By Elias Passas
Sara Horowitz confronts a depressing reality in America in the modern day: despite the myriad of existential threats[1] looming in the background of daily-experienced disasters,[2] “we all felt an absence where our federal and local governments should have been.”[3] Though this reality became more stark during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been true in every facet of American life. Absent the needed support of a government safety net, we all exist in a state of precarity,[4] where any event—brought by our own hand or by fate—has the potential to cast us into ruin. Horowitz retells her own unexpected encounter with precarity. After graduating law school and entering the legal profession as a labor lawyer, she was shocked to learn that the “progressive law firm [she’d] just accepted a job with planned to treat [her] (and several of [her] coworkers) as an independent contractor rather than as an employee.”[5] A quirk of legal classification—with no actual basis in the material reality of her life (after all, she worked for the law firm for a wage, in exchange for which she provided a service)—meant that she lost access to healthcare, retirement savings, time off, and other protections. The solution to the precarity? Mutualism: a principle of institutionalized reciprocity.
Horowitz heralds “mutualism” not as a disruption—unlike the so-called “disruptions” of the tech sector, which exploit advances in technology in the interest of capital—but rather a resurgence of an old idea. She traces a history of “mutualism” through her family past, the history of modern economic development, and even to biological origin. In her history of mutualism, Horowitz’s account of unions is the most compelling—in no small part because it is the most detailed. Convincingly, Horowitz ties the action of unions—the mutualist organization par excellence—to the balanced life and strong safety net expected by Americans in the 20th century.[6] So too does she tie the assault on unions in the modern neoliberal age to the decline of the social safety net. But in much of the rest of her account, Horowitz’s is at once too inclusive and under ambitious.
For example, Horowitz discusses mutual insurance companies as a sort of mutual aid organization that has helped create wealth for everyone, by helping them manage risk. This positive account traces back to founding, with Ben Franklin’s early insurance companies.[7] Although “mutualist” organizations do help manage risk, Horowitz enters dangerous territory by including them in the same tradition of other liberatory mutualist organizations—such as Black banking cooperatives in the Reconstruction era or proletariat unions. The principal purpose of insurance has been to safeguard the accumulation of capital. Ben Franklin’s early insurance company, the “Pennsylvania Conservatorship,” grew out of “Factory Mutuals,” whose members were capitalist protecting their interests against the threat of losing tremendous capital investments to fire.[8] From the start, insurance protected the risks of capitalists, who accumulated wealth through extraction of value from labor. In fact, a group of Rhode Island cotton mill owners—the wealth of whom depended on the brutal extraction of value through the political economy of chattel slavery—created the first factory mutual.[9]
Insurance aimed at helping everyday people manage risk, such as the insurance provided by the Freelancer’s Union,[10] is a recent development in history.[11] Although insurance is necessary to manage risk in modern America, as a social arrangement, it is not an inevitable necessity. While the United States manages risk through insurance—and by extension, through an inefficient and grossly biased tort system—other countries have built a broad public safety net which operates through and by the state. Insurance, unlike a true public social safety net, operates under the logic of capital—and increasingly neoliberal capital, with its atomistic short-termism. As a consequence of relying on insurance, the logic of capital rules the life and social ordering of people and communities. Actuarial tables developed by insurance companies determine the value of homes, cars, jobs, and lives.[12] So, too, does it determine how much must be extracted as a payment for risk management. Despite its ostensible neutrality, this means a higher price and a lower payout to the poor, disadvantaged and oppressed.[13] This actuarial logic of neoliberalist capitalism has even extended to possibly unexpected aspects of public life—such as the criminal law.[14]
Even in a supposed world where insurance payouts and premiums could be severed from problematic biases that perpetuate damaging hierarchy, the problematic logic of capital remains. This is a problem Horowitz faced in developing the Freelancer’s Union. Despite the best attempts to create a radical and egalitarian safety net, the milieu of neoliberalism stood as a barrier to capital acquisition and expansion. More, the Freelancer’s Union or its equivalents—transformative as they may be—cannot address the needs of the people truly cast as “surplus” in the American neoliberal political economy.[15]
That is in part because Horowitz takes an overbroad understanding of what it means to be a “worker.” While she correctly calls on all wage-earners, even high-earning wage workers, to recognize their place in relation to the production of value as being more “proletariat” than “boss,” this picture oversimplifies economic relations in a neoliberal era that has commodified everything and subjected it to the logic of a market economy. An account of the relation between freelancers can illustrate my point. Imagine person A, a well-paid lawyer at a large firm who nevertheless works for a wage as an independent contractor. Because they lack protections, they are forced to work long hours to meet the rigorous demands of their firm. To make things work one day, A buys dinner from Uber-eats. Person B—an independent contractor/employee of Uber-eats—receives the order, and rushes to deliver the food. The political-economic relations between A and B and their respective employers are more complex than two similarly situated people producing value, which is then extracted for profit by their capitalist employers. A too extracts value from the labor of B by “outsourcing” the domestic labor required to feed oneself. A can enjoy the economic surplus created by the extractive relationship between A and B. Meanwhile, B is likely biking through the New York City streets—despite what might be terrible weather—because not having the meager income might simply spell devastation. Meanwhile, both Uber-eats and the firm enjoy the value of the labor created by both A and B, and turn that surplus value into further profits. This kind of layered relationship of extraction and labor exists in any given economic relationship, no matter how attenuated, and though mutualism, as accounted by Horowitz, may lessen the precarity, and therefore, the potential for extraction, mutualism will not fundamentally change the basic logic of capital—extraction and profit.
Horowitz under-ambitiously pegs mutualism as an end towards a transformed future, rather than a means of self-defense in a hostile time of “exit.” By a time of “exit,” I mean a time in which public life is defined by a “withdraw[al], or exit, from the social compact with an incompetent, sub-minimal state: a state that fails to so m basic, fundamental state functions.”[16] I want to clearly say: the Freelancer’s Union and the vision of mutualist organizations intervening in a time of state failure are profoundly positive innovations that have affected and have the potential to affect millions of people. But ultimately, their effect is one with a defensive posture, guarding against the worst that capital threatens to consume. In this way, it is alike to the growth of community defense organizations, such as the John Brown Gun Club.[17] Although it protects those in precarity from imminent devastation, it does not measure to the same world where the threat never existed.[18] It is a meaningful temporary measure, but ultimately inadequate if we truly seek a liberatory horizon.[19]
Notes
[1] Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014); Martin J. Sherman, Gambling With Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette From Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis (2020); James Barrat, Our Final Invention (2013)
[2] Seth G. Jones & Catrina Doxsee, The Escalating Terrorism Problem in the United States, CSISs (June 17, 2020), https://www.csis.org/analysis/escalating-terrorism-problem-united-states; Claire Colbert & Hannah Sarisohn, Mississippi Governor Extends Jackson Water Crisis State of Emeregency, CNN (Oct. 31, 2022); Police Shootings Database, Washington Post (Updated Nov. 30, 2022) (accessed Nov. 30, 2022), https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/; Kristina Watrobski, Legal Abortions Drop by Nearly 11,000 Since Dobbs v. Jackson Ruling, Study Reveals, KATV (Oct. 31, 2022), https://katv.com/news/nation-world/nearly-11000-fewer-legal-abortions-have-occurred-since-dobbs-ruling-study-reveals; Jan Ransom & Jonah E. Bromwich, Tracking the Deaths in New York City’s Jail System in 2022, N.Y. Times (Nov. 4, 2022), https://www.nytimes.com/article/rikers-deaths-jail.html; also see the news generally.
[3] Sara Horowitz, Mutualism, 3 (2021).
[4] For a detailed discussion of “precarity,” see Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (2021).
[5] Id. at 39.
[6] At least white Americans.
[7] Id. at 78.
[8] Hannah Farber, Insurance, The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia (Accessed Nov. 28, 2022).
[9] Id.
[10] Mutualism at 102.
[11] The first real health insurance only entered the scene during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Michael Morrisey, Health Insurance, 3-17 (2d Ed. 2013).
[12] For a discussion of the implications of bias in tort law, see Martha Chamallas, The Architecture of Bias: Deep Structures in Tort Law, U. Penn. L. Rev. 463 (1998) Only recently has there been movement among the legal community to limit the use of actuarial tables with race or gender as an explicit data point in tort claims.
[13] Although insurance companies have nominally stopped relying on the most egregious actuarial classifications, such as race in determining car insurance, it functionally discriminates on race and perpetuates racial hierarchy through the use of zip codes, credit scores, and education as proxies.
[14] For a robust criticism of actuarial policing, see Bernard Harcourt, Against Prediction (2007).
[15] For an interesting discussion on this topic, see Beatrice Adler-Bolton & Artie Vierkant, Health Communism (2022).
[16] Robin West, Tragic Rights: The Rights Critique in the Age of Obama, 53 Wm. & Mary L. Rev 730 (2011). I borrow this conception from West, who discusses the nature of rights in Obama’s America as being “exit rights,” which are those that claim a right to “exit,” as described above the line.
[17] What is Redneck Revolt? Redneck Revolt (accessed Nov. 30, 2022), https://www.redneckrevolt.org/about.
[18] Natasha Lennard, Why Queer Communities Are Welcoming Armed Antifascist Protection, The Intercept (Nov. 29, 2022), https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/club-q-lgbtq-armed-self-defense/.
[19] Consider José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) (“The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”)