Against 'capacity'
Anyone who has been a member of a group chat dedicated to political organising in the past few years will probably be familiar with the idiom of ‘capacity’. They will also know that no-one has enough of it. Capacity is a finite resource that is always on the verge of running out. The little battery image in the corner of your phone is always running down. Green, less green, red, dead. Asking after the capacity of others usually reflects mutual concern and demonstrates a recognition that people’s lives are difficult and demanding, full of external pressures and strains. But what exactly do people mean when they say they ‘don’t have capacity’? Can capacity be generated or renewed? And what is capacity anyway?
Saying ‘I don’t have capacity’ sounds quantitative, as if people were vessels that can hold a certain amount of liquid but it fails to define either the content of the liquid or the context or shape of the vessel. Something about the way the term is used seems weirdly compatible with Taylorist conceptions of worker efficiency from the early twentieth century. I just said that people talk about capacity as if it’s a finite resource but the term actually sounds more like the tank than the petrol, in which case where or what are the petrol stations, the refineries, the oil fields? Should we be finding alternative sources of energy?
A lack of capacity could refer to a lack of time, which is objectively measurable, but there are many reasons people don’t have enough time – work, caring responsibilities, other political commitments, hobbies – and the term is also often used in ways that are more ambiguous and qualitative. The sapping of capacity can be practical and/or emotional. But who or what is doing the sapping? Capacity locates deficiencies of time or energy within the individual capacity-haver while only implicitly acknowledging the broader social conditions that can impede sustained political engagement and ignoring the more nebulous emotional aspects of political engagement that also wear people out. Sometimes when people say they ‘don’t have capacity’ they mean ‘I am working loads at the moment’ or ‘I have to take care of my sick child’ or ‘I am getting evicted and trying to find a new place to live’ but at other times they might mean ‘I don’t feel like it’ or ‘I’m annoyed with you all’ or ‘I’d rather be involved in this other project instead’ or ‘I can’t be bothered’.
Perhaps it might be useful to name the causes and the emotional ramifications of this pervasive depletion more precisely. After all, the very conditions that unevenly diminish people’s ‘capacity’ are often exactly the things that will require political organising to transform. Maybe it’s just that no-one has capacity to come up with new concepts. Maybe I’m just being churlish – there are certainly good reasons for being euphemistic sometimes – and it’s obviously good to recognise that people have limits and other things going on in their lives that they might not want to go into in detail. But wouldn’t it be better to acknowledge more clearly that those limits and constraints are not essential features of individual vessel-like people? People’s capacity - time, energy, desire, whatever - to engage in political activity is shaped by the external material conditions in which they live. It’s necessary to describe those conditions in order to change them.
Maybe I’m wrong about this but for now I am against ‘capacity’.
