It Is Not Society That Is Decaying. The Order of Capital Is at Work

Dear Young Comrades

For months one word has been everywhere: decay. Under the news of the fund plunder, under the videos of traffic fights, under the photograph of a politician cursing a rival yesterday and embracing them today, the same comment: "Society has decayed." The word is strong, definite, and soothing. The person who says it has both voiced their anger and seemed to "diagnose" the situation.

The sociologist and education scholar Kemal İnal objects to exactly this word in "Yaşadığımız Şey Çürüme Değil, Kapitalizmin Ta Kendisi…" ("What We Are Living Through Is Not Decay, It Is Capitalism Itself…"), published today in Gazete Solfasol. The objection is well placed, and its timing is very good. In this piece we will introduce İnal's article, open the points we find right, and try to carry it a little further with our own contributions. First a short summary, then the detail.

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Summary: Nine Theses

1. "Decay" is not an explanation. It is a verdict. In İnal's words, "a kind of wildcard concept": it fits every gap, and it explains nothing.
2. The same word is used on the left and on the right. On one side, a liberal-left voice lamenting the loss of empathy and justice. On the other, a community foundation that reads the fund plunder as "moral decay" and proposes religious education. The word is the same. In neither is there class.
3. Sociology already has the tools. Alienation (Marx), anomie (Durkheim), the disenchantment of the world (Weber), reification (Lukács). These do not only describe the problem. They also show where it comes from.
4. "Decay" is anti-dialectical. What decays is passive, its end is known, and there is no opposing force inside it. Society, however, lives by contradiction. Where there is contradiction, there is also possibility.
5. The institutions are not breaking. They are performing their own function. The fund plunder is not a "deviation". It is a form of the transfer and accumulation of capital. Favouritism, rent and censorship are not a malfunction of the system. They are how it works.
6. The language of morality is the field of those in power. To answer, in the language of morality, a power that has done politics through morality for more than twenty years is to play the match on their pitch.
7. Our contribution: the word "decay" exists in the Marxist tradition, but its subject is not society. It is monopoly capital. The "parasitism and decay" in Lenin's analysis of imperialism shows this.
8. Our second contribution: the discourse of decay is not only wrong. It is functional. It turns anger toward individual morality, and the solution toward sermons and punishment. It makes organising unnecessary.
9. The conclusion: decay is absolute defeat, and we are not at that point. Naming the problem correctly is half of the solution. The problem is not people's character. It is the order of profit.

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What Does the Piece Say?

İnal begins with a concession. Yes, things are worse than they were. Lying is increasing, social memory is shortening, character is sacrificed for office, and attacking the powerless is becoming ordinary. But the sentence that follows is the spine of the piece: these things are born not of people being bad, but of the working of capitalism.

The author proceeds through two examples:

• Zeliha Pürtek names the decline of empathy and of social relations "social decay". She gives rude behaviour in traffic, violence, injustice and loneliness as examples, and proposes human rights, justice and transparent administration as the remedy. The journalist Yıldıray Oğur says that this concept has no place in the sociological tradition, and that it condemns society as a whole. İnal agrees with this criticism.
• The Aziz Mahmud Hüdayi Foundation, tied to the Erenköy community, makes a statement of "moral decay" about the fund plunder. It loads the blame onto exam-centred education, the weakness of values education, advertisements for gambling and addiction, and the looseness of the supervisory institutions. The remedy proposed is morality and education.

İnal's finding is this. One left-wing voice and one religious-conservative voice use the same word without a theoretical ground. Yet the word is not innocent. In the image the author borrows from Paul Virilio, "decay" works like an information bomb: it makes a noise, and it closes off the view.

And the two strongest sentences of the piece:

"Decay is an anti-dialectical concept."

"Decay is absolute defeat. We are not at that point."

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What We Find Right, and What We Open Further

The politics of a word

Words do not only name things. They also determine how we will look at them. If we say "illness", we look for a doctor. If we say "crime", we look for the police. If we say "sin", we look for a preacher. What do we look for when we say "decay"? Nothing. You do not repair a rotting fruit. You throw it away. This is why the word, even at our angriest moment, calls us to passivity. The person who says it places themselves outside the decay, in a clean place. Everyone else is "a decayed society".

Here we want to take İnal's warning one step further. The person who says "decay", without noticing, blames the people. The minimum-wage worker who fights in traffic and the network of power that takes millions from the fund go into the same sack. Inside the sack, class disappears.

The real concepts we already have

Let us briefly open, for the young comrades, the four concepts İnal lists, because each of them tells one face of the phenomenon called "decay" together with its cause:

Concept	Whose?	What it tells	What it says instead of "decay"
Alienation	Marx	The labourer is alienated from what they produce, from their labour, from themselves and from the other	The loss of empathy is not a lack of morality. It is relations being built through the market
Anomie	Durkheim	The dissolution of norms in rapid social change, normlessness	The rules have not loosened for the people. Those who make the rule do not apply it to themselves
Disenchantment of the world	Weber	The surrender of the world to a calculable, instrumental reason	Everything measured by price, values converted into a profit account
Reification	Lukács	Human relations appearing as relations between things	Fund, share, score, "follower" — people are turned into numbers

Of these four concepts, Marx's and Lukács's are tied directly to relations of property and production. Durkheim and Weber describe the phenomenon well, but they do not show the root with the same clarity. This is why we give weight to the first and last rows of the table. What we said while explaining Marx's commodity fetishism in "Neden Kendimizi Aldatırız?" (in Turkish), written for a MARFET meeting, holds here too. As people live their relations through things, they also look for the source of the problem in things, or in people's "character".

Dialectics: where there is contradiction, there is possibility

İnal's finding that "decay is anti-dialectical" is the philosophical kernel of the piece. Let us open it a little.

Dialectical thought sees everything in motion, together with the oppositions inside it. If there is exploitation in a society, there is also resistance to exploitation. If there is impoverishment, there is also the demand of the poor. In Hegel's words, negation is not only destruction. It is the moment in which something new is born. Marx carried this to the social classes: capitalism grows, with its own hands, its own gravedigger, the working class.

"Decay", by contrast, is a one-way process. Inside the thing that decays there is no force defending it against decay. To declare a society "decayed" is not to see the opposing forces inside it: the worker on strike, the earthquake family at the courthouse door, the student arrested for opening a banner. As İnal recalls at the end of his piece, there are still millions in this society struggling for solidarity, for ethical values and for equality. A decayed society would long ago have surrendered.

The institutions have not broken. They are doing their job

Perhaps the politically most important sentence of the piece is this finding: the state and the institutions are not decaying. Inside capitalism they are carrying out their ordinary functions.

This has a very concrete meaning in the discussion of the fund plunder. As we followed step by step in the stock-exchange file (Six and a Half Trillion, Whose Party Is the Fund Crisis Breaking?), the money of the small investor, of the pensioner, of the teacher who puts their salary into a fund "so that it will grow", was transferred to a narrow network that knew, through insider information, which share to leave and when. To read this as "moral decay" hides what happened. What happened is this: the transfer of wealth from below to above, through political power. What David Harvey calls "accumulation by dispossession" is exactly this. Capital grows not only by seizing surplus value in the factory, but also by seizing what is public, small savings, and common assets.

Favouritism, tenders and urban rent should be read with the same logic. In our Izmir earthquake piece, A Building Does Not Collapse by Itself, we described how the zoning amnesty and municipal permits work as a "system". In Capitalism's Rent Is Taking Its Revenge we showed how the city was turned into a field of accumulation. None of this is "the immorality of a few bad people". Bad people always exist. They multiply when there is an order that rewards them.

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Our Contributions

"Decay" exists in the Marxist tradition, but its subject is different

An honest detail needs to be added here. The word "decay" is not foreign to the Marxist literature. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916, Lenin sets aside a chapter for "the parasitism and decay of capitalism". But note: what decays there is not society. It is monopoly capital. Lenin describes the emergence of a rentier layer, cut off from production and clipping interest and coupons, and of a structure of capital that brakes even technical progress for the sake of monopoly profit. So decay is the name of a mode of production historically exhausting its term, and choking its own possibilities of development.

This distinction is very instructive for today. If we are going to use this word, the correct use is this: what is decaying is not the people. It is an order of capital that, in order to reproduce itself, becomes ever more dependent on plunder, on turning everything into rent, and on repression. The fund plunder is the symptom of a model of accumulation that prefers a quick killing on the exchange to productive investment. What we saw on a world scale in Bubble or Debt? is the same thing: a financial bloating cut off from production.

In this way we extend İnal's thesis without turning it upside down. Society is not decaying. Decay, if it exists anywhere, is at the top of capital. And the remedy for this is not a sermon. It is the changing of property relations.

Why was the discourse of decay so loved? The function of the discourse

If a wrong concept spreads this far, it is because it is useful to someone. We see three functions of the discourse of decay:

• It disperses the blame. When it is said "we have all decayed", the person who takes money from the fund and the person whose money is taken are placed on the same moral ground. When responsibility is distributed to everyone, it belongs to no one.
• It turns the solution toward morality and punishment. The recipe in the foundation's statement is typical: more values education, more supervision, a ban on gambling advertisements. Some of these may look reasonable on their own, but none of them asks in whose hands, under whose control, to whose benefit. We discussed in detail how the politics of moral panic works in Whose Family Is Safe?. The same mechanism is at work here.
• It makes organising look unnecessary. If society has decayed, there is no one left to organise. What remains is either individual salvation (leaving the country, withdrawing into one's own small world) or waiting for a saviour. This is also the state of mind that power wants most.

The example İnal gives through Süleyman Soylu shows this function very well. The language of power always attributes decay to "the West", to "the outside", to "the other", but never to "us". The language of morality is a mirror in which power clears itself.

Why does the left fall into this language?

The Pürtek example tells us something more. This language is not only the right's. In liberal-left circles too, a culture of complaint of the kind "society has gone bad, people have got worse" is widespread. This has a class root. Petty-bourgeois layers who see themselves as an urban, educated, "civilised" minority often look down on the rest of society. The feeling that "the people are like this, whatever you do it will not work" is an ideology of being unorganised, and of the sense of defeat.

We do not want to blame anyone in making this criticism. The demands for human rights, justice and transparency that Pürtek puts forward are valuable. But when the question of the social force that will realise those demands is not asked, the demands turn into a wish list. Who will bring justice, with which organisation, through which struggle? In Social Frenzy and the Engineering of Passivity we approached a similar concept, "frenzy", with the same question.

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Two Languages, Two Ways of Looking

	The language of decay	The language of class
The source of the problem	People's character, the loss of morality	Relations of property and production
The fund plunder	Moral corruption, greed	The transfer of wealth through political power
The loss of empathy	Individual selfishness	A life forced into competition and stripped of security
The institutions	"They have broken", "they do not work"	They work for capital
The people	A decayed mass	A majority that is exploited, but that resists
History	A one-way collapse	Contradiction and possibility
The solution	Sermon, punishment, values education	Organising, public control, the commons
Who does it benefit?	Power and capital	The labourers

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Concrete Tasks

1. Let us watch the word. In our own writing, in what we share, in our conversations, let us name what is happening instead of "decay": plunder, transfer, rent, exploitation, censorship.
2. Let us ask "whose?". Faced with a scandal, let the first question be not "what immorality!" but "in whose hands, under whose control, to whose benefit?".
3. Let us build a bond with those harmed by the fund plunder. The small investors, pensioners and teachers whose money was taken are not "a decayed mass". They are a community of the harmed that can be organised. People can stand side by side for sharing information, for legal support and for a common demand.
4. Let us expose the language of moral panic. Let us read the statements that community foundations and the spokespeople of power make through "morality" together with the relations of interest behind them.
5. Let us read our concepts. Alienation, reification, accumulation by dispossession. These are not academic ornament. They are tools for understanding everyday life. Let us discuss these concepts with current examples in reading groups.
6. Let us make those who resist visible. Let us tell of the strikes, the networks of solidarity, those who seek their rights. The strongest answer to the narrative of "a decayed society" is the society that is struggling.

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Dear Comrades

Kemal İnal's piece may look like a small argument about a word, but it is not. How a period is named determines what is seen as possible in that period. The person who says "decay" closes the door. The person who says "capitalism" opens it. Because decay has no remedy, but another order can be built against an order.

The hardships we are living through are born not of people's wickedness, but of an order that ties our labour, our savings, our city and our future to the profit account. That order is at work, and it is working very well. Our work is to set something else to work against it: what is held in common, solidarity, organisation.

Decay is absolute defeat. We have not been defeated.

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