In “On the Imperative of Niceness, Part One,” Anselm McGovern quotes another Damage author: “freelancers and gig-economy workers have internalized the ideology of an employer that exists only in potentia.”
When the 2008 economic collapse left me (and millions of others) unemployed, I ended up working freelance. I took on part-time hourly jobs, two of which were created to replace salaried, full-time positions, and continued to freelance in-between. Despite 60-hour work weeks, what I earned remained well below the median-income level for where I live.
Freelancing exposed me to the market in ways I wasn’t prepared for. I had to find new clients, new projects. I went to networking events. I set up accounts on LinkedIn and Twitter, I launched a Facebook fan page and a website with a blog, all to convey myself as desirable to potential employers, that I was worth the investment. I feigned the enthusiasm of a self-starter, a go-getter. I created and shared content I didn’t really like but thought I should in order to earn clicks. Online and off, I worked hard to make sure I came across as likeable, inoffensive, and “nice” to people who might hire me. But I never achieved the success others had—I couldn’t close the gap between the everyday me I knew and the impressive, likeable person I felt I had to become. I ended up ghostwriting awful books and accepting low rates to “build up my portfolio,” all the while feeling grateful to have any work at all.
And now, as another economic collapse begins, I worry what new territory of everyday life will be laid bare to the market. McGovern explores how even something as seemingly trivial as “being nice” can be reified and put to work for capital. He typifies Marx’s concept of use-value for others as a subjective experience: We learn early on in our lives to relate to others in terms identical to commodities on the market.
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“Niceness” is an ambiguous category, something taken for granted more often than it is critiqued. McGovern is interested in what motivates people to be nice, describing an obfuscating performance that, as workers or consumers or both, we have all participated in: The friendly waiter who has to be more than someone taking an order or serving food, but a nice person who’s chatty and interesting. The interviewee hoping to impress upon a potential employer an outgoing, enthusiastic, nice personality. We’re compelled to smile and be nice because it satisfies someone who might leave a tip or offer a job or any number of things essential to survival in a market economy. McGovern notes that this “imperative of niceness” doesn’t stay at work, though. It comes home with us. Capital makes cynics of us in this respect because we know that, in every case, it’s just “part of the job.”
But is this social performance on the part of a subject—feigning to be nice—really novel to life in a capitalist society? I am not so sure it is.
The pressure to please someone with more power, more wealth, or who otherwise will make a decision on which our well-being hangs has no doubt evolved under capitalism, but it didn’t emerge from it. It’s a situation that has a historical continuity—class society. Whether it’s a feudal lord, a slave owner, or a factory boss, I suspect that people have long had to smile, say something nice, or “be polite” in order to avoid actual or symbolic punishment.
McGovern offers the imperative of niceness as an interior logic to explain why I found myself as a freelancer hawking my use-value to prospective clients. He calls upon the rhetorical scene Marx refers to in Capital, when the capitalist and worker meet in the market on apparent equal terms, each as owners of a commodity. Yet I wonder if what makes today’s obligate niceness unique is not so much that we feel compelled to be nice, but that we experience its materiality as an exchange of commodities. This means moving beyond what can only be speculation of what happens within the worker’s head (an entirely argumentative exercise) and considering the actual, historical stage and props with which Marx’s scene is constructed.
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Under capitalism, niceness is a commodity. The memory of a handshake or a thoughtful comment that a manager or an investor fifty years ago might have remembered about you is now a material thing that they can find, inspect, and purchase.
Niceness is spectacle: A LinkedIn post with me bending into a raised bed as I volunteer at a community garden surrounded by happy neighborhood kids, a photo of a letter I received from a client praising how easy to work with I am on Facebook, a congratulatory retweet of a fellow freelancer who just won an industry award. We not only have to appear to be nice during the interview, but we need to produce corresponding nice moments, represent them, and take them with us to Marx’s market scene.
I know when I say “someone is nice,” I’m really just saying “I approve of this person.” It’s unlikely my criteria exactly matches someone else’s. However, reified niceness has an objective, verifiable quality. LinkedIn, an algorithm, in this way, becomes something like Marx’s “automatic subject,” objectifying niceness into a form that we can consume and reproduce. The technology can seem like it has a subjectivity all of its own, tallying up who’s naughty and who’s nice. The category is no longer a loose frame I use with (or against) others to negotiate the world, but rather something I either have or lack.
Objective niceness is authoritative.
McGovern mentions the resentment that nice people might feel at the sight of those who don’t comply to the same categorical imperatives that they themselves begrudgingly do. But there’s a great store of resentment on the other side, too. This leads to an over-valuation, even reification, of emotional states supporting or opposing niceness. Otherwise arbitrary choices come to seem like political acts, whether it’s wearing a face mask during a pandemic or driving a certain model of car. But these aren’t political, they are exchangeable.
So, is there a true “niceness” beyond the spectacle of it? What’s lost when such a vague idea gets rationalized to serve what McGovern rightly calls irrational? I turn to Max Horkheimer on whether critique can be used to answer these kinds of questions:
Critical theory…is based on the idea that what is good, and thus, what a good, free society is, can’t be determined from inside the society we now live in…. However, we can speak about the negative aspects of society that we want to change.