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.]

Property

Until maybe the middle of the 19th Century, most of the world thought that it was sometimes just for one person to own another.  In any given instance, whether one person owned another was a matter for legislatures to legislate, and courts to decide (and, of course, for the individual conscience of the property owner).  Now, we no longer feel that way.  Slavery is considered to violate a fundamental human right, and therefore to be beyond the limits of what a legislature may impose, or a court enforce.  On the other hand, we (most of us) hold that that it is sometimes (often!) just and meet for one person to own the means another person requires to live, and to hold that property, and profit by it, even if that means the other person goes homeless, or starves, or sickens and dies.  How much of the means of life one person owns, and another does not, is a matter for legislatures to legislate, and courts to decide (and, of course for the individual conscience of the property holder).  And for determination by the sacred market.

But there is no inherent reason why one property “right” is more obvious, just and eternal than the other.  The right to own slaves was completely obvious to an ancient Roman, or a medieval Turk, or an antebellum Southerner, and to almost everybody else in their eras, and in between.  The right of private individuals to own capital seems obvious to most of us.  Maybe someday that will change.

Isocrates and us or “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”

 “When I was a boy, being rich was considered so secure and honorable that almost everyone pretended he owned more property than he actually did possess, because he wanted to enjoy the prestige it gave.  Now, on the other hand, one has to defend oneself against being rich as if it were the worst of crimes… for it has become far more dangerous to give the impression of being well-to-do than to commit open crime; criminals are let off altogether or given trivial punishments, but the rich are ruined utterly.  More men have been deprived of their property than have paid the penalty of their misdeeds.”

This was the Greek, Isocrates, writing I guess in the early 4^th Century BC.  The thing is, if de Ste. Croix is correct in his analysis in The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World,  Isocrates wrote these words during a time when, in fact, economic inequality was growing in much of the Greek world.  The demos was on the defensive; the oligarchic sector was (correctly) realizing that their interests were better served by supporting outside imperialists like Phillip II of Macedon (and his successors), who would permit them free reign to squeeze the local peasantry, as long as they eschewed outright political ambition beyond the local level, but would be very suspicious of the potential for a popular uprising by hoi polloi.  And, in fact, under, first, the Macedonian kings, and later the Romans, the last vestiges of democracy were stamped out, opening the world to more and more vicious exploitation of the poor and middling by the uber-rich, until finally the Emperors Diocletian and others basically enserfed the entire population below the economic and political elite.  Economic, and political, inequality in the late Roman Empire reached a level that we, in our still relatively open societies, can barely conceive.

The thing that bothers me about the Isocrates quote I opened with is that it seems so modern.  We again find ourselves subject to “poor me” complaints from the rich, fuming, for example, that they pay the lion’s share of income taxes (but taking as a natural right their claim to an even more disproportionate share of the fruits of economic production), and decrying the slender benefits allotted to the “undeserving” poor; calling for us to be tough on crime (while we imprison, in the U.S. more of our population than any other country in the world, and more black men than were slaves  before the Civil War), and for tax cuts for the “creators” of (mostly non-existent) Mac-jobs.  So, while financial markets soar post-depression, we cut unemployment benefits and food stamps in time for Christmas, and produce movies in which criticism of the excesses of the corrupt ruling class is so muted that members of that class can cheer at screenings, while critics on the left complain, in effect, that the director is praising with faint “damns”.

And I think:  It’s been 2400 years.  Why are we still fighting the same fight?

Elections and myth

I write on the eve of a Massachusetts election which may, unfortunately, be an historic one. After winning the primary, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Martha Coakley, seems to have taken the general election for granted; now, surprisingly, she finds herself in a neck-and-neck horserace with Republican Scott Brown. If Brown wins, the Senate Democrats will immediately lose any hope of breaking a filibuster; health care reform (even in its current, deformed state) will be finished, and so will any future initiative that President Obama is likely to make. It will also probably foreshadow further Democratic losses in the midterms, and likely a one-term presidency for Barack Obama. (Brown will be a one-termer, too. The progressive machine in Massachusetts will gear up belatedly, and almost certainly oust him in the next election; but a lot of damage will be done, by then.)

If Brown wins this election, it will be a wake-up call to the Democrats, but one which, like a den of opium addicts trapped in a fevered, collective dream, they probably won’t hear. The message they will hear, the message they always hear in their deluded dream state, is that when the other side wins, the Democrats need to become more like them. What the people will really be saying is: they need to be different.

Obama rode in like a hero, in the election of 2008, like a knight in shining armor for many Americans. We have two kinds of folk-tales about heroes. A hero can storm the palace gates, free the imprisoned damsel, and all will live happily ever after. Or a hero can make a vain last stand, selflessly sacrificing everything in the struggle for righteousness, fighting to the bitter end for the people, never giving up while life remains. Either type of hero wins our loyalty, our admiration, and our love. What a hero cannot do is make nice with the forces of evil. A hero cannot give in, give away everything, even in a spirit of compromise, while winning only crumbs, or nothing, for the people in return. We have a word for that kind of behavior, and it is not “heroism”. It is “betrayal”.

Unfortunately, when we feel betrayed, we don’t always act in the most rational manner. When we are jilted by our lover (to switch my metaphor), we may not choose to be cautiously celibate until a more trustworthy candidate comes along. We may, instead, troll the bars to find some even less reliable lover “on the rebound”. This is especially true if our last lover acted in a way which has made us feel of potential partners that in some sad sense “they are all the same”. Thus, the American voter. If Brown wins, it will not be because the majority of voters who jump ship to vote for him have really understood and agree with his positions; most people in Massachusetts do not. It will be because they are feeling hurt, betrayed and jilted by the Democrats, and they want to show them a thing or two.

I may be accused of elitism for analyzing the electorate on the level of fairy tale and romance novel, instead of a hard calculus of interest and agency. Perhaps the charge is just; it is true that I think most people think politically on a level of myth and passion, and not by a rational consideration of costs and benefits. Of course the forces of interest and agency are always there; but between them is interposed an analysis, and the analysis is not always sound.

This is often as true of self-conscious, politically active, over-intellectualizing “lefties” as it is of the man or woman in the street. We are as likely as anyone else to want politicians to act, out of principle, as if they were our knights in silvered armor. We want politicians who refuse ever to compromise; but of course, we also want these finely principled men and women to prevail.

The trouble is, this assumes that there IS a principled choice – that absolute victory is possible. In politics, absolute victories are likely to be the victories of a Stalin, or a Pol Pot, and even then, they don’t last forever. (I rather suspect that if any politician managed to kill off all the people who disagreed with him, he would find himself all alone – and then start arguing with himself.) People are, and always will be, contrary and cooperative, greedy and selfless, stupid and smart. Differences of opinion, conflict, error are eternally and necessarily the stuff of politics, and compromise and back room deals are part of any political solution.

So should we just wash our hands of it? Refuse to have anything to do with such a dirty business? As Howard Zinn said, in the line that went into the title of his memoirs, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” a deliciously mixed metaphor by which he meant that you cannot NOT make a moral choice in politics; abstention has consequences as surely as a vote, a failure to act, when action is called for, leaves us as guilty as those who acted, yet made the wrong choice. There is no redemption in taking the moral high ground, if ceding the ACTUAL ground leaves people really worse off than if you had compromised. The great irony of politics is that unshakably holding the principled position is NOT the principled position.

The problem is one of strategy, and strategy is a problem of analysis of probable outcomes. Did you compromise too soon, and therefore give away too much? Did you compromise with the wrong people, when some other compromise might have won you a better ally, and a coalition strong enough to force a breakthrough? If you had refused to engage, and spent more time building your power, would you have eventually have been able to win a better resolution? Or would you only have given your enemy, also, more time to regroup? How many people would have been hurt while you waited, and would it have been worth the cost?

History can look at the outcomes, and decide if they were good or bad. It is much harder to decide if they were good or bad relative to the actual possibilities of the moment.

Nevertheless, I fear that President Obama did the wrong thing by starting his backpedalling, his compromising, his search for bipartisan solutions, so early in his term of office. He would have been better off (I think) to draw a line in the sand, and fight, vocally and aggressively, for whatever was best for the people. If he made compromises, he should have done so from a position of strength, and made certain that he really got some quid pro quo.

Obama should have done that not because compromise is an evil to be rejected on principle, but because, in this case, compromise was bad strategy. He might have lost these battles, but if he had played a bold role, struggling against the unrelenting Republicans, he might have stayed a hero. He might have convinced people that what was needed in Washington was MORE progressive Democrats, to break the gridlock, and not that it made no difference either way, because all politicians in both parties were after all the same. He might have been our Zapata, our Leonidas at Thermopylae, our Roland at Roncesvalles sounding his horn; instead, I fear he has come to be seen as our Benedict Arnold.

The political pundits do not agree with me. To them, losing is always bad, and anything you can call a victory, no matter how Pyrrhic, is always good. Perhaps they are right. In particular, they might be right as regards the career of the particular politician seen to be losing. But then, self-sacrifice is part of the nature of being a Roland – of being a hero. I’m pretty sure we won’t make a meaningful change for the better in this country, until we manage to elect some politicians who have more faith in the power of myth than does the typical Washington insider. And who knows? If they hold out courageously in the pass, they might be pleasantly surprised and find out that the grateful people call up the cavalry just in time.

Postscript, footnote, or what-have-you. I write the above, of course, as if Obama really wants to be a progressive President, but is constrained by circumstances, which (also) he may or may not have misjudged. This is one of the accounts currently being told to explain Obama’s behavior in office. Another is that he is in fact merely another pro-business neoliberal, who pretended to believe in community empowerment (which perhaps he really believed in, in his younger days), in order to win his own place in history. I make no pretense to knowing enough about the man, Obama, to know which of these accounts is true – possibly some mixture of the two.