Consequences of Capitalism

Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

Noam Chomsky, Marv Waterstone

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642593839
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Is our "common sense" understanding of the world a reflection of the ruling class's demands of the larger society? If we are to challenge the capitalist structures that now threaten all life on the planet, Chomsky and Waterstone forcefully argue that we must look closely at the everyday tools we use to interpret the world. Consequences of Capitalism make the deep, often unseen connections between common sense and power. In making these linkages we see how the current hegemony keep social justice movements divided and marginalized. More importantly, we see how we overcome these divisions.

Chapter 1

COMMON SENSE, THE TAKEN-FOR-GRANTED, AND POWER

Waterstone Lecture, January 15, 2019

How do we know what we think we know about the world? How do we navigate through our day-to-day lives, and how do we negotiate novel situations? In this first chapter, we are interested in taking up questions about the mechanisms involved in producing, reinforcing, and sometimes changing the interpretive processes through which people come to conclusions (sometimes correct, but often incorrect or inaccurate) about: (1) how the world does operate in specific circumstances; and (2) how the world might or should operate. While we begin this discussion at a somewhat abstract and general level, we are concerned throughout with thinking about such matters within the contexts that are of foremost interest to us; that is, in public social, political, and economic contexts rather than in predominantly private spheres of thought and activity. As a beginning shorthand, we will term what many people in a particular time and place believe common sense.

THE NOTION OF COMMON SENSE

“Central to the notion of common sense is that its truths need no sophistication to grasp, and no proof to accept. Their truth is agreed to by the whole social body, and immediately apparent to anyone of normal intelligence.” This definition, from Kate Crehan’s book (2016), includes a number of very slippery concepts, things that we should be very troubled by whenever we see them, things like “the whole social body,” “anyone of normal intelligence,” and things or ideas that we accept simply on their face without proof. All of those things should be alerts to us. But they are elements clearly of what we think we understand about the notion of common sense. In fact, that’s part of how common sense works, through these kinds of unexamined, taken-for-granted mechanisms.

There are several different senses of common sense. The first one from Aristotle is that common sense is actually a sixth sense that organizes the other five senses and allows us to understand the world. In other words, we experience all kinds of sensory input, whether it’s through hearing or through sight, smell, touch, or taste, but there is a sixth sense, which, according to Aristotle, allows us to integrate all of that and make things that come into our brain meaningful. That’s one notion of common sense, a kind of mechanistic notion.

Second is what people in a particular time and place know about the world and how it works. Scale actually matters here; that is the closer you are, the more proximity you have to others, the more common is your common sense (at least as posited in this sort of framing), and the more distinguished from distant others. This notion is where we get a phrase like, “Well, it’s only common sense. Of course that’s how things operate.” That’s another sort of notion of common sense.

A third one is one that actually puts a normative valence on some common sense and gives it a kind of positive inflection. This notion of common sense makes it the equivalent of good sense. This variant is sometimes characterized as street smarts versus book smarts. You know what your gut tells you. We have many people who operate in society that way. This is where a phrase like “Use your common sense” is employed. In other words, “You know how the world works, right, so use your good sense.”

Now let’s turn to a formulation that characterizes all of this a little bit differently: British sociologist and social theorist Anthony Giddens and his notion of practical consciousness (1984). This is related to common sense. The first two of the framings of common sense just described (the Aristotelian notion and the notion of what everybody sort of knows about how the world works) are related to what Giddens thinks of as practical consciousness, which he describes as an accumulation of learned behavior for navigating the situations that confront us in our everyday lives. He calls it practical consciousness, and he distinguishes it from what he defines as discursive consciousness (1984).

When utilizing discursive consciousness, one must have an internal conversation that tells you how to operate in the world. You have to think about things very carefully. Practical consciousness doesn’t work that way. You actually sort of know, under many circumstances, how to behave, what to expect, what will happen in the world if you behave a particular way, which is why last year I opened by yelling at people because it’s not what we think we understand about a situation like this. It’s not part of the decorum. It’s unexpected.

But practical consciousness is rarely raised to this kind of discursive internal conversation level. This is essential. The fact that we don’t have to think about every single thing we do and how we operate in the world is a very good thing. Otherwise, we would essentially be paralyzed. If we had to relearn every instance in which we operate in the world every day, we would in fact be constrained from behaving at all. So it’s a good thing that much of what we do in our interactions is routinized in this way; that is, that it is, in fact, a practical rather than a discursive consciousness.

There are some circumstances where we become aware that we are operating in a rule-bound way. One of those circumstances is when we are in novel situations. For example, when we travel and come into settings where we don’t know the rules. A couple of things happen then. If you’ve had this experience, you know this is the case. One thing, you have to think a bit about how to behave, what’s the proper behavior, what will keep you in a safe zone rather than encountering things that become uncomfortable. So that’s one of the things that happen: you begin to think about how things work in unfamiliar settings. If they work differently than how they work where you usually operate, well, you might wonder how will I find out how things work? That’s one thing that happens.

The second thing that happens if we’re at least conscious of that process, is that we begin to understand that much of behavior is in fact rule-bound. It’s rule-governed, even if in most situations we don’t have to think about those rules, or even the fact that there are rules.

This is a very important kind of step, to think about the fact that much of behavior is rule-bound, and this is what Giddens is thinking about when he says that practical consciousness works for most everyday situations, but there are circumstances in which we begin to become aware that we have internalized a whole number of rule-governed behaviors (1984). In fact, to use a phrase that I want to emphasize, we take things for granted.

A second circumstance in which we might move from practical to discursive consciousness is when we are operating in situations where we think we know the rules, but something unexpected happens. Either something unpredictable occurs, or we don’t like the consequences. But again, this kind of situation produces in us this notion that life is rather rule-bound and that we need to understand how things work.

One important question that Giddens asks about all of this, and that we’ll come back and think about, is where do all these rules come from? How do these rules of behavior come into play? I’ll come back to this in a little bit more detail in a minute, but just for the moment, let me introduce this very unfortunate word that Giddens coined. This is a process that he calls structuration (1984).

What he means by that is that people through their practices make and reinforce the rules, but then forget about the fact that they are people-made rules. The rules begin to take on a character that looks like they simply operate independently of society. That issue where we forget that we are the rule makers is what makes the status quo so persistent to some degree. Again, we come to take the rules of everyday life for granted. This is how things work; this is how things should work. It’s just common sense. I’ll come back and talk about that. I also want to make clear, at this point, that not everyone is in an equal position in making these rules and making them stick, and we’ll come back and think about that.

Where does our common sense come from? How do we learn these rules? One quote from Kate Crehan again: “In a sense, we all have our own particular stock of common sense. Much of this will be shared by others in our immediate environment [that is this proximity issue], diverging as those others become more distant. So we’re acculturated into understanding these rules” (2016).

The earliest influences clearly, and this will be fairly prosaic, are our parents and immediate family. There is some notion that some of this learning actually occurs in the womb, but not going to get into that at the moment. After our immediate family, our extended family, our friends, the educational system, including religious education if that’s part of our background, the media, very broadly defined, the culture apparatuses, the kinds of things that get our attention, and then our own accumulated experience.

I just want to note here a little caution, which again I’ll say a bit more about in a bit. Our own accumulated experience becomes increasingly solidified over time. That is, we start to think we know how the world works, and things that accord with that evolving viewpoint we take in much more easily than things that seem to contradict how we think the world works. This evolution is a kind of ongoing process to the extent that we need to understand further and further how the world works.

It’s also important here to distinguish between what’s possible to know and understand firsthand from information that must be delivered second-, third-, fourth-hand by a various media; that is, mediated information, which is more and more the case. I mean, we know less and less about the world firsthand than we do through other sources of information.

It is also critical to point out that nothing enters our brains or minds unfiltered. Going back to the idea from Aristotle, the first definition of common sense (i.e., the extra sense that allows us to make meaningful what other senses tell us about the world) sidesteps the very important question of how this additional sense is itself built. What I’m suggesting is that part of our acculturation, part of the way we develop a sense of the common sense, is to develop a set of filters that tells us what’s important, what’s not important, how we should interpret what we get as stimuli. Some of that can be right, some of it can be wrong.

So the issue of taken-for-grantedness, and reinforcement of common sense, is a very important phenomenon. This is, in fact, what I just described, that is that we begin to filter those things that don’t really accord with how we think the world works, and we reject those things that really are contradictory. This is especially the case, I would suggest, and is becoming increasingly the case, through what we think about as either this bubble or silo effect. This is where we’re channeled in many of our media interactions, particularly into things that we seem to have already accepted.

So anytime you see a prompt, “If you liked this, you will love that,” know that this tactic works according to algorithms that produce this channeling effect. This is happening in all kinds of ways on social media and even in the mainstream media. People are CNN people, or they’re MSNBC people, or they are Fox News people. So there’s a tendency to sort of silo ourselves or put ourselves in these bubbles, and that’s becoming increasingly the case.

Now, an important question: Are we thinking about common sense (singular) or are we thinking about common senses (plural)? All too often, one rational being’s obvious fact is another’s questionable or flat-out wrong assertion. There is more than one common sense, and even seemingly incontrovertible facts have a way of shifting over time. Even for ourselves, something that we may have believed at one point in time, if we are open-minded, we might believe something quite different at a later date. But quite clearly, there are different common senses operating simultaneously. These are the sources of controversy and argumentation.

The notion of the single common sense, “[w]hich all men have in common in any given civilization is quite foreign to the spirit of the [Gramsci prison] notebooks. For Gramsci as for Marx, any given civilization is so fractured by inequality that understanding it requires us to begin with that inequality. Those most elementary things which are the first to be forgot, the fact that there really do exist rulers and ruled, leaders and led. Common sense in all its multitudinous confusion is the product of a fractured world” (Crehan 2016).

Yes, there are multiple common senses operating at any particular time and place. There are always competing common senses at play, which tells us several things. Immediately, it tells us that common sense is unstable. It changes over time. It changes from place to place, from one group, for example a social class, from one setting to another, and so on. This also tells us that common sense is both malleable and subject to manipulation. It’s not a stable thing. Common sense can shift.

Let’s begin to tie those notions of what common sense is about to political action. Ultimately, as Kate Crehan argues, “what interests Gramsci is the knowledge that mobilizes political movements capable of bringing about radical transformations” (2016). This is what Gramsci was interested in. One of his central questions was trying to understand how the Italian people came to accept Mussolini and fascism. So he was very interested in coming to grips with that kind of question.

The most important knowledge would seem to be precisely knowledge that when embodied in self-aware collectivities has the potential to act in the world. For Gramsci, the primary such collectivities as a good Marxist were class, classes. He was interested in class struggle.

The webs of intelligibility in which our socialization wraps us from the day of our birth are a reality from which we all begin. We are all to some degree creatures of popular opinion, and yet of certain historical moments, there is radical social transformation. When and why does this happen? Running through the Gramsci notebooks is the question, what is the relationship between popular opinion, another phrasing of common sense, and social transformation? How are these things tied together, if they are tied together at all? This was a central question for Gramsci and one that Marx really did not take up to any significant degree. So Gramsci is thought of in many ways as a cultural theorist of Marxism.

“Despite all his criticisms” of common sense—and Gramsci was quite critical of it; he thinks of it as a kind of hodgepodge, and he thinks of it as very unsophisticated in many ways—“Gramsci’s attitude wasn’t wholly negative. Embedded within the chaotic confusion of common sense, that is both home and prison, he identifies what he terms buon senso [good sense]” (Crehan, 2016). That is, we feel comfortable in our notion of common sense, but we’re also bounded by it. That’s home and prison in this case. And there’s a kernel of good sense in common sense.

The phrase “being philosophical about it,” in addition to calling for patience or resignation, can also be seen, and it was for Gramsci, as an invitation for people to reflect and to realize fully that whatever happens is basically rational and must be confronted as such. This is the way in which good sense can be extracted out of common sense, but it’s a process. It’s a process that Gramsci says has to be extracted, made coherent by intellectuals, that this is the role of intellectuals for Gramsci.

But he has a very ecumenical notion of intellectuals. Anyone, in Gramsci’s view, given the opportunity, could be an intellectual, that is, a person who could reflect on the conditions of their own material existence and think about why that existence has the characteristics that it does. So for Gramsci, anyone could be an intellectual.

The role of intellectuals is to extract the good sense out of the hodgepodge of common sense. Gramsci thinks about intellectuals as falling roughly into two categories. Organic intellectuals are those that remain connected to their class and further class interests. Now by saying that, that doesn’t necessarily mean of one sort of political stripe or another. Adam Smith, the classical economist, I would argue, is an organic intellectual for his class, the bourgeois class.

Traditional intellectuals, as Gramsci describes them, are people who are interested in being apologists or explainers or supporters of the status quo. The traditional intellectuals are also what Marx would have called the vulgar economists, with whom he was engaged in conversation and contention. So the role of intellectuals is to extract the kernels of good sense out of common sense.

Okay. Now, let me turn from the abstract for a minute and think about a concrete example of something that we think about as common sense, which we will come back to in certain ways through other parts of the course. So as common sense, the American dream. If I say that phrase, do you get a picture in your mind immediately? What does it look like?

The American dream, here it is: In America (and this is not just confined to America of course), if you work hard, play by the rules, you will succeed. Work hard, play by the rules, you will succeed. That’s part of the dream. Typically, it also includes a metric for what constitutes success. It almost invariably takes a commodified form, success. Since that’s the kind of reward a...