Mara Marin’s profound work connects a normative theory of our shared responsibility to undermine oppression with a critical social theory of how our agency constitutes oppressive social structures. She thus offers a compelling account of how commitments both constrain us and empower us to emancipate ourselves, and explains why we must use that power to build less oppressive social relations.
In Marin’s view, individuals are nodes in dense networks of interaction and mutual vulnerability. Vulnerability is inevitable, but it can be produced, reduced, hidden, and distributed through “interactions of open-ended action and response” (p. 14)—the “commitments” of her title—that engender shifting structures of rights, obligations, and oppression. Though artificial, these social structures are often so stable as to seem natural, and their associated rights and obligations as moral.
The author starts with the fundamental conundrum of individual responsibility for structural injustice: Although social relations must in some sense be something we do, individuals do not will them and apparently cannot change them. This disconnect undermines both ascriptions of moral responsibility and motivation to work for justice. To overcome this “circle of powerlessness and denial” (p. 2), Marin theorizes social relations as grounded in commitment. Commitments are voluntary undertakings that create social structures through patterns of action and response. As undertakings, they give us responsibilities, but the responsibilities are open-ended and unknowable at the outset.
Consider marriage: The vow “in sickness and in health” cannot plausibly be treated as a promise to do each action that one spouse takes when the other falls ill (p. 27 ff). Rather, marriage is a commitment: an interactive relationship of mutual obligation (p. 33), created and endorsed through “a course of open-ended action and response” (pp. 34, 36). Commitments are structured externally by social norms that identify the kind of relationship thereby created—marriage, friendship, and so on. But each commitment also creates internal normative structures—for example, who does which housework (p. 38): “Once in a committed relationship, the partners are under [open-ended] obligations to each other in virtue of the relationship they stand in toward each other” (p. 41). Personal relationships are thus best characterized as commitments.
Commitments also explain macro-level social structures, such as legal and economic systems, which are equally “forms of activity,” “constituted by chains of open-ended action and response” (p. 58). At both levels, commitment explains how voluntary actions create social structures and their associated norms, and how those norms obligate us.
These obligations may not be moral obligations, however. If, through commitments, we create oppressive structures, we are morally obligated to retract our endorsement and cease acting in a way that oppresses ourselves or others.
After two compelling theoretic chapters, Marin critically analyzes obedience to law (Chap. 3), care labor and marriage (Chap. 4), and class divisions under capitalism (Chap. 5). I will focus on Chapters 4 and 5, which are more intertwined than the equally insightful Chapter 3.
Care work and “unskilled” labor are essential activities without which human life and economic production would be impossible. Care labor demands multiple and varied skills—cooking, diaper changing, basic first aid—but over and above each of these it demands skills of flexibility (p. 97), that is, the ability to move from one task to another at a moment’s notice, and the attentiveness to know when this is required. No less so than going to medical school, building these skills of flexibility consumes time and energy; it carries opportunity costs. Yet firms and even families tend to value specialization over flexibility; flexible work is called “unskilled,” if not rendered altogether invisible, justifying low pay for “support staff” and rendering caregivers vulnerable to oppression as their welfare suffers.
Marriages are commitments built on caregiving activities that then structure the relative vulnerabilities of the parties. Marin argues that liberal-feminist reconceptions of marriage, such as Martha Fineman’s “contract marriage” and Elizabeth Brake’s “minimal marriage,” ignore asymmetric vulnerability due to differential investment in unremunerated flexibility. These proposals put caregivers “at a risk that [recipients are] freed from by [caregivers’] care” (p. 117).
In the workplace, “it is because rather than in spite of the differences between our skills” (p. 163, emphasis in original) that coworkers are productive. A skilled professional’s productivity “presupposes work in all the other nodes” of the network (p. 127, emphasis in original). Yet “unskilled” and flexible work is devalued and rendered invisible by contrast with “skilled” and “professional” work. Who benefits from this hierarchical division? Disagreeing with Iris Marion Young, Marin argues that this distinction enables employers—capital—to appropriate the value created through interaction. By individualizing merit, capital hides the value added by labor’s collectivity, taking this added value for itself (p. 149).
By foregrounding the commitments that generate productive enterprises as well as families, while generating asymmetric risks of oppression, Marin’s analysis yields significant positive proposals for reform. For instance, since all workers, irrespective of status, share a class interest, unions should organize across job categories to avoid “sustain[ing] the hierarchical division between high- and low-skilled labor” (p. 160) and instead reflect “the joint nature of work and the value produced as a result” (p. 163). Similarly, marriage law should provide public support for care labor and legal protection against asymmetric risk and lost opportunity.
Marin’s analysis is profound, insightful, and in many ways compelling. I nonetheless have some concerns about whether the social theory of commitment yields the normative results that Marin draws from it. For instance, she emphasizes that productivity comes not from individual contributions but from their organization into networks. Yet it is capital that organizes these networks. Moreover, the coequal necessity of each contribution does not imply the coequal value, to the enterprise, of each contributor. Not every node in a network is equally central. Relative centrality depends partly on the purpose of the network. So who determines the network’s purpose and, hence, the contributors’ relative centrality? Again, the capitalist. So her analysis could equally justify capital’s appropriation of surplus value, rather than returning more gains to workers.
Whereas Marin’s analysis of the firm foregrounds the network’s joint productivity and the relative status of contributors within it, her analysis of the family ignores any external product but emphasizes the effect of internal relations on the relative position and opportunities of each party outside the family. Arguably, one difference between a firm and a family is that whereas firms are instrumental, a family is a final good even as its members are, too. Hence, the meaning and value of intrafamilial actions are determined by their members, not by an external designer. This difference perhaps justifies Marin’s ignoring any external product that the family might arrange itself to produce. But it causes problems regarding the nature of the social roles within the marriage.
Referring to an imaginary couple, Rose the breadwinning recipient and Oscar the asymmetric caregiver (p. 108), Marin claims that Rose must “reciprocat[e] care, and shar[e] the demands of his work of care . . . as a matter of justice” (p. 116, emphasis in original). But who or what determines what counts as care, and where the balance lies? Marin insists that “by receiving and accepting Oscar’s care without reciprocating in kind, [Rose] . . . enjoys the benefits,” whereas “Oscar is put at a risk that Rose is freed from by Oscar’s care” (p. 117). Yet suppose Rose dislikes this arrangement; she prefers restaurants to his mediocre cooking, but accepts for Oscar’s sake his frugality, and his food. Arguably, her eating in then counts as care work, his cooking as asset building or self-indulgence. This example seems to show not just that the macrosocial, microsocial, and (as it were) psychoanalytic characters of actions can diverge, but even that their implications for vulnerability can be ambiguous. It is not clear how normative inferences could follow.
The point can be extended and generalized beyond this (perhaps odd) example. Inasmuch as a network’s structure and product are interactive, Marin regards relative contributions to them as equal across all participants. Hence, “victims of oppression” are “equal partners” both in their own oppression and in “the process of change” (p. 90). Each of us has a responsibility to take action to undermine oppressive structures that we participate in, and rebuild them in a more just way. I agree. My own view, however, is that the perspective of victims of oppression should take priority over that of the relative beneficiaries, both in characterizing the situation and in shaping resistance. That is compatible with beneficiaries’ taking on a larger share of the work of resistance, precisely because we can: but at the direction or behest of the least advantaged. It is not clear to me that Marin can require this kind of deference to the least advantaged. They are equal participants in their oppression and social change. Their views have no priority over those of others. My sense, however, is that her analysis needs some way of practically prioritizing the perspective of the oppressed.
These concerns notwithstanding, Connected by Commitment is deeply insightful, clearly written, normatively compelling, and genuinely among the best books of social philosophy to appear in recent years.
