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4.07 AVERAGE
4.07 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
A thought provoking work. Hägglund's basic thesis, developed out of a close inspection of primarily Marx (but decorated with dozens of writers and thinkers), suggests that both capitalism and religious faith limit our ability to maximize our freedom and our quest for the good.
I'm with him about 4/5 of the way. I wish he had edited the book down a bit (he got a bit repetitive and could have probably said the same thing in 1/2 the words). Like I said, I need a bit more time (my leisure) to really clearly communicate the areas I enjoyed (there were many) and the areas I thought were a bit self-indulgent (also many). I think as I get older I get a bit more suspect of so much certainty, whether religious, economic, or philosophic.
Enough for now. I choose my bed.
I'm with him about 4/5 of the way. I wish he had edited the book down a bit (he got a bit repetitive and could have probably said the same thing in 1/2 the words). Like I said, I need a bit more time (my leisure) to really clearly communicate the areas I enjoyed (there were many) and the areas I thought were a bit self-indulgent (also many). I think as I get older I get a bit more suspect of so much certainty, whether religious, economic, or philosophic.
Enough for now. I choose my bed.
Enjoyment of this work might depend on one’s level of self-identified spirituality, and also one’s interest in undergraduate level philosophy. If both are very high this is going to be an intriguing read, but if not one might struggle a bit. Not sure if it was the particular translation from Swedish, but the use of the word ‘beloved’ in the first half of the book was difficult to digest as often as it was uttered – perhaps if one turns it into a drinking game every time it’s mentioned it would go down easier? The second half of the book focusing on social democratic aspects was more interesting, and yet the musings on Marx and Hegel were just not as satisfying as I would have hoped. I would pick up another book by Hägglund based on reading this, but I would wish it would be a bit more concise.
This is singularly the most ambitious book I’ve ever read. In the first part, Hägglund targets religious faith; in the second, he targets capitalism. Per Hägglund, the most important thing we have is our time, our finite lives. The most important question of anyone’s life therefore is this” “What do I do with my (finite) time here on earth?” Both religion and capitalism rob us of this time - and thus the chance of asking this question; religion by either asserting the meaninglessness of our corporeal earthly existence, and entreating us to live for an eternal afterlife (a la Christianity and Islam), or by asking us to reject/overcome the conditions of our fragile finiteness (a la Buddhist Nirvana or even Stoicism) - and capitalism by robbing us of our finite time, our freedom, by exploiting us under wage labour.
Hägglund broadly defines religion. It is, for him, “any form of belief in an eternal being or an eternity beyond being, either in the form of a timeless repose (such as nirvana), a transcendent God, or an immanent, divine Nature”, which is to say, any belief system that maintains that our lives, here on earth, are at best, a precursor to whatever is to come once we are “freed” from this life - freed from, as is fashionable to say these days, this “flesh prison”, by death. Haegglund does not indulge in the tired debate of the truth value of religion, a desire to call out the beliefs of religious people as not amenable to “logic” or “reason” - a la the New Atheism of Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens etc. His argument is a simpler yet more trenchant one: that what religion promises - the promise of an eternal life, is an undesirable state.
The intelligibility of a life, Haegglund maintains, is a function of its finiteness. We are only able to love people, to demonstrate care, to keep faith with practical projects, because we know that death looms in the horizon. As such, the more common desire we have, thinks Haegglund, is the desire for what he terms “living on”; that our lives be extended - but not indefinitely; that we may have more time with those we care about, more time with our projects - but that this time not be eternal. When we mourn the loss of a life, what we are doing, according to Haegglund, is expressing our sadness for the termination of the conditions of this life, that that person isn’t living on, but we are not pining for eternity. If eternity were at all an intelligible proposition, then mourning would not make sense, for our loved ones would simply have gone on to something better. We could not intelligibly conceive of their deaths as loss.
Here, Haegglund engages in detailed deconstructivist readings of the works of various thinkers. On the one hand, religious thinkers: from St. Augustine, who mourned the loss of an intimate friend (perhaps even a lover, we don’t know), and who even while reckoning with his sense of corporeal earthly loss, felt guilty at his feelings of loss, for they contradicted the notions of eternity his christianity compelled him to cleave to; to Martin Luther who, at the death of his daughter Magdalena, wailed at his sense of deep loss, and had trouble acknowledging the notion of eternal life for Magdalena as providing any consolation; to Soeren Kierkergaard, who in “Fear and Trembling” extolled Abraham’s deep religious faith which led him to decide to sacrifice his only son, Isaac; to C.S. Lewis, who wept for the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, and who even as he felt a profound sense of loss, attempted to hold on to religious faith. On the other hand, Haegglund engages deeply with Karl Ove Knausgard and Marcel Proust, who both showcase a commitment to secular faith, who both struggle to make sense of and liberate THIS life, not to be liberated FROM it, as religious faith calls for.
The second part of the book sees Haegglund engaging with non-religious thinkers who wrote about freedom and capitalism - or rather with thinkers whose work was not necessarily religious: Kant and Hegel who lay the groundwork for Marx; Marx himself - and here Haegglund provides what is easily the most spirited defense and enlightening reading of Marx’s labour theory of value; to Neoclassical thinkers who attempt to repudiate Marx - Mill,Hayek, Keynes etc., to those thinkers who attempt to arrive at social democracy - Rawls, Thomas Piketty. Haegglund’s conclusion? - Marx was right; Mill, Hayek, Keynes, Rawls, Piketty et al are wrong - they either misread Marx, or they fail to acknowledge some things immanent within capitalism that make it’s reform a contradictory notion.
The Ancient Greeks (primarily Athens here) conceived of two realms of activity within the state: 1. the oikos (household), which was the realm of production- poiesis, of NECESSARY LABOUR, the domain of the slave 2. the polis, which was the domain of action, of politics, of FREE labour - and where citizens were to pursue eudaimonia - the thriving of the state, which necessarily included the thriving of all within it. Yet as Hegel later came to argue, and as is obviously clear to us now, this was not by any means a free society. “The institutional rationality of a free society”, said Hegel, “requires that the production of wealth is not an end in itself but for the sake of the well-being of each citizen”. EACH is the operative word here (The Greeks took it to be CITIZEN, hence slavery was justified by the fact that only foreigners, barbarians, were enslaved)
This was where Marx came in. Capitalism is grounded on the notion that the measure of wealth is in terms of what Marx called “socially necessary labour time”. The argument here derives from the thought that we all produce a surplus of time - which is to say, that not all our time is spent sustaining life, but that we have a surplus of it once we have eaten, gone to the bathroom, and performed all the other necessary things we need to do to stay alive. What is left after we have performed these life sustaining activities, is disposable time - which we could think of as “free time” - time to pursue our practical identities, the projects we have and desire to pursue - play with our kids, play the violin, build a road, write a book etc - Marx called this “socially available free time”.
In a society where we were free to ask ourselves the question of what we freely wanted to do with our time, we would seek to reduce as much as possible our socially necessary labour time, and to maximize as much as possible our socially available free time. Thus all our production would be geared towards consumption. Any surplus value, therefore, since it isn’t necessary, could only be extracted from infringing into our socially available free time, and making it socially necessary labour time. This is what capitalism does.
Capitalism’s main imperative is not the satisfaction of material needs, but rather the accruing of profit, and to do so, capitalists need to continuously extract more relative surplus value from living labour - i.e. people. But since we would have no reason to abide by this if not coerced, within capitalist structures, our capacities to sustain our lives are tied to wage labour, which means we are only able to live as long as we work and generate profits for capital. Even when dead labour i.e. machines- perform most of the socially necessary labour, we are still screwed, for since our value under capitalism is primarily our labour, what results from machines performing this labour is not that we now have more socially available free time to pursue our practical identities, but that we now suffer from unemployment, hence cannot sustain our lives.
Because he recognises how imperative production is within these structures, Haegglund rails against reformists of capitalism who seek to have a broader welfare state e.g. social democrats like Thomas Piketty, Rawls etc., and utopian socialists who simply seek to redistribute available wealth through programs such as Universal Basic Income. Such ideas -social democracy and utopian socialism - Haegglund insists, by concentrating only on distribution and not attending to matters of production, overlook a fundamental contradiction: that since the measure of our value under capitalism is our socially necessary labour time, “the more we devote our lives to the public goods of the welfare state or to non-profit projects supported by a UBI—the less wealth there is to finance the welfare state and the universal basic income… the more we emancipate ourselves from the exploitation of living labor time, the less wealth we have to support our state of freedom.”
Hence, for Haegglund, the compatibility of capitalism and religion, as Marx suggested, is no accident: both “prevent us from recognising in practice that our own lives—our only lives—are taken away from us when our time is taken away from us. While capitalism alienates us from our own time by subordinating it to the purpose of profit, religions offer the consolation that our time ultimately is insignificant and will be redeemed by eternity.”
This leads to Haegglund suggesting that once we have undergone a reevaluation of value; recognized our socially available free time as the measure of our value, then we ought to have Democratic Socialism be the mode of political economy under which our lives are organised. “Democratic” because “freedom requires the ability”, for every citizen, “to participate in decisions regarding the form of life we are leading”. “Socialism” because only in collective ownership of the means of production, can we truly engage with that question - what are we to do with our finite time - for only then can we decide, democratically of course, “how and what we produce, based on which abilities we seek to cultivate and which needs we have to satisfy.”
And here, Haegglund’s argument begins to show some cracks - Kumbaya ideas that may evade practicality. For one, he argues that under democratic socialism, no one would be compelled to produce something that, though necessary for the thriving of the basic society, they didn’t want to do. One question comes to mind here: If this society is one where compulsion truly does not exist, how are we to deal with those members of our society who refuse to perform their share of socially necessary labour, perhaps seeing (rightly, I might add) that if they do not have to perform this necessary labour, then they will have more time to perform the free labour they desire? What if these people end up constituting a substantial number (but not a majority), such that some basic functionings of our society are destabilised or even hindered?
Haegglund’s answer to this objection is this: that a lot of necessary labour can be done within the realm of freedom. I.e. If cleaning houses is socially necessary labour, but for some reason some people truly enjoy cleaning houses (in which case, this then becomes the realm of freedom for them), then the task, house cleaning, can still get done, without requiring socially necessary labour. But this answer still begs the question: for what if we have socially necessary labour that does not exist within anyone’s realm of freedom - say, none of us particularly enjoys building roads or processing sewage, what’s our democratic socialist society to do about sewage and roads?
To be fair, Haegglund does observe that for democratic socialism to exist and thrive, the “social role of citizen” must count as a practical identity to us, such that my duty as a citizen is one I attend to in the same manner that i attend to my duty as say, a father or a friend. Yet this still seems to be without teeth. Institutions under liberalism work partially because they have eminent domain -and because of the incentive structures of capitalism. It is unclear from Haegglund’s work how democratic socialism would replicate this, allowing the undertaking of such necessary work without providing similar incentives nor having domain. The whole idea of “committed citizenship” doesn’t quite cut it; it places too much hope on wishy-washy feelings of communal belonging at the cost of actual consequences.
Haegglund’d book ends with a deconstruction (thanks again, Derrida) of the thought of Martin Luther King Jr., showing how even though King’s rhetoric was a particularly religious one (located, as it was, in the tradition of liberation theology, and influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr), his practical undertakings, both as regarding black oppression under American racism, and worker oppression under capitalism, both betray a commitment to secular faith: that of the amelioration of THIS LIFE is what is important, not, even for King the Southern Baptist preacher, whatever is promised in the next.
This has truly been a remarkable read. BIG RECOMMEND.
Hägglund broadly defines religion. It is, for him, “any form of belief in an eternal being or an eternity beyond being, either in the form of a timeless repose (such as nirvana), a transcendent God, or an immanent, divine Nature”, which is to say, any belief system that maintains that our lives, here on earth, are at best, a precursor to whatever is to come once we are “freed” from this life - freed from, as is fashionable to say these days, this “flesh prison”, by death. Haegglund does not indulge in the tired debate of the truth value of religion, a desire to call out the beliefs of religious people as not amenable to “logic” or “reason” - a la the New Atheism of Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens etc. His argument is a simpler yet more trenchant one: that what religion promises - the promise of an eternal life, is an undesirable state.
The intelligibility of a life, Haegglund maintains, is a function of its finiteness. We are only able to love people, to demonstrate care, to keep faith with practical projects, because we know that death looms in the horizon. As such, the more common desire we have, thinks Haegglund, is the desire for what he terms “living on”; that our lives be extended - but not indefinitely; that we may have more time with those we care about, more time with our projects - but that this time not be eternal. When we mourn the loss of a life, what we are doing, according to Haegglund, is expressing our sadness for the termination of the conditions of this life, that that person isn’t living on, but we are not pining for eternity. If eternity were at all an intelligible proposition, then mourning would not make sense, for our loved ones would simply have gone on to something better. We could not intelligibly conceive of their deaths as loss.
Here, Haegglund engages in detailed deconstructivist readings of the works of various thinkers. On the one hand, religious thinkers: from St. Augustine, who mourned the loss of an intimate friend (perhaps even a lover, we don’t know), and who even while reckoning with his sense of corporeal earthly loss, felt guilty at his feelings of loss, for they contradicted the notions of eternity his christianity compelled him to cleave to; to Martin Luther who, at the death of his daughter Magdalena, wailed at his sense of deep loss, and had trouble acknowledging the notion of eternal life for Magdalena as providing any consolation; to Soeren Kierkergaard, who in “Fear and Trembling” extolled Abraham’s deep religious faith which led him to decide to sacrifice his only son, Isaac; to C.S. Lewis, who wept for the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, and who even as he felt a profound sense of loss, attempted to hold on to religious faith. On the other hand, Haegglund engages deeply with Karl Ove Knausgard and Marcel Proust, who both showcase a commitment to secular faith, who both struggle to make sense of and liberate THIS life, not to be liberated FROM it, as religious faith calls for.
The second part of the book sees Haegglund engaging with non-religious thinkers who wrote about freedom and capitalism - or rather with thinkers whose work was not necessarily religious: Kant and Hegel who lay the groundwork for Marx; Marx himself - and here Haegglund provides what is easily the most spirited defense and enlightening reading of Marx’s labour theory of value; to Neoclassical thinkers who attempt to repudiate Marx - Mill,Hayek, Keynes etc., to those thinkers who attempt to arrive at social democracy - Rawls, Thomas Piketty. Haegglund’s conclusion? - Marx was right; Mill, Hayek, Keynes, Rawls, Piketty et al are wrong - they either misread Marx, or they fail to acknowledge some things immanent within capitalism that make it’s reform a contradictory notion.
The Ancient Greeks (primarily Athens here) conceived of two realms of activity within the state: 1. the oikos (household), which was the realm of production- poiesis, of NECESSARY LABOUR, the domain of the slave 2. the polis, which was the domain of action, of politics, of FREE labour - and where citizens were to pursue eudaimonia - the thriving of the state, which necessarily included the thriving of all within it. Yet as Hegel later came to argue, and as is obviously clear to us now, this was not by any means a free society. “The institutional rationality of a free society”, said Hegel, “requires that the production of wealth is not an end in itself but for the sake of the well-being of each citizen”. EACH is the operative word here (The Greeks took it to be CITIZEN, hence slavery was justified by the fact that only foreigners, barbarians, were enslaved)
This was where Marx came in. Capitalism is grounded on the notion that the measure of wealth is in terms of what Marx called “socially necessary labour time”. The argument here derives from the thought that we all produce a surplus of time - which is to say, that not all our time is spent sustaining life, but that we have a surplus of it once we have eaten, gone to the bathroom, and performed all the other necessary things we need to do to stay alive. What is left after we have performed these life sustaining activities, is disposable time - which we could think of as “free time” - time to pursue our practical identities, the projects we have and desire to pursue - play with our kids, play the violin, build a road, write a book etc - Marx called this “socially available free time”.
In a society where we were free to ask ourselves the question of what we freely wanted to do with our time, we would seek to reduce as much as possible our socially necessary labour time, and to maximize as much as possible our socially available free time. Thus all our production would be geared towards consumption. Any surplus value, therefore, since it isn’t necessary, could only be extracted from infringing into our socially available free time, and making it socially necessary labour time. This is what capitalism does.
Capitalism’s main imperative is not the satisfaction of material needs, but rather the accruing of profit, and to do so, capitalists need to continuously extract more relative surplus value from living labour - i.e. people. But since we would have no reason to abide by this if not coerced, within capitalist structures, our capacities to sustain our lives are tied to wage labour, which means we are only able to live as long as we work and generate profits for capital. Even when dead labour i.e. machines- perform most of the socially necessary labour, we are still screwed, for since our value under capitalism is primarily our labour, what results from machines performing this labour is not that we now have more socially available free time to pursue our practical identities, but that we now suffer from unemployment, hence cannot sustain our lives.
Because he recognises how imperative production is within these structures, Haegglund rails against reformists of capitalism who seek to have a broader welfare state e.g. social democrats like Thomas Piketty, Rawls etc., and utopian socialists who simply seek to redistribute available wealth through programs such as Universal Basic Income. Such ideas -social democracy and utopian socialism - Haegglund insists, by concentrating only on distribution and not attending to matters of production, overlook a fundamental contradiction: that since the measure of our value under capitalism is our socially necessary labour time, “the more we devote our lives to the public goods of the welfare state or to non-profit projects supported by a UBI—the less wealth there is to finance the welfare state and the universal basic income… the more we emancipate ourselves from the exploitation of living labor time, the less wealth we have to support our state of freedom.”
Hence, for Haegglund, the compatibility of capitalism and religion, as Marx suggested, is no accident: both “prevent us from recognising in practice that our own lives—our only lives—are taken away from us when our time is taken away from us. While capitalism alienates us from our own time by subordinating it to the purpose of profit, religions offer the consolation that our time ultimately is insignificant and will be redeemed by eternity.”
This leads to Haegglund suggesting that once we have undergone a reevaluation of value; recognized our socially available free time as the measure of our value, then we ought to have Democratic Socialism be the mode of political economy under which our lives are organised. “Democratic” because “freedom requires the ability”, for every citizen, “to participate in decisions regarding the form of life we are leading”. “Socialism” because only in collective ownership of the means of production, can we truly engage with that question - what are we to do with our finite time - for only then can we decide, democratically of course, “how and what we produce, based on which abilities we seek to cultivate and which needs we have to satisfy.”
And here, Haegglund’s argument begins to show some cracks - Kumbaya ideas that may evade practicality. For one, he argues that under democratic socialism, no one would be compelled to produce something that, though necessary for the thriving of the basic society, they didn’t want to do. One question comes to mind here: If this society is one where compulsion truly does not exist, how are we to deal with those members of our society who refuse to perform their share of socially necessary labour, perhaps seeing (rightly, I might add) that if they do not have to perform this necessary labour, then they will have more time to perform the free labour they desire? What if these people end up constituting a substantial number (but not a majority), such that some basic functionings of our society are destabilised or even hindered?
Haegglund’s answer to this objection is this: that a lot of necessary labour can be done within the realm of freedom. I.e. If cleaning houses is socially necessary labour, but for some reason some people truly enjoy cleaning houses (in which case, this then becomes the realm of freedom for them), then the task, house cleaning, can still get done, without requiring socially necessary labour. But this answer still begs the question: for what if we have socially necessary labour that does not exist within anyone’s realm of freedom - say, none of us particularly enjoys building roads or processing sewage, what’s our democratic socialist society to do about sewage and roads?
To be fair, Haegglund does observe that for democratic socialism to exist and thrive, the “social role of citizen” must count as a practical identity to us, such that my duty as a citizen is one I attend to in the same manner that i attend to my duty as say, a father or a friend. Yet this still seems to be without teeth. Institutions under liberalism work partially because they have eminent domain -and because of the incentive structures of capitalism. It is unclear from Haegglund’s work how democratic socialism would replicate this, allowing the undertaking of such necessary work without providing similar incentives nor having domain. The whole idea of “committed citizenship” doesn’t quite cut it; it places too much hope on wishy-washy feelings of communal belonging at the cost of actual consequences.
Haegglund’d book ends with a deconstruction (thanks again, Derrida) of the thought of Martin Luther King Jr., showing how even though King’s rhetoric was a particularly religious one (located, as it was, in the tradition of liberation theology, and influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr), his practical undertakings, both as regarding black oppression under American racism, and worker oppression under capitalism, both betray a commitment to secular faith: that of the amelioration of THIS LIFE is what is important, not, even for King the Southern Baptist preacher, whatever is promised in the next.
This has truly been a remarkable read. BIG RECOMMEND.