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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

Occupy Wall Street

They re-occupied Wall Street, yesterday. The mainstream media seems to be largely blacking it out, and it's hard to tell exactly what is happening. The crowd in photos looks smaller than some Occupy internet sites have claimed. I suspect the forces of the City of New York, and possibly the Federal Government, will come down on them like a ton of bricks - certainly if they pitch tents, or seem to be assembling in too much strength. I suspect the near-certainty of this will keep a lot of prudent potential protesters away. Still, the mere fact that this is happening causes profound emotion to well up from my heart to my tearing eyes.

I love the Occupy movement with a surprising, deep intensity. It is the source of much frustration, true. But the sins of the Occupiers are those of naivete, mostly. Their strengths are hope, inclusion, solidarity, love, and pure heart. Compare this to a mainstream culture based on self-interest, greed, hypocrisy, and the exercise of naked power. Not much choice, is there?

I do not know how to go about building a better world. As U.S. and global political and economic centers grow stronger, more concentrated, and more adamantly resistant to change, I grow less and less certain that it is even possible. But I do know that whatever limited powers of intellect, knowledge, ability I may possess, I'd rather throw them on the side of love and hope than greed, aggression, and repression. I know which side I'm on.

My favorite Occupy chant expresses, I think, both the sometimes childlike innocence of the movement, and its enthusiasm and unlimited, but unselfish, ambition:

"Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Main Street.
Occupy EVERYWHERE and NEVER GIVE IT BACK."

 

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 Common Good

Robert Dahl, in Democracy and its Critics, has a section late in the book where he considers at length the concept of the common good.  I had always suspected that the idea of the common good could be little more than  a reification – an concept that, given the huge diversity of human interests, could have no real content behind it.  While reading the Dahl chapter, I found myself musing on whether a conception of the common good, consistent with pluralist values, could be found.  My resulting thought experiment follows.

Take any particular polity or demos as a given.  This is not a restrictive criterion, because the process can be repeated for any given (other) demos.  Do a Senian partial ordering of people’s conceptions of the good.  (Realize that the process – discussion, dialogue – will change the constellation of preferences with which people start the process.)  By a “Senian” partial ordering, I mean a ranking of preferences such as Amartya Sen often mentions in The Idea of Justice, which he conceives essentially as in Social Choice Theory, but he frequently observes that even if we can’t get a complete ordering, so that we have a complete social ranking of all possible alternatives, sometimes we may have a clear definition (e.g., consensus) with respect to a partial ordering, and in many cases that may be, if not “good enough” at least good enough to be of some practical use.

A Senian partial ranking would mean that consensus, or near consensus on some items had become apparent.  (For instance, all may value that the community is prosperous, that child mortality rates be low, that the drinking water be clean…)  Is it enough?  Can consensus be improved?  Consider the other (non-consensual) issues.  Can some of them be packaged or bundled in such a way that the bundle will be at least acquiesced to by consensus (ranked as preferred or indifferent by all; opposed by none).  Is this, now, enough?  “Enough” means can the rest of the items be left to individuals or subgroups to pursue or decide autonomously for themselves.

If not, then no definition of “common good” applies to the group, and the only option is power politics in which different subgroups (whether minority or majority) try to dominate others.   Of course, another option available to each group is to try to sway public opinion.  The situation is dynamic.  Over time a sense of the common good may become meaningful where none was before.  Or a prior conception of the good could become no longer consensual.

Note that for this not to be arbitrary, the demos must be inclusive of all who will be bound by its decisions, and consensus must be real, e.g., not based hidden dominations like of husband over wife or boss over employee.  If there are such de facto dominations, the question of hegemonic ideas or false consciousness arises, whereby domination is so habitual that it is internalized and appears as free will on behalf of the dominated.  Obviously, situations like this are always disputable and hard to prove.

My use of the term “near consensus” also raises issues.  If people are to be excluded from consideration in a consensus process for determining the common good, there must be a “good reason” other than simple minority status, e.g., mental illness, (literal) immaturity, intentional perversity (“anything everybody else wants, I will reject”).  People with a manifest desire to dominate others, who will not accept any conception of “the good” that does not include their domination, would be another example.  Obviously such exclusions are also disputable, and the “good reason” hard to prove.

The problem of people affected by decisions of the demos, but not included in the demos, cannot always be solved (even in a thought experiment) by extending the demos.  One example is the “good” of future generations.  I don’t see any way around this other than to say that justice demands that members of the demos consider, to the best of their ability, what the wishes of those others would be, were they to be somehow included.

Remember, this is a thought experiment, and not something that could necessarily be implemented to actually define “the common good”.  But it might be argued that a legislative procedure modeled on these ideas would tend to produce legislation consistent with the underlying concept of “the good” that would have been so discovered.  Particularly if debate around proposed legislation was allowed to be open, broad and free-ranging.

Trusting each other

There is no “magic bullet” for democracy.  That is, democracy cannot reside in the institutions, alone.  The people, or a large majority of them, must take their role as responsible decision makers seriously, and they must do their job well.  This idea used to be common to the democratic movements, as in the English lyrics of “The Internationale”:  “We must, ourselves decide our duty.  We must decide, and do it well.”  Democracy requires us to have mutual respect and a sense of justice.  We must make a good-faith effort to exercise good judgment.  We must exercise self-restraint.  We must honestly weigh the good of others against our own interests.  Otherwise, democracy devolves into a struggle between different groups of “the strong” for their own immediate good, and the political quagmire the ancient Greeks called “stasis” prevails.

The people’s faith in each other cannot be naïve.  The problem of the “free rider” serves as an example.  If almost all the people in a society are good, do their jobs, and share the resulting wealth, then it will, at least superficially,  be beneficial for some people to try to take a share without working for it.   Concern about  free riders is certainly a slippery slope.  People of relative privilege may label the less privileged “free riders” (as they are inclined to do in our own, plutocratic society), so as to argue against sharing their wealth.  But despite the potential for abuse, the potential for free riders is real, so this is a slippery slope that must be navigated.  Judgment is required (see above).  But denial is not a solution.

False dichotomies and either-or decision making must be avoided.  The problem of correctly identifying free riders (for example) cannot be turned into a battle between a “right” which identifies all poor people as presumptive free riders, and a “left” which argues that abusers of social privileges do not exist.

Democracy is prey to the problem of generalizing from particulars.  One person or ten betrays our trust, so we conclude that people, in general, cannot be trusted, and design laws to limit people’s freedom of action to narrow, “safe” paths.  This leads to Byzantine, alienating laws, and ironically worsens the problem of people breaking trust, because a person who feels alienated from “the system” sees little reason, other than the fear of punishment, to commit the effort required to make it work.  Transferring the exercise of judgment from the people to the laws, limiting the degree to which people have to think and take conscious responsibility for their participation, is tempting, but is another slippery slope.  There is no magic bullet.  Taken too far, this process weakens democracy, rather than strengthening it.

Trusting people doesn’t mean believing that the people are always right.  It means recognizing, first, that laws, too, can fail.  The laws, after all, are written by some of the same people you’re deciding you can’t trust!  But more importantly, laws cannot be made sufficiently detailed to anticipate every possible situation.  The basis of law is a process of abstraction.  Prioritizing law over judgment means ignoring many of the particulars that arise in any possible situation.  This tends to separate law from justice.  Separating law from justice is alienating, and alienation (as we saw) undermines democracy.

Secondly, trusting the people means recognizing that even if the people err, it is their mistake to make.

The first of these recognitions is that no alternative to trusting the people is functional; the second is that no alternative to trusting the people is just.

This does not mean that a democracy should not establish institutions or pass laws.  (This is where I break, perhaps, with the anarchists.)  But a law should not be viewed as a once-for-all solution to a problem.  The laws should be seen as documentation of a part of the collective experience and wisdom of the past, preserved to inform the judgments of the present.  Such laws exist to prevent the necessity of reinventing the wheel – of forming all judgments fully de novo at all times.  The law should support, and not preclude , the exercise of judgment, and especially it should not preclude the recognition of cases in which the requirements of justice differ from the letter of the law.

Allowing judgment to take priority over the law may require different institutions of justice.  In our legal system, we have a (rather small) jury which is charged with considering only matters of fact, and a judge who is charged with deciding on matters of law.  Nobody is specifically charged with considering matters of justice –  if justice is thought about at all, it is assumed to be fully embedded within the law.  The ancient Athenians heard cases with much larger juries, and no judge.  The advocates for both sides were assumed to bring up relevant points of law, of which jurors were also expected to be reasonably well-informed, and the jury judged (by majority vote) with few restrictions on their scope of responsibility. 

Some kind of hybrid system may be best.  A democratic justice system may require larger juries, randomly selected, with full scope to consider matters of justice as well as matters of fact.  A panel of judges or other learned persons could serve to bring the jury’s attention to matters of law (considered, as above, as a repository of wisdom, to be used as a resource, to guide, but not to bind).  Options other than punishment or acquittal could be considered – mediation, negotiation, restitution for example.  Decisions could be made preferably by consensus, with a fall back of a majority, or super-majority vote if consensus is judged to have failed despite all good-faith efforts.

It’s something to wonder about, at any rate…

 

Note:  The musings in this post arose as reflections on a book I am reading, The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The invention of politics in classical Athens, by Cynthia Farrar.

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. 

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.

The house I live in

A few weeks ago, some section I was reading in Richard Rorty’s “Philosophy and the Mirror of the Mind” impelled me to attempt a moment of pure introspection, turning off any conscious thought in so far as possible, and just trying to be aware of my immediate impressions – sense impressions, and random passing thoughts viewed as an observer rather than as agent. This is not the first time I have tried such a thing. For some reason, on this occasion, the thought occurred to me that I do not directly perceive my “self”. This led me to the conclusion that I infer myself. On further reflection, I speculated that humans, as infants, learn to infer the existence of themselves by comparison with the role others play as agents of actions (causes of effects) in the infant’s environment. They see other effects, with a “hole” in the middle (no agent evident), and infer that they exist, as people like others, in order to fill the hole. The effects inferred to be caused by this “self” are associated with feelings, desires, motivations, so they infer similar feeling, motivated “selves” associated with the other agents, as well.

I offer this as of interest mainly because of the immediacy and specificity of the intuition. I make no claim to originality – if nothing else, I am reminded of the motivating insight in the c. 1972 American Zen book “On Having No Head”, as well as a few barely remembered passages on the construction of the ego in Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents”. I have long accepted the idea that our understanding of ourselves, in the sense of who we are, is constructed and reconstructed over the course of our lifetimes through social interaction and other life experience. And I certainly don’t offer the above speculations as a developed theory. They were the result of a few moments of introspection and reflection – what they mainly suggested to me was the need to do more research into other people’s views on the development of the self.

But I haven’t been able to avoid (or postpone) thinking more about this, because the nature of the self has been an important issue in several books I’ve been reading. It came up in Jean Grimshaw’s book, in her critique of some of Sartre’s ideas, it was important (from very different viewpoints) in MacIntyre’s book, and in Rorty’s, and it is important in Chapter 3 of the book I am reading now: “The Future of Democratic Equality”, by my friend Joe Schwartz, in which he critiques the ability of post-structuralist ideas, including the “fictive” nature of the self, to serve as a basis for building the concepts and institutions necessary to sustain democracy.

I guess I’ll have to read some existentialists and post-structuralists to get a first-hand understanding of their ideas. In the meantime, if I may be indulged in an argument from second-hand sources, it SEEMS to me that a false dichotomy is being drawn; i.e., if a “self” is not some natural, monist, indivisible, unchanging core of our being, then it must instead be “fictive” and “unstable”. Why? An automobile is a constructed artifact, but this doesn’t make it a phantasm, nor does the fact that it would fall apart if all the bolts were removed make it unstable.

I may not know much about the “self”, but I know a lot about houses. I built houses during my teens as a “carpenter’s helper”, working both with framing crews and finish crews; I’ve designed the structure (and restructuring) of many houses in my professional career as an engineer; and I’ve overseen at least four major remodeling projects in my role as a homeowner. To most of us who haven’t had these experiences, houses often seem the epitome of the solid, concrete, and stable. The British even have an expression, “Safe as houses”, which sums this up perfectly. But I, and others in the trade (or other “post-remodelist” homeowners) know differently.

Houses are “fuzzy” things, with uncertain boundaries, and they are in a constant state of flux. Our definition of “house” can change contextually: does it include the furniture? the outbuildings? the stove, sink, refrigerator? The house itself continually changes: we move furniture in or out, put up new curtains, paint the walls new colors. Left to itself, a house will sag, settle, decay. Termites eat the sills and other supports. A house not built properly is especially vulnerable: absent a few nails or ceiling ties, the walls can spread under the base of the rafters, causing the ceiling to crack and the ridge to sag. I’ve been involved in a few projects where houses in which this had happened needed to be pulled back together and resecured.

Houses are of course, initially constructed, and this construction is the result of a social “conversation”. The owner may have his ideas, more or less well articulated; the architect has hers; as does the contractor, and for that matter each of the many individual construction workers (carpenters, plumbers, electricians, painters...) There is no unity in these differing conceptions (despite the ambition of the architect), and each makes its own contribution to the outcome. The “final” product is massively unpredictable in its details as they will stand at the moment of “completion” (an arbitrary moment in time perhaps defined by the Building Inspector making a final sign-off on the permit form). And the house immediately begins to change, under the actions of the kinds of forces described above, as well as from the grander plans of the occupants, who may decide they need a new baby’s bedroom, home office, or kitchen.

Despite all of this, none of us, even we who are well acquainted with these processes, would refer to a built house as “fictive”. Nor, except in extreme (dare I say “psychotic”?) cases would we refer to it as “unstable”. “House” remains a concept, and houses things, that we would rather not do without.

So my “self” may be something that is formed and reformed continually throughout my life, by my social interactions (including those with powerful and/or repressive institutions), and by other things. It may be difficult for me to specify with precision, at any given time, just exactly what my “self” is, or what it contains. It may even be that my sense of agency is in some way illusory, because I can’t help doing what I do because of who I am, and who I am has been (and is being) constructed by forces that are beyond my control. Still, it’s a useful thing, this “self”, and it seems to have at least a certain pragmatic, dynamic stability (even if I can’t precisely define the state to which it “returns” after a “disturbance” – which is an engineer’s definition of “stability”).

So, for the moment, at least, I find I have no more desire to give up my "self" (either as a concept or an artifact) than I have to make my home permanently under the stars.

References: In the course of the above, I referred (yet again) to Jean Grimshaw’s “Philosophy and Feminist Thinking”, as well as Alasdair MacIntyre’s “After Virtue”, and to: Richard Rorty’s “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”, Sigmund Freud “Civilization and Its Discontents”, D. E. Harding “On Having No Head”, and last but not least Joseph M. Schwartz “The Future of Democratic Equality”. It’s also clear, if I am to get a better understanding of various ideas of the self, that I am going to have to read some Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida, as well as some more up-to-date books on the psychology of ego formulation. (I’m open to suggestions...)

Rights and the Common Good

I was recently interviewed, in my capacity as a member of the National Political Committee of Democratic Socialists of America, for a monthly radio program called “The Socrates Exchange”, which airs on New Hampshire Public Radio (www.nhpr.org for schedule). The question I was asked to discuss was “Are individual rights more important than the common good?” The show’s producers told me they intended to interview a socialist and a libertarian on this, then edit the interviews into a kind of radio dialogue or debate. Since I had to order my thoughts for this interview, anyway, I thought the topic would make a good blog post for this week.

My first thought was that I was being asked, in a sense, to argue in the “language” of my libertarian opponent. Not that socialists aren’t profoundly interested in human rights. Over the past 200 years, socialists have probably fought more to expand human rights than any other single group of people –struggling to expand the franchise in the 19th Century, fighting for Civil Rights in the U.S. in the mid 20th Century, fighting for labor rights such as fair pay for a day’s work, and decent working conditions, in both Centuries, and more. But the concept of rights is not really central to a socialist analysis, in the way it is to libertarians. A socialist analysis is a dynamic analysis – we are interested in processes and forces. We are, thus, concerned with the political and economic forces which might prevent people from enjoying their rights; we are concerned with the way people organize themselves to win their rights; and we are concerned with the social and democratic process by which those rights are defined or constructed in the first place.

This matter of social construction particularly distinguishes a socialist from a libertarian view on “rights”, I think. A libertarian takes rights as prior to social construction – if not to society itself (cf. Robert Nozick “Anarchy, State and Utopia”). In fact, they take one particular right – the presumptive right of property – as prior to everything else, deriving all the rest of their political and social philosophy, and their ideal conception of the state, from this.

This priority of rights makes no historical or ethnographical sense. Our ancestors were social animals before they were humans; the idea that such a complicated conception as a right to property could arise, in a form any human society would recognize as such, in an animal perhaps less mentally developed than a macaque, strains the credulity. And the complex and varied systems of individual and collective property and use that anthropologists have found in different human groups, and even the sharing behavior ethologists have found in other primates, are simply incompatible with the kind of theoretical primacy libertarians like Nozick place on a simple “mine” and “yours” concept of property.

To a socialist, at least to this socialist, all imaginable rights, even the very concept of “property”, itself, are socially constructed. One thing that this suggests is a special importance for those rights which enable people to participate fully in the political processes by which all rights (including these) will be constituted, in other words, for democratic rights: the right of free association, right of free speech, right to vote, etc. Another thing that is suggested is that, unlike some imagined a priori right, socially constituted rights will be inherently contextual, and limited in scope – I may have the right to bear arms, but if I bear them so carelessly as to cause another’s death, I am guilty of manslaughter. I may have the right to free speech, but I may not maliciously cry “fire” in a crowded theater.

In fact, if rights are socially constructed, and in a democratic society, the very idea that individual rights could be set up against the common good appears as a false dichotomy. When people define a right socially, democratically, acting in solidarity, they are defining it precisely with a view to furthering “the common good”, according to their best lights. There may be a debate about how far to extend the right so as to best effect the common good, but the idea that the right should be extended beyond that point, to imperil the common good, is nonsense.

Of course, in a non-democratic, unsolidaristic society, an elite group may try to define “rights” for itself over against the rights of some other group – i.e., they are defining some special privilege which they should have, and the others not (hence the “divine rights” of the nobility, and kings.) But from a socialist point of view, when the attempt is made to define some elite privilege as a right, to the detriment of “the common good”, then it is incumbent on the non-elites to challenge legitimacy of that right.

In other words, from a socialist point of view, “individual rights” which are contrary to the “common good” are not “rights” but “wrongs”.

With regard to property, in particular, socialists not only disagree with libertarians on how the concepts of “property” and “property rights” are constituted, we disagree on how wealth is produced. Libertarians tend to focus on an individual’s role in production as legitimizing their subsequent monopolization of part of the product. Socialists understand that all property is socially produced. The idea that is possible to uniquely and precisely determine the contribution of one person to the total output is ludicrous. None of us makes it “on our own” in this life. If nothing else, we are raised, nurtured, educated by others. Our role in the production of goods and services is deeply embedded in a social matrix: we work on committees and task groups, process materials produced by somebody else, etc. (Perhaps we should exclude the fanatical few who go out of their way to live as “survivalists”. But even the most committed, hardy mountain man probably uses steel traps made by workers in a factory somewhere.)

Since wealth is socially produced, socialists believe that society should make collective decisions about how to use and distribute it. This doesn't mean society "owns" the shirt on your back. Socialists make a distinction between personal property and productive property, or capital. The ability to live a decent life requires a certain amount of non-interference by others in the basic day-to-day decisions affecting your life, and this implies a de facto “right” to “enjoy your personal property”. But accumulations of property – capital – are a productive resource that affects the lives of tens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of people. Decisions as to the use of that kind of property should be made collectively, with the fullest democratic participation possible of all people who will be affected.

In a sense, socialism, the kind of socialism that Democratic Socialists of America espouses, is simply deep democracy. We believe that all important decisions affecting our lives should be made with the full participation of all who are affected by them. The selfish will of the few should never be allowed to trump the human need of the many.

References: Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” is a worthy polemic on libertarian theory by a serious (even if, in this case, completely wrong) philosopher. Frans De Waal “Good Natured”, which I’ve also referenced in a couple of other posts, has a good discussion on primate sharing behavior. “Understanding Capitalism” by Samuel Bowles, Richard Edwards and Frank Roosevelt has (mostly in side bars) some interesting ethnographical information of differing property relations. It also discusses some of the other themes above, and is an excellent basic text book on classical economics written from a democratic socialist point of view.

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…