Policy and Planning

from The Undercommons

by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

Valerie Pang

Introduction

This entry will attempt to explain the chapter “Planning and Policy” in Harney and Moten’s book, The Undercommons. In the following sections, there will be a definition and explanation of policy and planning, as well as terms that fall under these categories. Following the explanation, there will be a history section which will give context to Moten and Harney’s terms and references, such as Cornel West’s essay “Reconstructing the American Left: The Challenge of Jesse Jackson” and concepts such as Post-Fordism and primitive accumulation.

It must be noted that in the following entry, there will be mentioning of the term “policy deputies.” This means people who are advocating for policies, not necessarily people who create policies and laws, but those who strongly believe the laws that these policies represent.

Summary

Moten and Harney’s chapter, “Planning and Policy” in The Undercommons discusses the importance and symbiotic relationship between a group of people whom they call “policy of deputies” and “planners.” They discuss and critique Cornel West’s concept of hope, derived from black radicalism and the Jackson campaign, which notes how policy changed to not only control society but people of colour. Furthermore, they bring in concepts from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to discuss the progression from capitalism to neoliberalism and the manipulation of the economy in order to gain capital for policies’ benefit. Moten and Harney highlight the importance of the repression from the settler race as it continues to perpetuate the ideology that society, especially people of colour are attacked within the construct of the Post-Fordist economy. Policy has three rules: to help and fix those who are wrong, to have participants, and realizing how a crisis is provoked by wronged participation.

Drawing from Stevphen Shukaitis’s (2012) interview with Moten and Harney, Stefano Harney talks about policy as people who feel they have the right to assume others are wrong. Policy appoints itself the ability to judge others as wrong and need fixing while claiming themselves in the position of correct. Harney goes on to clarify that planning represents people who have corrected themselves differently, seeing that they use policy against people who choose to see the wrong in them. Fred Moten explains that policy is everyone who is on patrol, trying to police and arrest those who are escaping.

Policy

Policy must be simply understood as such: policy is invisible and cannot exist without the activity of planners. It emerges because it has taken over the economic management and it designs to separate people. Planners perpetuate the ideologies of policies, therefore, creates an activity for policies to enact upon. Policy sees themselves as people who bring hope for planners because they deem planners as people who have lost their way and change must be brought upon them in order to correct themselves.

Policies have taken over the economic capital in order to generate a surplus for their benefit as well as predicting the patterns for future income. This continues to perpetuate the system of the rich repeatedly profiting and the poor suffering. People controlling policy does not want to abandon social reproduction or make it successful in the workplace, they would rather control social reproduction because they see how monetarily valuable it is to have authorization over industries such as care, food, education, and sex.

Policy will continue to go against the planners’ plan. It is a vision that is heavily dependent on the settler’s vision, which one can assume policy’s plan is the more ‘advanced or revised’ version. The old forms of command such as drugs, youth, violence, and terrorism are conducted through colonizers and settlers. This new vision is against gathering, cooking, drinking, and smoking if they lead to the freedom of oneself from slavery. Policy’s vision is to break it, fix it, pass it on through fixing, and ultimately create ambition for children which this false construction of hope is to create more policies, participation, and change.

The Three Rules

There are three rules in policy that must be abided by. Firstly, policies are meant to provide help and correction for planners. Policy itself is a correction and ferociously force upon the incorrect and those who are unaware that they need to be corrected. You must pick between “dwell[ing] in policy to fix things” or “dwell in planning and must be fixed (Harney 78).” By fixing others, it is an extension of Michel Foucault’s work of fixing the equilibrium; it is policy’s goal to govern others and to crumble any forms of militant preservation. They will not allow planner’s plan to be successful– they will only be seen as potential. Planners are not allowed to succeed because their plans are supposed to be stagnant, with no perspective, and no vision; they are here simply to plan. Hope is a form of command in order to control, regardless of whether planners have a sense of self.

The second rule of policy requires planners to become participants. They will be taught to reject plans and future events, disregard imagination and free thought. Participation is seen as an integral part of policies because they require a mass effort in order to drive policy throughout society and social reproduction. Mass efforts are demonstrated throughout jobs such as writing news articles, news conferences, debates, and laws. Hope is one of the main driving forces for participation because by participating in change, they will become change itself.

The last and final rule of policy is the realization of wronged participation caused by wrong individuals. This stems from the crisis in productivity of a radical, crazy event because of a fault in participation, which is to say that this “fault” in participation are planners who fail to follow the exact way of participation that is expected from policy deputies. It is assumed that the planners are the ones wronged because policy positions and promotes itself as helpers and correctors. Some of the examples offered in the chapter of incorrect participation are the crisis of obesity by unhealthy eaters and the crisis of the environment by the Chinese and Indians. However, those that are being controlled, the deputised, say that these are inevitable crises of the world. When participation occurs, it must be hopeful, have a vision, and embrace change. This change must be presented as a united front for a specific crisis.

Governance

The most basic manifestation of change is governance. It has emerged as a new form of expropriation, meaning the state taking property from owners for public use. These policies of governance are a set of conventions where a person auctions and bids itself to both public and private sectors succumb to the Post-Fordist production. Governance through policies is how they are able to acquire social reproduction by fabricating it as an act of will rather than by force (or even exploitation if you may). In order to attract planners or non-policy deputies, governance offers interests, participation, and knowledge by merging the corrected and the correcting through correctional facilities. These facilities may include prisons, hospitals, asylums, corporations, universities, and non-governmental organizations (NGO’s).

Governance holds a sense of exclusivity because there is an expectation of how the people who have been admitted formally should act; they must talk about their interests disinterestedly, why they voted (for whomever they voted for) and want to be taken seriously by serious people. As noted in the chapter, “those who vote and know why they vote (not because someone is black or female but because he or she is smart)” (Harney 81). Governance seems to try and ignore the bigger national issues such as blackness or feminism but place their interests more towards intelligence.

Planning:

To control planners, policy must break up the plans of the Undercommons. The idea of hope which Cornel West spoke about returns yet is inefficient. Policy controls planners by constantly enforcing its own agenda upon planners– they will not change, will not embrace change, and have lost hope.

The first rule of policy regards Planners do not want to be controlled and supervised, they want to be able to think their own way and speak their own minds. Not only are their plans seen as problematic, but the individuals themselves are troublesome and wrong. However, they seek solidity in planning, imagination, and love.

Policy’s second rule with governance and capital does not actually know what makes up the Undercommons’ means of social reproduction, so they must search for the components: affect, thought, sociality, imagination to extract and abstract as labour. Through these means, they want to lure the planners of the Undercommons and break up planning and militant preservation.

With regard to the third rule of policy, for planners to embrace change is for them to accept the repercussions of their plans. To critique policies that state the examples of incorrect participation, the crisis of environment caused by the Chinese and Indians cannot be solely blamed due to one specific country. A lot of these factories are catering to the industries of mass consumers. In order to change the environment, these policies must change the way these products are produced as well as altering the consumerism expectations. In addition, policies manipulate the economic capital in social reproduction for economic gain, therefore the change must come from policies not looking to benefit from the system of social reproduction. Of course, this is not something that can be possibly changed if the world wants to continue functioning through consumerism and trades. It must be noted that policy deputies have no right to assume that the planners are the ones to be blamed since planners are also producing through the wishes of the capital.

Planners are considered the provokers of crisis. Crisis is defined as such: the danger that comes with planning to participate without being fixed. There is a specified way by which policies want their participants to be fixed. One must enter dim enlightenment, which is to say participants are given knowledge and understanding of something greater than what they already know. Participants must also have functioning families and financial responsibility; they must also respect the law and submit to the rules of expertise that is provided by policy deputies.

Participation that involves attributes such as being loud, fat, loving, full, or dread leads to crisis. Can it be assumed that anyone with normal emotions is labelled as in crisis? Or emotions which are regulated so that only certain emotions are accepted in the society of policies? The solution that policies will offer is to share the same idea of change. They want participants to mirror the image of deputies, and deputies’ jobs are to lead and become perfect examples in order for concrete change to occur. There is the difference in the desire to plan and the desire to correct.

Militant Preservation:

Militant preservation is a form of planning at which planners are resistant towards change that policy deputies are attempting to enforce upon them. Planning is self-sufficient, it does not require any assistance because they are interested in experimenting with life and its differences. Yet, policy attempts to break up their experiments as a form of control, breaking apart means of production by separating and isolating each worker’s skill. These workers are now only efficient in one specific part of a building block (factory line) and no longer possess any other valuable skills outside of this job.

Historical Context

Cornel West’s Essay on Hope

Cornel West’s essay on “Reconstructing the American Left: The Challenge of Jesse Jackson” is crucial to understanding the importance of West’s claim and assumption of black politics in relation to planning and policy. Through the upcoming and development of America as a liberal capitalist nation, it heavily depended on the slave economy in order to proliferate. The Americans utilized capital accumulation, or in other words, private property and a slave-based society to enforce a superior domination over the slaves. Due to this, the lower class is motivated by the dream of “rags to riches,” hoping to work hard enough in order to save and own property that can be called theirs.

West claims that progressive warriors from the past, such as Huey Long and Father Coughlin, alongside with new minorities and women workers sustain and give life to the movement today (8). There are multiple political issues which took advantage of black people as the minority; discussing communitarianism as a form of utopian radicalism to sustain a motivation to try and succeed. Feminism emerged and became a national issue because white, middle-class women saw the rise of black inequality and how that managed to gain national attention that they drew a parallel comparison between sexual oppression and black oppression. Lastly, black radicalism struggles with not only racism in American society but also in American radicalism. The systematic dehumanization of Africans was the most important part of forming and establishing the American society, yet the continual perpetuation of oppression through racism continues to be the most visible and brutal form.

Like the religious culture from which it flows, black radicalism hopes against hope if only to hold out the dream of freedom in a never-never land be it American society for integrationists or a black nation for nationalists) in order to survive in the deplorable present. – Cornel West, Reconstructing the American Left: The Challenge of Jesse Jackson, pg.8

Bringing attention to the bolded text above the exact quote extracted from Moten and Harney’s opening of this chapter, which they refer to in relation to how black radicalism had to face the brutal lessons of white exclusion within the white, settler realm. The hope West speaks of is the continual fight for change, despite it being a dream in “never-never land” which is to say this hope is what keeps the ostracized fighting to live on to see another day.

Jesse Jackson is part of hope West speaks of for black politics, who was able to bring light onto the racism and suppression through radical forms of thought. It must be noted that during the twentieth century, black people were not given the same rights as the whites– they were not allowed to vote or run for the office. Dawson and Powell were one of the other few black politicians who were influential enough to create a mark in politics by creating a black political class which consists of a high social class in the black community. The Jackson campaign emerged favourably at a moment when the black freedom movement was at its lowest point. A lot of hope generated and became dependent upon this campaign, where black Muslims and Christians voted for and supported for Jackson. This act of black unity was symbolic as an act of assertion against their oppressors.

Speaking as an argument against Moten and Harney, Cornel West is assuming the black community and black politics will prevail, as seen in Jesse Jackson’s campaign; it is not that simple.

Post-Fordist Economy

The Post-Fordist economy moves away from the Ford economy, which was originally founded by Henry Ford’s automotive companies that utilized the structure of production lines to efficiently and mass-produce goods. Post-Fordism focuses on producing smaller and specialized batches of production rather than large abundances in order to market towards a specific type of consumers; women were introduced and allowed into the workforce. This new economy allowed for producers and marketers to look at consumption and production through a different lens, basing social movements off gender, race, and region while acknowledging the worth of specialized education over standardized education, which therein values knowledge-based workers more.

Within social reproduction, policies and policy deputies position themselves above other workers in order to perpetuate Post-Fordism as an elite class and one must audition in order to be included. Policies and policy deputies will continually incorporate and welcome change, but in actuality, change is not something that is definite or promised but rather pliable and flexible. Change is easily influenced by a multitude of factors, which cannot guarantee a specific outcome, yet policies promote the promise of change as a new form of hope for planners.

With regards to the second rule of policy, their need for participation models the system of Post-Fordism by having small sectors of specialized knowledge and jobs in order to offer their labour as a collaborative effort. This is to sustain policy as the dominant structure.

Primitive Accumulation (Marxist Internet Archive Encyclopedia):

This original term stemmed from Adam Smith, who attempted to theorize the division of labour was established when factory workers began to section themselves off into different job sectors. These factory workers became specialized and eventually, those who saved up enough money were able to become factory owners which lead to the hiring of wage workers.

Karl Marx argued against Adam Smith, saying that this separation emerged because this idea of self-sufficiency forced workers out of their divisions. People with money self-declared land as private property and prevented those that were poor from accessing it. This caused a lot of problems because the poor depended on those lands in order to work and earn a living, yet blocking their access creates a bigger rift between the rich and the poor. The poor were forced to become criminals because they were arrested for being homeless and thieves. The legislative council assumes that once these ‘thieves’ get out, they will be able to return to their old working conditions. However, because the poor working class have been pushed out of their previous working condition and have no homes to return to, they are stuck in this continuous cycle where they are unable to reclaim the land that was once theirs.

The idea of capitalism is brutal because producers have transformed into wage workers. These wage workers or free labourers are not part of the means of production nor does the production belong to them. Their being is free from owning or being affiliated, but they are ‘free’ labourers because they are only associated with the means of production by selling their labour power to those privatized owners.

Application of Theory

Of course, policy and planning do not only occur within the world of economic management and the Undercommons. Below are two examples, one that is specifically targeted against racialized communities, and secondly is targeted towards a marginalized community. Planning and policy both exist within these communities, though with a similar effect which is where policy deems a group is wrong and tries to fix them. On the other hand, planning will continue to stand by their perspective despite policy’s need for change.

Cocaine Laws

In Michelle Alexander’s chapter “The New Jim Crow,” it discusses how drug wars in the United States are actually racially motivated. People of all races interact with drugs either through selling or buying, but these markets are segregated to sell and target their own race, yet most people in jail are black and brown (Alexander 14). Cocaine laws are extremely discriminatory, heavily basing their laws off racism. There is no difference between crack cocaine and powder cocaine, yet the punishments and policies around the mandatory minimum jail times for crack cocaine are targeted towards racialized individuals. Crack cocaine is usually targeted towards African-Americans because it is cheaper, yet powder cocaine is usually sold to white folks. Despite the two being the exact same drug, the repercussions of crack cocaine are excruciatingly heavier than powder cocaine.

Capitalism is sustained through racialized bodies due to incarceration for profit. By sending these individuals to jail, they are profiting. As prison complexes get richer through bonds, bails, and being funded by the government, it has gradually transformed to become a warehouse for prisoners, not rehabilitation. They also exploit these prisoners by making them do “community work” as forms of volunteering, nullifying the need to compensate their work through salaries. Even after these prisoners are released, naming them as felons is a “bad of inferiority” (Alexander 15). Even when these prisoners end up being released, they are denied the most basic rights of human life because they are constantly being affected after doing their time. They are not given the ability to integrate back into society, such as employment discrimination and no right to votes. The Supreme Court is also heavily clouded by race discrimination because no matter what solid evidence is presented in court to defend those racialized, they will still be sent into prison.

The Reagan administration specifically wanted funding to support the drug war by profiting off the publicity of crack cocaine use in the city, specifically targeting black users and dealers that are being presented on television and in newspapers. This clouded the public’s perception of drug users because everyone automatically assumes drug users are associated with black people. By continually perpetuating this policy that black people are drug users, they are seen through the public eye as wrong participants because regardless of their actions, the government and the State will continually base their sentences off skin colour. Sending black people into prison continues to sustain the distribution of wealth by keeping the rich, richer since if they do get convicted, they are always able to pay their way out of it. Yet, those who are poor and are convicted due to their race are unable to pay their way out because they have no means of being able to save up.

Policy, in this sense, is trying to fix African-Americans who are under the negative influence of drugs. Consequently, policies are the ones who created this misconception towards these racialized individuals based on their skin colour. It creates this hope for African-Americans to break away from these stereotypes and racism but no resources are made accessible for these communities to flourish from their impoverished setting.

LGBTQ

A controversial concept that has slowly gained ground is the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) community. Breaking the boundaries of conventional ideas of how traditional men and women are supposed to love, represent, and identify with, these labels allow individuals who do not identify with the accepted gender binaries to identify with something else. One of the most recent controversies revolving around this community is a comment that was made by Ed Razek, the chief marketing officer of Victoria’s Secret commented on how transgender models should not be cast in the show because “the show is a fantasy” (Pearl 2018). For a long time, laws and policies have been set against the LGBTQ community such as condemning same-sex marriage and overall discrimination.

It should be noted that celebrity models such as Cara Delevingne and Stella Maxwell are openly lesbian or bisexual, yet they were still allowed to walk in the show. Not only that, but Stella Maxwell is still to this day, a representative of Victoria’s Secret.

Nikita Dragun, a transgender woman who is a YouTube influencer created her own version of the Victoria’s Secret fantasy, further validating that transgender women are able to deliver the fantasy, regardless of whether they were born as females or not. Nikita’s advertisement is a form of planning, promoting the idea that transgenders should be given the same rights to audition and walk the show just as much as women. This planning encourages people to see and accept how women who were not born as a woman are equally able to represent women. On the contrary, the perspective Ed Razek holds is representative of policy, deeming that the representation of transgenders is wrong, further enacting men’s fantasy of objectifying women visually. Not only does his perspective deem transgenders as wrong participation for the show, but it also represents how men view transgender women; individuals who are not “real” women because they have altered themselves through a sex change.

Despite Victoria’s Secret’s effort to include lesbian and bisexual women, this does not discount their discrimination against transgender women. Their policies base decisions off what would generate the most capital and revenue in order to monetize their models. Regardless of society and times becoming more progressive, Victoria’s Secret continues to represent an idea that is against popular belief amongst the LGBTQ community and those in favour of them in order to continually present their company as against this community. Planners of the LGBTQ community, such as Nikita Dragun will continue to fight for their perspective and ideologies as much to policy’s dismay.

Works Cited

Alexander, Michelle. "The New Jim Crow," Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law vol. 9, no. 1 (Fall 2011): p. 7-26. HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/osjcl9\&i=9.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. “Planning and Policy” The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013.

Pearl, Diana. “The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show Is a Marketing Juggernaut With Waning Relevance.” Adweek, Adweek LLC., 30 Nov. 2018, www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/the-victorias-secret-fashion-show-is-a-marketing-juggernaut-with-waning-relevance/.

“Primitive Accumulation.” Marxist Internet Archive Encyclopedia, https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm\#primitive-accumulation

Shukaitis, Stevphen, et al. “Studying Through the Undercommons: Stefano Harney & Fred Moten.” Class War University, 12 Nov. 2012, classwaru.org/2012/11/12/studying-through-the-undercommons-stefano-harney-fred-moten-interviewed-by-stevphen-shukaitis/. Accessed 10 Dec. 2018.

West, Cornel. “Reconstructing the American Left: The Challenge of Jesse Jackson.” Social Text, no. 11, 1984, pp. 3–19., doi:10.2307/466592.