4/25/20 Piketty “Capital & Ideology” c. p. 511

This blog has been disused for a while. Hardly anybody ever read it, so I decided to hardly ever write for it. But now I’ve decided to use it, for a while at least,  to start posting comments on things I am reading, copied from my notebooks. These are not edited, and particularly not made to function as stand-alone essays. I.e., I have not tried to paraphrase the arguments from the books that I may be discussing. The first book I’m doing this with is Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”. Page references are to the 2020, hardcover, English language edition, published by Belknap Press.

4/25/20 Piketty “Capital & Ideology” c. p. 511

Had these thoughts a couple of days ago, when I was reading this section, but didn’t write them down. Trying to reconstruct.

Piketty’s considerations of fairness re. the entrepreneur trying to start a small business seems to conflate a couple of questions – at least the mechanics of capitalization and questions of passion and ambition.

First it assumes a capital regime similar to ours, that businesses are financed out of private savings, also a wealth regime such that a person not born wealthy might accumulated a small capital by saving, sufficient to start a business. (How realistic is his example, BTW? Is even $50,000 enough to start a small business with a brick-and-mortar store and two employees? My guess is it would be iffy, at least without also securing a substantial line of credit.)

Imagine, instead, Schweickart’s model, where the capital would come from a public board. Then, P’s entrepreneur would pursue her dream by developing her powers of persuasion, including the ability to develop a well-documented business plan, instead of by working in solitude to amass a capital. Powers of persuasion would also serve her in good stead in finding sympatico coop partners. And persuasion is a skill that requires much more social values than accumulation.

If we do assume private capital, the unfairness in the initial injection of the resources of one to be subsequently shared by all could be addressed by making capital infusions, over and above some initial universal buy-in, perhaps, in the form of loans. The terms of the loan would be set at the making of the loan (by contract), and could not later abrogated unilaterally by one party (the collective) acting against the other party (the member/investor “entrepreneur”). Of course, this isn’t necessarily fair, either, if we consider questions of initial social distribution of assets and privilege.

The other issue that seems to be conflated in Piketty’s story is an attitudinal one. P’s entrepreneur has ambition – a dream. Her two potential coop partners just want a job. This is P’s character thinking like a boss. She wants to hire people to fulfill her dream using her money, and feels annoyed that a coop structure might give them too much power to influence the direction of that dream. Successful coop recruitment, I would think, requires a different mindset. You need to think more like an organizer than a boss. Persuasion, again. You need to seek people who are not just hungry for a job, but who are capable of being infected with your dream, and then you need to spread it to them.

A large coop may be able to tolerate a range of levels of commitment to the mission or vision. Also some members may be motivated less by the mission, per se, than by social solidarity (or friendship) with their comrades. Diversity of motives is probably a good thing. (Even better when most people have more than one.) But a small coop like P’s example needs a high level of shared purpose, I would think, to succeed. In this it is like any human enterprise that is not able, due to external forces, to be structured purely hierarchically.  But capitalism is based on hierarchical structures of capital over labor, bosses over employees, managers over line workers, and Piketty, for all his research and creative thinking, has trouble shaking this mindset.

[Alt language at end of note not incorporated: Conflates issues of capital and social structure of firm, and involves quite a lot of classical bourgeois background assumptions.]

7/2/20 This ended up being the last post in this sequence. I had intended to continue, but decided I did not like this raw dump approach. Then I was going to synthesize an over-all book review, but couldn't get that to go in a way that satisfied me, so I dropped that, too. Live moves on.

4/19/20 Piketty “Capital & Ideology” p. 410

This blog has been disused for a while. Hardly anybody ever read it, so I decided to hardly ever write for it. But now I’ve decided to use it, for a while at least,  to start posting comments on things I am reading, copied from my notebooks. These are not edited, and particularly not made to function as stand-alone essays. I.e., I have not tried to paraphrase the arguments from the books that I may be discussing. The first book I’m doing this with is Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”. Page references are to the 2020, hardcover, English language edition, published by Belknap Press.

4/19/20 Piketty “Capital & Ideology” p. 410

I don’t think the far flung parts of the world had previously “ignored” each other. Extensive and important trade networks had always existed, effectively linking people from Scandinavia to the Far East, and large parts of at least Northern and Eastern Africa. The Americas were largely unknown in Europe, but Norsemen had already explored them, some, and attempted colonization. Also, there had been important military excursions west to east and east to west dating at least from the Bronze Age (Sea Peoples), or even before.  In the Middle Ages, the Crusades and the Mongols are obvious examples, not to mention the Moors in Spain and Sicily.

What changed in early modernity was the possibility of European domination, based on improvements in technology (including weaponry and transportation) and organization. Prior conflicts had been reduceable simply to force of man against man, similarly armed, organized, and equipped. Such struggles had never shown the West to have the superiority it liked to claim.

4/17/20 Piketty “Capital & Ideology” p. 368

This blog has been disused for a while. Hardly anybody ever read it, so I decided to hardly ever write for it. But now I’ve decided to use it, for a while at least,  to start posting comments on things I am reading, copied from my notebooks. These are not edited, and particularly not made to function as stand-alone essays. I.e., I have not tried to paraphrase the arguments from the books that I may be discussing. The first book I’m doing this with is Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”. Page references are to the 2020, hardcover, English language edition, published by Belknap Press.

4/17/20 Piketty “Capital & Ideology” p. 368

This analysis of state power and functions in terms of tax revenues is interesting, if, I think, oversimplified. To get a complete picture for all types of state, you’d also need to look at local taxes, and other forms of elite income, especially in states where the line between the wealth of the state and the personal wealth of the ruler(s) is not clear (as in feudal societies), as well as the types of bonds within the ruling class, e.g., dependence of kings on the goodwill of nobility and clergy (sources of men and money) for extended military campaigns in Plantagenet England.

This does not counter Piketty’s points, just meant to elaborate on the in certain cases.

Similarly some empires (Ottoman? Chinese?) may have relied on local rulers/strong men, supported by local taxes/tax equivalents, for a lot of “state” functionality, including “watchman” function. Of course, this was a potential source of rebellions (and new central dynasties).

Then, there were lots of times and places when the “watchman” function pretty much broke down, altogether – bandits, highwaymen, condottieri, bands of armed men terrorizing the populace – Medieval times, Renaissance Italy, the American frontiers (North and South America)…

The other thing he hasn’t talked about (at least, yet) is the connection between the overall national income level and the tax revenues available to the central state. The closer the national income is to the subsistence level, the less excess exists, part of which can be taxed away by the state. A very poor family may not be able to sustain a 10% annual tax, especially if already required to tithe to the church and labor part time in the lord’s fields. It takes a fairly prosperous family to sustain a tax of 30-40%, or more. (It helps if some of those other levies are eliminated, or at least made voluntary.)

His analysis (p 369 ff) of why Europe developed a strong states with tax powers (when other places didn’t) doesn’t seem particularly compelling to me. My sense is that the Ottoman Empire was weak enough that states tended, effectively, to develop within it. Why couldn’t they develop into strong, European-style states? Similarly, I don’t think Mughal domination in India was so strong at all times and places that local political formations and competition couldn’t have developed within it. Again, I don’t know, I’m just not convinced by his explanation.

4/12/20 Piketty “Capital & Ideology” c. p. 250

This blog has been disused for a while. Hardly anybody ever read it, so I decided to hardly ever write for it. But now I’ve decided to use it, for a while at least,  to start posting comments on things I am reading, copied from my notebooks. These are not edited, and particularly not made to function as stand-alone essays. I.e., I have not tried to paraphrase the arguments from the books that I may be discussing. The first book I’m doing this with is Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”. Page references are to the 2020, hardcover, English language edition, published by Belknap Press.

4/12/20 Piketty “Capital & Ideology” c. p. 250

I think his “ternary” or “trifunctional” classification of societies is wrong, but not totally off, and the distinction with later “proprietarian” societies is valid. [See 4/4/20 for earlier thoughts.]

I think the target he’s aiming at is societies based on orders, that is traditionally defined, maybe divinely ordered classes of people, usually though not exclusively heritable, where the paradigmatic type of the class includes wealth (or lack thereof), status, functions (duties), and privileges. This may be more-or-less amenable to lumping into the three “estates” of the Ancien régime, certainly those divisions would have been seen as primary in Medieval Europe – but a society of the orders doesn’t end there. It also defines you as a yeoman farmer, a Roman provincial colon, a miller, a blacksmith or other artisan, a mariner, fisherman, or merchant. These roles may be 100% determined for you by inheritance, as per the edict of Diocletian, or they may be determined for you early in life, as in an urban Medieval guild apprenticeship, but once chosen, they are (at least theoretically) all-embracing, and determine all the important circumstances of your life.

Unlike the strict ternary model, the society of the orders model can maybe be pushed way, way back, even to hunter-gatherer societies, where fixed roles might be defined only by sex/gender (possibly with some “two-spirit” alternative), along with transitory roles defined by age cohort. (Of course, aristocracy is not impossible in early societies, and slaves may exist.)

In terms of “inequality regimes”, it seems to me this gives us three relevant ideologies:

1. Society of the orders: Inequality is justified by traditional roles (maybe divinely inspired), each with its duties and privileges.
2. Proprietarian society: Property is in principle available to all, and may increased by hard work. Property is sacrosanct: otherwise, there is no guaranteed reward for work, and society will fall apart. Property may be unequally distributed, but this is because some people work harder, or worked harder, than others, and, in any case, redistribution of property (other than by free contract) is a cure worse than the disease. Anybody who cannot get ahead by their work is lazy or incompetent, and therefore undeserving.
3. Social democratic: The aggregate wealth of society is the product of the labor of us all, and should be shared more-or-less equally between us. People who cannot work, for some reason, should be well-cared-for by reason of our common humanity. Material things (capital) is obviously necessary for production, but the legal fiction of private ownership of that capital contributes to production not in the slightest,  and should not be allowed to exist (let alone richly rewarded). No one should be paid handsomely just for already being rich; in fact, all the capital of society should be collectively owned (socialized), and decisions as to its use made socially and democratically by all.

[Note the “social democratic” model above doesn’t specifically tie to anything Piketty has said, up to this point in the book.]

This may be controversial, but it seems to me that the main difference between what I’ve called the “social democratic” model and early Leninist communism is the addition by Lenin of vanguardism: until the people are ready to assume their full, democratic role, they must be led by a vanguard or party that has already attained the correct consciousness.

I am not distinguishing between social democracy and democratic socialism.  I do not accept that the regulated capitalism in fact accepted by many social democrats as a compromise should be allowed to redefine the term. [Although Piketty, when he gets around to talking about it, uses the redefined term.]

4/6/20 Piketty “Capital & Ideology” p. 103

This blog has been disused for a while. Hardly anybody ever read it, so I decided to hardly ever write for it. But now I’ve decided to use it, for a while at least,  to start posting comments on things I am reading, copied from my notebooks. These are not edited, and particularly not made to function as stand-alone essays. I.e., I have not tried to paraphrase the arguments from the books that I may be discussing. The first book I’m doing this with is Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”. Page references are to the 2020, hardcover, English language edition, published by Belknap Press.

4/6/20 Piketty “Capital & Ideology” p. 103

French revolutionaries, like 19th Century Radical Republicans, were unable to conceive two ideas that could have led to more egalitarian societies, in each case:

1. That centuries of exploitation – working the land for someone else’s benefit – might give people (peasant or freedman) a “property right” in the land greater than that of the titular owner who had been exploiting them, and,
2. The idea of cooperative ownership, i.e., of former plantations in the U.S.A., or things like mills (“banalités”) in the French case.

4/4/20 Piketty “Capital & Ideology” p. 52

This blog has been disused for a while. Hardly anybody ever read it, so I decided to hardly ever write for it. But now I’ve decided to use it, for a while at least,  to start posting comments on things I am reading, copied from my notebooks. These are not edited, and particularly not made to function as stand-alone essays. I.e., I have not tried to paraphrase the arguments from the books that I may be discussing. The first book I’m doing this with is Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”. Page references are to the 2020, hardcover, English language edition, published by Belknap Press.

4/4/20 Piketty “Capital & Ideology” p. 52

Sometimes I think Piketty does not know how much of historian he is not.

I’ve been trying to project his tripartite model onto the classical, and, to a lesser extent, the ancient world.  Greece and (pre-Christian) Rome didn’t really have a priestly class. They didn’t really have a military class, either. The main categories were citizen, non-citizen free people, and slaves. In later Roman society, the military was professionalized, as was the (Christian) priesthood, but powerful landowners stood apart, not primarily military nor priestly (nor clerical, intellectual, or administrative). The military was not a socially privileged class in the way of the Medieval nobility, although it could provide a path, for some, to wealth and political power, even supreme civil power.

It seems to me the trifunctional society in Europe rose from the barbarian invasions. The ruling class was, perforce, military, since the conquerors consisted of a numerically small military elite. The clerical class they inherited by their adoption of Christianity, and the clerics were useful to the rulers because, (1) they believed their souls needed saving, and, (2) they needed scribes and clerks (and disdained to do that work, themselves, and, (3) because they needed some respectable class to absorb second, and especially third, fourth, etc. sons in a society committed to non-partible inheritance (although that wasn’t true in all parts of Europe, I guess.)

For the ancient (Mediterranean) world, I don’t know enough. Based on what I do know, the trifunctional society MAY have fit at least some cultures in the Middle East. Not sure about Minoan and Mycenean societies. It seems a stretch to apply it to Egypt.

May have fit China, Japan, Korea better, especially if the clerical class is understood to be a class of educated administrators, and not necessarily religious.  India, okay probably, although the caste system was more complex. [He actually has a much more thorough discussion of this, later in the book.]

I think it’s a stretch at best to try and fit this “trifunctional” model on the Muslim world, also. Maybe. Not sure.

I mean, I don’t know enough about all these societies, but based on what I do know, trying to divide their social arrangements into these three specific classes seems to do violence to the facts.

[See additional comments made on 4/12/20.]

Navel gazing

With all the talk about "democratic socialism", these days, including attempts to define the term that make it essentially indistinguishable from "New Deal Democrat", I've spent some time thinking about how I would describe my own political/philosophical leanings to an interested stranger. Every day is different, but today I am thinking "radical democratic socialist" because I do NOT think that capitalism with a human face is sufficient. Private ownership of capital is essentially incompatible with democracy (which is why I've sometimes argued that "democratic socialism" is a tautology). Further, paying people, let alone paying them generously, just for owning stuff, let alone just because they already own a lot more stuff than anybody else, is morally indefensible.

On the other hand, I need to add something like "pragmatic radical", because I know that wishing don't make it so, and I do not believe in letting the best be the enemy of the good (or even of the "better than now"). Morally, it is better to do something to make things better, for at least some people, than to do nothing. Pretending to a high moral stance from "keeping your hands clean" is not actually better, morally, than being "compromised" by accepting, and working for, limited reforms. Life is short and (to quote a prominent liberal), in the long run we are all dead.

This leaves out a lot. Feminism, anti-racism... or, better, pro-POC... "embracing" LGBTQ (a phrase I learned recently from a friend, and like so much better than "ally"). I like to think of socialism as not limited to the economic realm. Socialism is democracy, taken to its ultimate conclusion. Socialism is the end of all exploitation, all preferential advantage or privilege of one group over another, for whatever reason, from whatever source.

Taxes

It is true, as I understand it, that the modest amount of progressivity left in the Federal tax code means that most income taxes are paid by people who are at least moderately well off. It is also true that Federal income taxes, proper, are only a part of the overall tax burden, and when you factor in other taxes (FICA, sales taxes, gas tax, state income tax, real estate taxes) the overall tax structure in this country becomes regressive (poorer people pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes, overall, than rich people, and MUCH lower than the super-rich. That is a reason activists often give in explaining why having rich people pay more in income taxes is fair.

But there's another reason I think is even more important. Wealth, ALL wealth, ultimately derives from profits - i.e., from something like a rent for the use of your property - and not from labor. This is true even if a high income is disguised as salary. NOBODY's labor is "worth" more than 200 times the median. Ultra-high CEO salaries come from their ability to control property (their own, and that of shareholders).

And profit is essentially a privatized tax - a tax that we pay on every good and most services that we consume, but that goes strictly to the benefit of a small class of individuals. (Small in percentage population terms; rather large in absolute numbers.) Profit represents the owning class blackmailing us by threatening to withhold the means of production, which would mean that we could not, with our labor, produce anything at all. And the more that wealth becomes concentrated, the stronger the stranglehold that property has on us, and the more they are able to squeeze out.

What progressive tax rates do, in a capitalist society that refuses to simply expropriate private owners, is to reclaim part of that private tax, for the public benefit. More progressive tax rates actually represent a LOWERING of the private tax that is capitalist profit.

And that is why progressive taxes are fair.

Entrepreneurial

Thomas Piketty, on page 572 of Capital in the 21st Century, worries that an excessive tax on capital income would “risk killing the motor of accumulation.”  He means entrepreneurship. 

So what if it did?  Profit-driven innovation is not innovation for human need.  It prefers idle whim, if  backed by cash, to the most urgent necessity without.  If inequality is extreme, this disfigurement of priorities is demonstrably exacerbated.  We have people watching TV on iPhones, while others go hungry and homeless.

I begin to suspect that the entrepreneur, as conventionally conceived, is as useless as the capitalist – and I am convinced that the capitalist, qua capitalist, has no social value whatsoever. 

If all capital were socialized, if all decisions about how to allocate material resources were made by some democratically accountable process – David Schweickart’s model of “Economic Democracy” shows one way this could be done* – if no one, ever again, would ever be paid just for already owning stuff, do we really think that all innovation, all creativity, all progress would stop?  And suppose it did, or even just slowed dramatically, couldn’t that just be because people no longer saw any need for it?  And wouldn’t that be a good thing?  It would mean people thought things were good enough, and no more change was necessary.

I don’t think that’s likely.  People are curious, creative, inventive – even just for the sake of those qualities, in themselves, but especially if they see need.  People like to do good work.  They like to be productive.  They like to help.  They like to make a difference.  If someone saw a need, and the need was real, in a truly democratic world, they would convince others to go along, and resources would be made available, both material and in the form of people’s time and creative energy.

Desire for personal wealth is one possible human motivation.  The theory of the invisible hand shows that, in some cases, this motive may suffice for a greater social good.  The theory does not prove that it will always so suffice, nor that it is the only motivation that can do so.  And the theory certainly does not show that greed is the motivator best-suited to curing humanity’s ills.

*David Schweickart explains the system he calls “Economic Democracy” in his books Against Capitalism, and After Capitalism.

Natural that it be paid

Thomas Piketty, on page 423 of Capital in the 21st Century, says, “If capital plays a useful role in the process of production, it is natural that it should be paid.”  Actually, I think it is not. 

When I read those words of Piketty, back in October of 2014, I wrote in my notebook, “It is only the separation of property ownership from labor characteristic of capitalism (but not unique to capitalism) that makes this seem reasonable.  If all the wealth in the world were evenly distributed (but still privately owned), and everybody labored, then I would expect to use my own property in my work.  I would expect my labor to bear return, more than enough to cover any of my property used up in the production process (otherwise I am falling behind).  But I would not naturally think of paying myself a rent on my own property.  I would not demand a return on my capital, per se.  It is only the fact that some have not enough property, while others have more than they need, that makes paying for the use of capital seem ‘natural’”.

Rereading those words, I have a couple of additional thoughts. One is that there is no reason to assume that property should be privately owned, rather than somehow held in common.   Then, also, I question whether I would necessarily expect my labor to at least replace the capital “used” in it.  Certainly, this would not necessarily be true if there were other, intangible, benefits to the labor.  The real point is, I would expect my labor to bear fruit in some fashion (otherwise, I would not labor).  And I would use whatever material goods I had access to in pursuit of my ends.  But the idea that “my” capital should be “paid” is not necessarily intuitive.  Consider also that, outside of capitalism, saved property does not generally multiply.  Food stockpiled may be a hedge against starvation (as long as the stockpiles survive vermin and decay), stockpiles of fuel or clothing may guard against the cold, etc.  But if I do not add to them, eventually my stockpiles will be used up.  “My” fruit trees may naturally replenish their fruit, with little labor on my part.  But most kinds of “stuff” do not naturally multiply on their own.  I see no reason that it should be “natural” to assume that they would.

If you leave cultural bias aside, there is nothing more natural in an ethic that people should profit from “their” property than in an ethic that those who have more than they need should share with those who do not.  People trained to “classical” (i.e., capitalist) economics may be tempted to assert that the former is enforced by the “invisible hand” of self-interest, whereas the latter necessarily requires collective action to counter “natural” selfishness.  That reaction unjustly deprecates people’s very real impulse to selfless, generous social behavior, which exists alongside their impulse to self-interested greed.  But besides this, it denies the massive cultural edifice we have erected to the protection of private property, starting with definitions of same, complex and controversial, which we have created so that people may know what is and is not “their” property, because people do not necessarily spontaneously see this the same way.  Then there is almost the entire body of contract law, most of the police and court systems, arguably even much or most of the military. 

The resources that go into regulating the “natural” relationship of people to each other’s private property are enormous!  There is no obvious reason why the social structures required to support an ethos of sharing would be more unwieldy than those we have erected to support an ethos of greed.  And they would probably generate a far, far better world.

Madness foisted

Does anybody remember when Kleenex boxes just had a hole in the top to get the tissue out, and didn't have a slotted piece of plastic film glued around the hole to hold the next sheet in position?  Why did they change this?  Did anybody have a real problem getting the next tissue out of the old boxes?  Seriously?  The old boxes were simple, and about as cheap as they could be.  The new boxes are probably cheap, too, but making a box and gluing a sheet of plastic in it MUST be at least a little more expensive than just making the box, and it is more harmful to the environment to use the extra material, especially a non-biodegradable, petroleum-based plastic. Why?

Another of my pet peeves is coffee cup lids.  I drank coffee on the go for many years when the cups had simple, tearably-thin plastic lids with no holes to drink through.  I never had a problem getting my coffee out (improvising a sipping hole if-and-when I needed one), nor did any of the other coffee drinkers I knew.  But over time, all the coffee shops started providing (and ONLY providing) much heavier lids (more material) that couldn't easily have custom holes torn in them - but had a PERMANENT sipper hole.  The main function of these sipper holes seems to have been to dribble coffee everywhere (usually all over your clothes) while you were walking to your destination with the cup.  After several decades of this madness, some coffee shops started realizing that this was a problem for their customers.  Their solution was to provide ANOTHER thick, heavy piece of plastic to temporarily plug the unnecessary hole in the unnecessarily thick plastic lid.

The theoretical justification of the capitalist marketplace is that it "puts the consumer first" because they have sovereignty over their purchasing decisions, and producers compete to satisfy the sovereign customer.  But the only feedback is the purchasing decision, which comes LONG after the production decision has been made (and after many prior purchasing/production decisions, such as deciding on expensive retooling of factories).  But I don't think consumers were ever clamoring for plastic tissue-holders in Kleenex boxes, or thicker coffee cup lids with permanent sipping holes, and I doubt that many consumers ever made the choices of buying or not buying tissue or coffee based on these features.  These were unnecessary and irrational choices made by producers and foisted on consumers due to the inefficiency of a feedback mechanism so feeble as to be virtually non-existent.

I dream of a more rational economic system in which production decisions could me made deliberatively and collectively in a broad-based social process, and not in isolation and secret by competing cabals of producers, to be "voted on" after the fact by individual consumers acting even more in isolation and faced with limited and complexly aggregated purchasing options.

But, hey, maybe its just me that's gone mad, and not the rest of the world.  Who knows?

All the Money in the World

"If you had all the money in the world, it would be worthless." At the risk of ruining the appearance of sagacity, I will 'splain my thinking.

If "money" is defined as "gold" or "cattle" or something else which has use value as well as value as a medium of exchange, then the statement in my "status" would not be true. If you had all the gold or cattle in the world, it would be worth something. But money, qua money, has value only in its role as facilitating exchange in a functioning economy. If it became TOO concentrated, it could no longer fill this role. Most people having no money, they would have to acquire goods and services they didn't produce themselves in some other way (e.g., barter or rapine), or they would have to introduce some other medium of exchange in lieu of "money" (e.g., cigarettes in prison or post-war Europe), which of course would then technically be money, in which case the people who had concentrated the official "money" in their hands would no longer have "all the money in the world".

In any case, my thought experiment ran that IF you had "all the money in the world" its extreme scarcity would make it useless as medium of exchange, and it would no longer be "money". Of course, social disruption and change (of the political system, or economic system, or both) would happen long before that that time. The relevant questions, to our own radically unequal national and (even more) world societies are: "What kind of change?" and "When?"

Subject for Debate

It is not surprising that the debates fail to satisfy.  (I admit I didn't watch them.  A few minutes of Romney's wild eyes and wilder lies, and I was ready to puke, and changed the channel.  But I'm responding to the post-debate coverage I've read, both in the news media and on Facebook.)

You can't squarely and honestly address the issues facing this country unless you address the issue of class; to wit, that the rich and powerful are and have been systematically looting the working class both of this country and the world.  (This is the actual class that includes the working poor plus the bulk of that which we disingenuously refer to as  "the middle class" in our political debates.)  They have been doing this since time immemorial, generally with the full help and support of government.  This was mitigated for a brief time, due to working people's revolutionary struggles and the rise of unionism in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. The post-WWII prosperity then eased the pressure (there was so much wealth to be generated, that the rich could be convinced to share).  But since the mid-70s the rapine has resumed, and steadily intensified in force.  Extreme inequality was a driving force behind the economic collapse of 2008, and our government (a milquetoast Presidency and a recalcitrant Congress) ensured that, while working people got some palliative measures (a stimulus package, payroll tax cuts, unemployment extensions), which actually lessened our pain compared to, e.g., Europe, the rich essentially got made whole, and certainly were not asked to pay for their crimes.

But neither of the major U.S. parties can address this issue, since they are both entirely beholden to the capitalist class.  Our Constitution, and our private cash-driven electoral system ensure this.  I'm not a believer in the strategy of "Down with the Elephant, Down with the Ass."  While I would love to see an effective (i.e., election-winning) "Party of the Working Class,"  I have yet to see one with a credible plan of building mass American support.  Working within the Democratic Party has been somewhat more effective in my lifetime, but frustrating also:  for all the so-called "progressives" we sometimes manage to elect, we can't seem to shake the identification of the Democrats as the kinder and gentler of the parties of the elites.  Money is too influential, leadership too powerful, and even our "progressives", once in office, are often too willing to go along to get along.

I don't have a solution.  We need an effective, yet revolutionary politics if we are ever to break the stranglehold of wealth over our lives, and I frankly can't see where that politics is coming from.  But an honest recognition of the problem has got to be the first step.

P.S. The quote above is from an old Socialist chant, "Down with the Elephant.  Down with the Ass.  Let's build a party of the Working Class."

The Root of All Evil

The root of capitalism is the principle that the possession of property entitles you to a claim on the fruits of someone else's labor.  There is no moral justification for this.  It is on a par with "might makes right" or "the Devil take the hindmost."  Capitalism is thus corrupt at its very core, whatever social benefits it might be deemed to have in any specific time and place.

The logic of capitalism only makes sense if there is an unequal distribution of wealth.  If everybody had equal wealth, there would be no sense in property employing labor; rather, we would tend to evolve a system where men and women collectively used their property and their labor in order to socially produce things (since social production is more efficient than individual production).  Equal distribution of wealth would tend toward a cooperative society, rather than a capitalistic one.

So capitalism arises only in an unequal society; its essential logic guarantees that.  The logic of the working-out of capitalism increases the initial inequality.  If you have only a small amount of property, it is very difficult to make it grow.  Generally, only your constant labor can keep it from shrinking.  If you have a large amount of property, however, it is very difficult to PREVENT it from growing.  The process of being paid for the use of your property returns the borrowed property plus a dividend, over and over again.  The more property you possess, the larger the dividend.  If the amount of property you possess is very large, it becomes virtually impossible to spend the dividend.  Even if your wealth is a bit smaller, only a modest amount of self-restraint is necessary for savings.  So the wealth of rich people grows and grows.  Yes, it is possible for a wealthy person to "go bust" because of bad investments.  But it doesn't happen very often.  And even a wealthy person who, with great fanfare, has  "gone bust",  generally has more residual wealth than a person who wasn't rich to begin with.  Squalor turns out to be relative.

Capitalism is inherently incompatible with democracy, because capitalism concentrates concentrations wealth, and wealth is inevitably power. There is no way to decouple the relationship of wealth and power.  Regulatory tinkering, such as campaign finance rules, can only act as an impediment, an inconvenience to the wealthy when they act to assert their money-power.  Capitalist countries, then, even with republican governmental forms, tend to devolve into de facto oligarchies.  This process can be resisted only by constant vigilance, to limit accumulation of wealth, to restrain the free political exercise of wealth, to balance people power against money power (unions and voter empowerment campaigns).  This vigilance is a lot of work.  When we have won some improvements, "we the people" tend to slack off.  The capitalists never do.  The differential rewards for them - the incentives - are just too immediate and great.  Thus, when times got somewhat better in the postwar period - at least in Europe, the U.S. and Canada - the people became complacent, and in the mid-1970s the capitalists, with their neoliberal/Reaganite/Thatcherite agenda, counter attacked.  And so, here we are today, with economic inequality and poverty at record levels, with a stagnant economy, but with many capitalists declaring "recovery" despite the fact that so many remain unemployed, many, many more underemployed, and almost all of us economically insecure.

So it turns out that not money, but private capital is the root of all evil, arising only in conditions of inequality, sustaining and promoting inequality, and undermining democracy.  Ultimately, if we want secure and just economies, we need to decouple property and income, by recognizing that all capital is socially constructed, and must be socially owned. 

Casinos, capitalists and class struggle

The rush of Massachusetts to build casinos and other gambling dens makes me crazy.  The casinos are sold to us as a jobs program - this is almost a pure scam.  It is as if the 1% were to hire a small number of the 99% to construct, and then operate, a gigantic vacuum cleaner, the sole purpose of which was to suck money out of the pockets of the 99%, and deposit it in the bank accounts of the 1%.

Compare this with a genuine jobs bill - the Conyers bill, HR 870, which would tax the 1% (through a small financial transactions tax) and use the proceeds to hire some of the 99% to build and repair things (schools, roads, bridges) that belong to the 99%.

In today's political parlance, the second bill – the genuine jobs bill – is considered class warfare.  Casino construction, which employs some people to better exploit others, is not.  Essentially, "class warfare", for the punditry, is a term used to describe anything that acts effectively to the detriment of one specific class - the ruling class.

Even a casual student of Marx knows that the class struggle is not an option - something one chooses to engage in, or not.  It is an inevitable side effect of a class society.  As long as the economy is structured so that one particular class – feudal landowners, slave-owners, or capitalists – derives its income solely and explicitly by the exploitation of others (aka the workers), then you have a class society, one feature of which will be a struggle over the degree of exploitation.

A Keynesian analysis of a capitalist economy suggests there may be some "sweet spot" for the capitalist class, a level of wages that balances off increased demand and economic activity against a reduced profit margin, so as to maximize the capitalists' overall net income.  But there's no magic way to detect this "sweet spot", and the capitalists' greed is such that they will tend to overshoot when it comes to driving down wages.  Also, manipulating the overall wage rate in the economy, so as to manipulate demand, is beyond the power of most individual capitalists, or even cartels. 

At a given level of output and technology, the individual capitalist can only increase his income by increasing the level of exploitation - his profit.  Any such increase in profit comes directly out of the worker's wages.  So struggle is inevitable.  The only question is whether the workers resist low wages individually (in which case the majority of them are bound to lose), or collectively, through labor unions and political action, in which case they have a chance.  It is this latter form of collective struggle that the right wing insists on calling "class warfare".

A genuine jobs bill, like the Conyers bill, would strengthen the working class, lessen inequality, and make the 99% genuinely better off.  The casino alternative plays some in the working class against others, and its overall effect is to further the impoverishment of the 99% with respect to the 1%. 

Some with in the Occupy movement have started saying "They only call it 'class warfare' when we fight back."  I would add that they only call it "class warfare" when we adopt a strategy that might actually win results.

Truth in politics

I recently had an extended Facebook dialog with a comrade which ranged over the possibilities (or lack thereof) for a genuinely democratic politics, the usefulness (or otherwise) of lessons from history, and many related points. If I had an overall theme for my part of the discussion, it was that a genuinely democratic politics is, at least theoretically possible; that it involves a socialized decision making process based on dialog and debate, which, in contrast to capitalist economic theory, privileges reasoned, considered conclusions, arrived at after due deliberation, over the snap judgments which seem to arise from our instincts or first impulses; that to truly achieve such a decision making process would require a vastly more participatory form of democracy than our modern version, in which participation is largely limited to passively watching the news, then pulling a lever, every 2-4 years, for some candidate; and that classical Athenian democracy, for all its evident faults, had things to teach us about how to structure such a participative democracy.  (Some of these themes will be familiar to anyone who has followed this blog; others I do intend to develop, someday...)

Throughout the FB dialog, my comrade several times in passing raised the question as to exactly what is meant by “truth”.  At the time, I ignored it, because it seemed irrelevant to the current discussion, and because I rather thought, without reflecting, that the “conventional” view of truth sufficed for a political (rather than a philosophical) discussion.  If I say I fell down the stairs when I really got beat up by my spouse, the statement is untrue.  If I really fell down the stairs (and wasn’t pushed, or tripped, etc.), then the statement is true.  This definition seemed to suffice for most practical political purposes.

But I realized on reflection that that is not true, and that thinking about why it is not  makes for an excellent demonstration of my ideas about democracy.

Take a concept like the “value” of a person’s labor.  Marx’s labor theory of value, although useful on an abstract level, cannot, in my opinion, be made concrete enough to objectively yield a precise “dollar” value in specific cases.  The capitalist (aka classical or neo-classical) economic model, which defines value in terms of market price, nothing more or less, always yields a precise, objective value.  (At least it does in cases where it “matters” – where there is an immediate need to come up with a wage rate, here-and-now.  It has more of a problem with hypotheticals.)  But there are so many broad social and political factors that go into determining real-world supply and demand that to take the market price as in any way representing a just price is problematic, at best.

And yet, each of us does have his own opinion, in every specific case we encounter, as to whether a given wage is just, or not.  More importantly, these opinions are not just inexplicable “gut reactions”.  We can adduce reasons for our opinions.  “Capital is giving up present consumption, and deserves a reward.”  “The worker’s children need food, a house, books for their education.  The capitalist’s children already have all these things, and more.”  Some such opinions will be hardened beyond possibility of change, but others will be amenable to counter-argument. This makes the determination of value perfectly suited to democratic decision making – to “government by discussion” – providing unencumbered fora exist where broad and open debate can actually occur (which is not generally true in our own malformed democracies).  In this view, what is “true” (i.e., the true value of a person’s work) is not a simple matter of observation, nor is it arbitrarily determined by objective, impersonal forces, but neither is it just a relativistic matter of individual judgment.  It is a social truth, determined, for a particular time and place, by a participatory, deliberative process.

Devotees of capitalist economics will cry that to set values (i.e., prices) by fiat, even that of a democratic public, will lead to horrible economic “inefficiencies”.  “Efficiency” is an interesting word.  It is usually presented in economics discussion as if it were in-and-of-itself a positive good.  Yet efficiency draws its value from the thing that is being done.  To efficiently murder a large number of people is very different from a moral standpoint than to efficiently save a large number of lives.  And, self-serving capitalist theory to the contrary, efficiency in generating private profits is not necessarily (in fact, not often) the same as efficiently building a more just and prosperous society.

But, although this will be apostasy to many of my socialist comrades, it may not be necessary to do away with market mechanisms in determining the actual price in order to benefit from a democratic social discussion as to what is a just value.  If we can successfully debunk the capitalist theory that says the market price is by necessity a just price, and if we can get most people to see that the actual, market-determined prices at some given time are not just, this paves the way for a social examination of the question, “Why not?”  It is an opening to a discussion of exactly what political and social factors influence supply and demand such that market prices are not just.  “Goods” which could come out of this discussion could include:  increases in the progressivity of the tax code, support for cooperative enterprises and small business vis-à-vis corporate big business, introducing some level of direct social control over big business (e.g., public or union representation on boards of directors), support for universal unionization of the work force, decisions to remove more social goods (e.g., healthcare) from private markets and to better support public goods ranging from roads and education to parks and the arts, radical curtailment of commercial advertising...  Please! Extend the list, yourself.

About all of such goods, I would say to my comrades on the left:  It may not be socialism, but it ain’t hay.

While we can certainly strive to educate people within our present social structures, in order for something like the results described above to really happen, we would need a much more robust democracy than our own; one with real, broad based and open social debates, and mechanisms for such debates to feed into actual political decision making.  How we get from here to there, it is hard, at this time, to envision, although I have some thoughts on what sort of structures the end might entail.  But all I’ll say, right now, is that there are strong reasons why capitalism, oligarchy and plutocracy prefer their formal democracies to be crippled.

Capitalism has got to go

The other night, Susan and I saw a television commercial for a new and infinitesimally improved type of contact lens, and we thought, "All the money (millions and millions of dollars) that goes into developing and marketing such an unnecessary product as this." (And this is hardly the most egregious example!)  Meanwhile, a 3 year old toddler is being gunned down on the streets of Boston. This is crazy!  It's just crazy!  Capitalism is MANIFESTLY unable to deliver resources according to need, except in the sick, twisted, circular definition of "need" put forward by capitalism's apologists.  We can pay millions for trinkets, but we can’t afford the policing, educational resources and jobs programs that would make inner city youth feel they had real life alternatives other than joining a gang and dealing drugs.  How much longer can we tolerate this monstrous system?

The rationalizers of markets claim that capitalism will reflect peoples “real” needs, as determined by their marginal utility.  That people’s “free market” decisions reflect their marginal utility isn’t really something that can be proven – it’s taken as self-evident.  And since we can’t know what is in people’s minds except by their actions (as expressed in their market behavior), the only way we have to measure people’s needs is by what the market produces.  This leads to the circularity in the argument that says market outcomes are good because the only way we can know what is good is to look at what the market produces, which, since markets satisfy peoples real needs, which can only be measured their market behavior, must be good.

The problem is that market theory fetishizes isolated, individual, decision making models, but this is not the way we make our BEST decisions.  Our best decisions are made collaboratively, after discussion and deliberation with our friends and other interested parties.  That is to say that GOOD decisions are made collectively, deliberatively, democratically.  Classical economics has built a whole theory of “optimal” resource distribution around the WORST kind of human decision making – isolated, individual, selfish, snap-judgments.

Now there’s a word for making economic decisions collaboratively, deliberatively, and democratically.  That word is SOCIALISM.  Socialism gives us a theory of resource distribution based on the BEST kind of human decision making.  Capitalism gives us a theory based on the worst kind.  And so capitalism always gives us bad results.  Capitalism gives us the things we think we need when we’re unconsciously reacting to hormonal stimuli (don’t even get me started on advertising...)  It does NOT give us the things we would REALIZE that we needed if we stopped and thought, listened to other people, and considered what our priorities really were.  And THAT leads to horrible maldistributions of resources in ways that don’t satisfy ANY of the needs that most of us REALLY feel.  As the sorrowing parents of far, far too many murdered children, in Boston and elsewhere about this nation and the world, could tell you.

Democratic choice

One often encounters an attitude, in writings or discussions about society, that being a (“small-d”) democrat requires adopting a “take people as they are” philosophy; i.e., an attitude that faults any questioning of people’s pre-existing attitudes, practices, desires or beliefs. Interestingly, this attitude has distinctive versions on both the right and left. On the right, it takes place in the context of market theory, specifically in the idea that outcomes from free market exchanges are not only economically more efficient (itself a challengeable claim), but are inherently more democratic than decisions made politically. On the left, it takes the form of cultural relativism – the idea that every society has the right to decide its own way of life, even if this involves practices (like female circumcision or stoning rape victims to death) that we may find morally reprehensible, by our own lights. The strong form of this attitude would claim that any attempt to educate others as to our own values is propaganda, imperialism and attempted culture-cide.

I would argue that both of these points of view are not, in fact, democratic, but actually anti-democratic, even anti-political, as well as elitist and degrading. I would argue, further, that they are in fact contrary to the way most people would evaluate their own decision-making process.

The market-theory version of the “take-’em-as-they-are” argument privileges small scale, individual decisions made by people acting in isolation, over those which the same people would make after collective deliberation, discussion and debate. Specifically, the individual decisions are considered “free”, and collective decision making considered to be in some way coerced. Some factors in real-life decision making are either ignored, or explicitly assumed away under such a rubric as “enlightened self-interest”. In particular, it dismisses or denies the fact that isolated individual decisions are likely to consider only a limited range of factors directly and obviously related to the immediate choice, whereas collective deliberation allows the opportunity to introduce broader perspectives, show how the decisions of one might have an unforeseen impact on others, and consider how each seemingly small decision contributes to broader, social outcomes.

One reason for this attitude in market theory, I am convinced, is that market theorists want to find a “once-for-all”, “magic bullet”-style solution to social problems. Democratic theory, in favoring collective decision making, does not offer this – it only offers a process: deliberate, discuss (perhaps argue), decide – which includes no guarantee that the final decision will be a good one. How much more appealing the idea of an impersonal mechanism (the market) that, if left alone (if we only don’t THINK too much), will automatically “get it right”. But this attitude, as it distrusts ANY form of collective decision making in favor of isolated, individual choice and impersonal mechanisms, is not only anti-democratic but it is actually anti-political. It is also degrading, in that is implies that people’s worst, most unreflective, selfish and egoistic sides are some how more “them” than their considered judgments. Further, it is often associated with a (degrading) assumption that people are more likely than not to mess up, if they try to make a conscious decision, which in conservative tradition goes hand-in-hand with efforts to limit popular participation in political governance, preferring to restrict it to an educated (usually wealthy) elite.

The “take-’em-as-they-are” theory is also contrary to the way most people would actually think about their decision making. If you were to say to most people, “The decisions you make when you think about a question, collect whatever information you can on it, listen to other people, and discuss it with your friends and colleagues, are likely to be better decisions than the snap judgments you make without doing these things,” this would not be a particularly controversial thesis.

One can also argue – not without pitfalls, but hard to refute in principle – that even the individual market decisions people make AFTER they have discussed, deliberated, educated themselves, or been better-educated, even constrained, as the result of collective decisions, will tend to result in greater INDIVIDUAL satisfaction in the outcomes than would have resulted from those ill-considered, a priori ones. This argument, if accepted, eliminates any conceivable utility-theoretical basis for preferring the less-considered to the more-considered choice.

“Common sense” decision making models also contradict the extreme multi-cultural leftist argument for non-interference. Most people have a reasonable amount of confidence in their own ability to weigh the evidence and make their own decisions. If you say, “You shouldn’t listen to other people, because they will lead you down a garden path, and convince you of things against your better judgment, and you will come to regret it, later,” people may say, “Yes, that could happen,” but by-and-large they will trust their own ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, and will not feel they need to do so by shutting their ears. (An exception, of course, is people with some pathological reason to deny reality, such as those who secretly fear their own position of privilege is unsupportable, and don’t want to listen to arguments that might turn this fear into an inescapable certainty.) Also, while people tend to be conservative about their own cultural values, they are not necessarily opposed totally and across the board to the idea of trying something new.

There are, of course, real difficulties in distinguishing between education and propaganda, and especially, there are real problems for democracy when “education” is presented within a political context marked by a pre-existing power disparity between the “educator” and the student. But to say that this means all attempts at education should be eschewed is itself elitist and anti-democratic – and self-contradictory. It makes no sense to say we should take people just as they are, and not try to educate them, because their opinions about how best to live their own lives should be trusted, and at the same time say they would not have sufficient wit to judge for themselves the pros and cons of contrary opinions we might express. People who adopt this attitude are expressing a basic distrust in political process, in favor of a head-in-the-sand, leave-well-enough-alone approach.

There are real moral problems, too, with adopting even mild forms of cultural relativism when the practices are extreme – slavery or genocide may be obvious examples, or, for that matter, stoning of rape victims. In these cases, despite theoretical pitfalls and slippery-slope arguments, it is morally appropriate to move beyond education and persuasion to outright coercion – if possible. Practical constraints here raise their ugly head, and the historical record for imposing morality at the point of a sword (besides predominating in examples of efforts later historians would not necessarily consider moral) has not been notably marked by practical success. In many cases, it may arguably only make matters worse. But I digress...

The imperfections of our “really existing” democracies do present problems with the idea of privileging political decision making over “invisible hand” market mechanisms, or in trying to promote culture-change by education and persuasion (let alone through coercion). The level of participation in public decision making in our societies is very low. Decisions are made by a tiny subset of the population, some elected by the people, others almost invisibly appointed to run agencies, or hired by those appointed, with broad latitude in how they implement the general directives that are set by the elected representatives. Public debate is largely moderated by privately (and elitely) owned news media, and the debaters mostly do not ultimately have a vote in the final decision making, which is often done by people far removed from any kind of democratic accountability whatsoever over their individual actions. The vast majority of the people only passively follow the debate, if at all, in the newspapers or (more likely) TV news stories, and limit their actual participation in the process to pulling the lever every 2-4 years. In the US a small majority of those eligible to vote usually don’t even do that much.

But anyway, that’s a topic for another post…