconcile freedom and necessity by projecting a freer and more agentive vision of society, normative forms like virtue, pragmatism, and duty reflect the spirit of neoliberalism by embracing the unfreedom and nonagency that it exacerbates.