I’ve been interpellated! https://twitter.com/warendenkform/status/1391879818153713667

Given that Al's shouting "hey, you there!" at me I thought I’d lay out some of my thoughts on this, mostly from some work in progress. I'm still figuring out what I think. Right now influenced by what I've read from Simon Clarke, I'm inclined to say capitalist social relations

exist historically in institutionalized forms which influence specific practices of struggle between workers and capitalist as well as practices of intraclass struggle (workers vs workers, capitalists vs capitalists). Institutions are simultaneously influences on and generated by

those struggles. I suspect institutional decay occurs both for depoliticized/social inertia reasons and for conscious political reasons - conflict might cause an institution to freeze up or be abolished. I also suspect that institution construction is generally the result of

political conflict over how to organize the capitalism-specific general interest, and I further suspect this occurs largely through a history of emergencies and crises. I think in this politicking over institutional re-organization there’s a mish-mash of actors including workers,

capitalists, and state personnel. I also think the breakdown of a given order institutionalizing capitalist social relations is guaranteed but the timing can’t be predicted, while the repair or replacement of a given institutional order is a contingent political process (tho if

an order just falls apart the result disrepair could become a de facto replacement - “the common ruin of the contending classes”). I'll add that I’m inclined to say all this is entirely adjacent to revolutionary politics, which is neither stably within nor outside-and-against

processes of politicking with capitalism. I’m also inclined to say the breakdown of a specific set of ways of institutionalizing capitalist social relations doesn’t tend to make the end of capitalism closer but probly makes it farther away. IMO the human costs of institutional

breakdown are super high and capitalism-compatible solutions to those problems tend to be more expedient in the short term than anti-capitalist solutions - that is, I suspect the outbreak of a capitalism-generated crisis makes capitalism's continuation more likely in the short

term, not less likely. (If anyone's interest, bits of these ideas are in a chapter I have in the Elgar Research Handbook on Law and Marxism. The rest is in stuff I'm still writing or trying to figure out how to begin writing.)

(Also @warendenkform in case you didn't catch it, in my initial tweet in this thread I called you a cop.)