Thoughts on Democratic Socialism and intersectionality

These are some thoughts on how I might word the part on the interplay of class and other forms of oppression in an “Introduction to Democratic Socialism” talk – as an alternative to the usual, “We know that race and gender oppression are not subsumed under class, but…”

Early in the socialist movement, socialist analysis tended toward economic reductionism: all historic forces, all forms of oppression, were subsumed in the concept of “class”.  Modern Democratic Socialists realize that this analysis is not correct.  The oppressions that people suffer because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or other characteristics of their identity, each has its own history, its own dynamic, which is intricately wrapped up with their class position (as each also is with the others), but not dependent on or uniquely determined by class.  This kind of analysis is called an “intersectional” one, and modern Democratic Socialists understand that an intersectional analysis of oppression is required.  Democratic Socialists oppose all forms of oppression and exploitation, whatever their source, and our vision is of a world in which all people are equally valued, and equally free.

If Democratic Socialists still focus largely on class, it is because – who but us?  The history and experience of our movement uniquely position us to understand and appreciate the roles of class and class exploitation in producing injustice in the world.  In many ways, this focus and these analyses are the particular contribution that we can make, as socialists, to modern liberatory movements.  It is important that class as a source of oppression be understood, and fought.  There is no implication that class is the only source of oppression, or even, in many cases, the most important.

There is one unique feature of class oppression that is worth pointing out.  Human differences based on race, gender, sexual orientation, culture, are to be embraced and celebrated; only the oppression is to be opposed.  But ending class oppression pretty much depends on ending a system of production based on economic class.  In struggling for gender justice, we seek a world in which social forces targeting  people’s gender do not negatively impact their well-being; we do not necessarily seek a world in which nobody has gender*.  But it is perfectly reasonable that the struggle for economic justice should end in a classless society, and this has historically always been a goal of socialism.

*This is not to say that “gender”, in a future, non-oppressive society, will be understood the same way as it is now.  There are many ways in which our culturally determined concepts of “gender”, “race”, etc. are determined by, and serve, the oppressive situations in which we currently live.  Part of struggling for liberation is a struggle to redefine these things appropriately; but not, necessarily, to obliterate the underlying reality.  Understanding that “race” is an artificial, unscientific concept, originally constructed to falsify moral legitimacy for oppressive systems of colonization and slavery, does not mean we seek a so-called “melting pot”, from which all of our descendants ultimately come out the same hue.  But a socialist economy, with all the productive forces of society collectively owned and controlled, with no division into “owners” and “workers”, i.e., a classless society, is a perfectly reasonable thing to seek.

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.

Presidency, democracy and stuff

I have just finished reading three big books on the U.S. System of government:  Michael Glennon's "National Security and Double Government", Arthur Schlesinger's "The Imperial Presidency", and Andrew Rudalevige's "The New Imperial Presidency".  It struck me that not one of the three authors EVER mentioned anything that could be construed as class politics.  Class issues did not cross one of their minds, apparently, even once, in the writing of these three works.

Nor did any of them seriously question whether there were any alternatives for democratic governance to the model the modern world mostly uses, involving relatively small deliberative/legislative assemblies, elected periodically by an otherwise largely passive electorate.  All three did devote some discussion of the question of whether a democratic government needs a strong executive, with all three ultimately concluding that it does.  Only Schlessinger devoted any pages to the question of whether the executive should be fully independent of the legislative branch, as in the U.S. system, or nominally answerable to it, as in the British system.  He ended up concluding that the U.S. system is better, because the British system ends up placing more  de facto power in the hands of the executive, not less.

The only writer on politics that I can recall discussing the larger structural question, besides anarchists and radicals rooted in the New Left, is Robert Dahl, in "Democracy and Its Critics", who terms the system we use "polyarchy" ("rule by many"), and, after discussion of its limitations from the standpoint of democratic ideals, decides that while not a perfect democracy, it is the best democracy we can get.

One important distinction between the three books I just read was that both Schlesinger and Rudalevige focus is on what might be called the constitutional structure of government; they assume the powers of the branches, as defined in the Constitution are the things that matter, for instance, that the President really is in charge of the powers of the executive branch.  Only Glennon's book addressed what might be called the shadow government, the fact that institutions take on a life of their own and may possess a power structure functionally much independent of the nominal hierarchy, especially when those institutions are under a secrecy regime such as pertains to our national "security" infrastructure.  The only other reference I can recall reading to this sort of effect is in Richard Parker's biography of John Kenneth Galbraith.  Parker reported Galbraith's impression that, during the Kennedy administration, the military establishment, if they didn't like a Kennedy directive regarding Vietnam, would simply ignore it.  According to Galbraith, Kennedy frequently complained of his inability to get things done.

The whole premise of a democracy is that the people, in some way, shape and fashion, somehow govern themselves.  All of these books I mention show aspects of the complicated problem of government that, in our current, alienating systems, most such nominally self-governing people, never, ever think about.

Government control

One “common sense” argument put forth against socialism, in the (limited) sense of direct government control over the economy, is that the government cannot be trusted to invest wisely.  They may keep non-viable enterprises going, for example, pouring in money drawn from better-performing portions of the economy, in order to win votes.

As a prima facie argument, this strikes me as silly.  After all, private capitalists cannot be trusted to invest wisely, either, and to the extent that they do, they invest for their own benefit, not ours, and the public weal follows as a side effect, if at all.  It’s not that I don’t believe in the existence of the “invisible hand”.  I just think its reach only extends so far.  Maintaining jobs in a money-losing business that produces a useful commodity may actually be a perfectly reasonable public investment in some circumstances, but not one that would ever appeal to the private capitalist.

On a more detailed, implementation-focused level, of course the anti-socialist objection is not entirely ridiculous.  If we have publicly managed investments, we do want them to be managed well, and managing investments well is not a trivially easy job.  We also need to protect ourselves from outright corruption.  Addressing these issues is partly a matter of management, of checks and balances, of trying to design a system as free as possible from irrelevant, systematic distortions.  But to get a well-balanced, robust plan of public investment that takes all direct and indirect costs and benefits into account, I think we would need a much more participatory planning process.   (Note that taking ALL direct and indirect costs and benefits into account is something that capitalist enterprise management NEVER does.)

Can we get a suitable democratic planning process within our current models of government?  I do not believe in the blanket statement, asserted by some on the left, that “you cannot tear down the master’s house using the master’s tools.”  But some of the master’s tools are in fact rather specifically engineered to serve the master’s purposes, and are not so readily adapted to the needs and purposes of the folk.  In my mind, our really-existing systems of representative government are examples of such tools.

Representative governments originated, in Europe, as a way for kings to appease the aristocracy, and eventually the richer bourgeoisie, without ceding too much central control.  Some constitutions, of course, were constructed as a conscious break with the rule of kings; however, the one such “revolutionary” constitution I know something about – our own in the U.S. – was consciously created to keep hoi polloi at arm’s length, and guarantee effective control by the richer classes.  Obviously, there have been modifications in these constitutions over the centuries, most of which (I think)  have been in the direction of greater democratization, but there still is a long way to go.  Most ordinary folks participate in democracy only by spending ten minutes every 2-4 years in voting  (if they even do that).  “Debate” takes place between politicians and pundits in the commercial news media (primarily), and is, to most people, at best a spectator sport.  People’s own discussions tend to take place amongst small groups of their own friends, and can influence the broader process of policy formulation only to the extent they happen to be queried through the passive (and eminently manipulable) process of polling. 

A truly democratic process would have people involved in interactive debate, with both themselves and opponents as participants; a debate taking place in a public forum that fed directly into the decision making process.  Listening to arguments pro and con, and being forced to make a meaningful decision afterwards, focuses the intelligence, I believe, like almost nothing else.

The punditry would assure us that people just don’t want to be that involved in their own government.  Maybe that’s only because they’ve never had the chance.

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.