Category: Charles Matthew Rupert

Oscar Wilde was a Better Marxist than the Bolsheviks, Part 1

by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Ethics, Philosophy, Political Economy, Politics

“The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody.”

Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”

Socialism is not the first thing I associate with Oscar Wilde. In fact, it’s not the fifth thing. The man in my mind is first a playwright, then a poet, novelist, artist, dandy, homosexual, Irishman, celebrity, and finally–with mild dubiousness–a social critic. Nevertheless, Oscar Wilde is exactly the socialist thinker we need today. His essay on socialism, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, offers a particular analysis of capitalism written with Wilde’s usual jaunty wit. While less theoretically precise than the work of, say, Peter Kropotkin, who presents anarcho-communism in a dense manner that was–consistently–a heavy influence on Wilde, the spirit of Man Under Socialism is more moving and more profound than the writer of The Conquest of Bread. Wilde’s picture of socialism is, perhaps, a trifle less anarchistic than Kropotkin, but still heavily emphasizes individual liberty and autonomy.

I think Oscar Wilde best fits the model of a libertarian socialist. The term may be apocryphally applied, but as is clear from his writings on socialism, individual freedom is an essential part of his socialist idyll. Wilde’s position, briefly summed, is that individuality is not to be taken as a given, as many right-wing libertarians would, but instead, individuality can only develop under a system that promotes general fairness and relative equality, viz. socialism. Wilde’s fascination with individual expression led him away from authoritarian socialists, like those that would only a few decades later come to power in Russia. It is dubious that Marxism leads only to the Bolshevik model of socialism, in fact, I would go farther and argue that Wilde’s brand of libertarian socialism is more consistent with Marx’s ideas than Bolshevik theory.

The Bolshevik’s denounced individuality because of its relationship to private property. They felt that it was an example of false consciousness, rather than a valid perspective. Wilde on the other said that socialism is valuable “simply because it will lead to individualism.” Like Marx, Wilde saw that individualism is the goal of socialism and that capitalism, for all its talk of individuality, really makes the vast majority of people live for the betterment of a few. For Wilde, the poor under capitalism are degraded by their relative poverty and so cannot be fully individuated, they must live for others (viz. the capitalists) or perish altogether.

Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and ensure the material well-being of each member of the community.

This is not unlike Karl Marx’s vision in the Communist Manifesto:

In place of the bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, shall we have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

But looking after the well-being of each member requires that each member be treated individually and not as a mere member of the community. Wilde writes,

What is needed is individualism. If socialism is authoritarian; if there are governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have industrial tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.

Wilde is taking aim here at what Dr. Richard Wolff will later call “state capitalism”. It is a form of capitalism that retains the aspect of private property ownership but resolves to make the state the sole owner of all property. In effect, this is “concentrated capitalism”, and it is far worse than private capitalism. This concentrated form of capitalism–monopoly capitalism–is no better off when the monopoly is the state. And its failures are replete in the twentieth century.

It is clear, then, that no authoritarian socialism will do. For while, under the present system a very large number of people can lead lives of a certain amount of freedom and expression and happiness, under an industrial-barrack system, or a system of economic tyranny, nobody would be able to have any such freedom at all.

Wilde introduces a need for freedom into the idea of socialism. Authoritarian socialism, while good for the defense of the socialist state from the teeth of capitalist rivals, is ultimately self-defeating. Despite this, the attempt to force socialism without liberty was as popular in Wilde’s time as it was in the twentieth century.

But I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question… It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.

But still, the abolition of private property remained central:

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world.  Most people exist, that is all.

Compare this to Marx, writing nearly half a century earlier:

A being does not regard himself as independent unless he is his own master, and he is only his own master when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the favor of another considers himself a dependent being. (138)

Marx, especially early on, was greatly concerned for the life of the individual. Socialism and communism were meant to liberate the individual, rather than dictate to individuals their duties and needs. Marx writes,

Alienation is apparent not only in the fact that my means of life belong to someone else, that my desires are the unattainable possession of someone else, but that everything is something different from itself, that my activity is something else, and finally (and this is also the case for the capitalist) that an inhuman power rules over everything. [Emphasis his] (151)

It does not matter to Marx if our life belongs to a private master or a public one, to live in the service of a lord, a landlord, or a capitalist is no worse than to live in the service of a state, a society, or a community. If it is wrong for one person to steal what is yours (your surplus value) it is just as wrong for ten-thousand people to steal it. And this is just as true when society is “free” as when it is controlled and directed by a governing body.

The “inhuman power” in Marx’s quote above is his name for the action of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. The action governs the behavior of both capitalist and laborer so that neither is truly free. Wilde, like Marx and Smith, emphasizes this freedom for individual expression as necessary for a good life. Marx is a staunch individualist and his socialism is designed to bring about more, not less, individual expression. It is the same for the wealthy capitalist as it is for the working poor according to both Marx and Wilde. Although Marx merely mentions this fact as an aside in the parenthetical (above), Wilde puts it much more cheekily,

If [private] property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich, we must get rid of it.

The real antagonist to individual expression is, according to Marx, the political economist, who reduces people to base functions in an economic system:

First, by reducing the needs of the worker to the miserable necessities required for the maintenance of his physical existence, and by reducing his activity to the most abstract mechanical movements, the economist asserts that man has no needs for activity or enjoyment…; and yet he declares that this kind of life is a human way of life. Secondly, by reckoning as the general standard of life… the most impoverished life conceivable, he turns the worker into a being who has neither senses nor needs, just as he turns his activity into a pure abstraction from all activity. Thus all working class luxury seems to him blameworthy, and everything which goes beyond the most abstract need (whether it be a passive enjoyment or a manifestation of personal activity) is regarded as a luxury.

Property creates roles, duties, and even the ideas of idleness and luxury. “What does a worker need ‘free time’ or ‘income beyond necessity’ for? Nothing as far as we can see?” But workers never feel the things they want are “luxuries”, they are simply the things necessary for a good life. Private property, for both men, was entangled with a notion of social rank from which it must be freed before it can be fair. Wilde writes,

In a community… where property confers immense distinction, social position, honour, respect, titles, and other pleasant things… man, being naturally ambitious, makes it his aim to accumulate this property, and goes on wearily and tediously accumulating it long after he has got far more than he wants, or can use, or enjoy, or perhaps even know of… considering the enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly surprised. One’s regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him—in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living.

Rich or poor, your life under capitalism is not free to develop its own character. You inevitably live for others. You are forced into a set of classes, which according to Marx, narrow to a set of two: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. While I doubt we will ever come to see ourselves merely as class interests, as Marx predicted, there is no doubt that we do come to live in the “groove in which [we] cannot freely develop”. Wilde defines “class” as a social script, the deviation from which is difficult at best and deadly at worst. Anyone in contemporary America who is not white, straight, healthy, wealthy, and male knows what I am speaking of all too well. The point here is that it is capitalism which establishes what “success” looks like, and to succeed without fitting the model becomes increasingly improbable as capitalism becomes the hegemonic economic system.

In the third part of this series, I will look into this idea further, examining what it means to be an individual and how capitalism interferes with that process according to Wilde and Marx. For now, suffice it to say that Wilde, unlike the Bolsheviks, shared Marx’s underscoring of individuality and his disdain for life under the authority of another, be it the bourgeoisie or the state. The need for individual freedom, for both men, sprouts under any political economy but it flowers only in the soil of equality. In the next part, I will examine the pragmatics of socialism as Wilde and Marx saw it.

 

 

The Abortion Line

by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics

As I write, access to abortion is facing its greatest threat in more than forty years. Attacks, some absurd and incoherent, have passed state legislatures in more than eight states and most have been signed into law. With legal challenges pending, the goal of these new bills is to attack the precedent established in Roe v. Wade. In this post, I want to take a long hard look at abortion rights, and the conversations surrounding this topic. Mostly, I want to resolve a media distortion that magnifies the divide and separates people on the issue when they are, in fact, not so far apart. The conclusion I will draw is that we are all pro-choice, only some of us want to choose for others, the rest want to choose for themselves.

From the point of view of someone entrenched in the media, abortion seems to be the most divisive issue facing America today. But the reality is very different. Consider the following timeline:

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On the left-most antipode is conception, the moment when a sperm fertilizes an egg and a single-celled life is formed. On the right is birth, when a human child would naturally evacuate its mother’s body. In between are a host of different “milestones” that have historically been associated with the abortion line. The abortion line is the point where a baby’s right to life supersedes a mother’s right to bodily autonomy. Make no mistake, every single one of us, no matter how “pro-life” or how “pro-choice”, believes in an abortion line. No “pro-choice” advocate believes in post-birth abortion (despite the current President’s hate-mongering rhetoric), just as no “pro-life” advocate believes in forced insemination in order not to waste potential babies by not creating them. These notions sound absurd to our ears precisely because we by and large agree about the abortion line, and even generally where it should fall: somewhere in the 37-week period between conception and birth.

This narrow band in the process of human beings coming into and out of existence is but a speck, and yet even the most extreme among us tend to agree that it is in this range that the abortion line must be drawn. It is our media coverage, with its over-developed sense of drama, that zooms-in, distorting the reality until these rather close theories appear extremely divided. This microscoping effect leads to hostility and even violence as near-agreement becomes vast disagreement. Its effect is so strong that as you are reading this today, you’ll probably feel the need to argue that there is no “near-agreement”.

So let me defend that position a bit. Assuming you accept the medical timeline above and my stipulative-definition of an abortion line, we might ask ourselves if it is ever acceptable to draw it before birth? I have never met a pro-life advocate who was so strongly pro-life that they believed in the forced conception of girls and women in order to prevent the loss of children who would have existed. Now, what is the reason for this? If you are “pro-life”, consistency would dictate that you must force pregnancy on “selfish” women who would allow an opportunity to reproduce simply go by through abstinence. But almost no “pro-life” people maintain this position. This is not because they are inconsistent with their beliefs or because they are really anti-sex or misogynists. It is because they draw the abortion line. Before conception, these “pro-life” advocates assume a women’s right to autonomy takes precedence over a potential life. So, for them, the conception–or slightly later–is the right place to draw the abortion line, switching the mother’s right to body autonomy under the single-celled organism’s chance to develop into a fully-developed human being.

On the other side, we can ask if it is ever acceptable to draw the abortion line after birth? I have never met a “pro-choice” advocate who was so strongly “pro-choice” that they believed in the killing of a toddler in order to free the mother from her attached responsibilities to the child. If you are “pro-choice”, consistency would dictate that a woman retain the right to abort her child indefinitely. But as before, no “pro-choice” advocates maintain this position. This is not because they are inconsistent or because they are deep-down “pro-life”. It is because they too draw the abortion line. After birth, these “pro-choice” advocates assume children’s right to life takes precedence over a woman’s right to autonomy. So, taking these arguments together we can see that both rights are emphasized by both positions and the only real question becomes where specifically to draw the abortion line.

This is consistent with the Roe v. Wade decision which held that the state had an obligation to protect both essential rights. However, the decision also punted the question of where to draw the line back to the individual states.  States have varied but most land somewhere before the third trimester. The decision elaborates a history of abortion looking for guidance from antiquity on where to draw the line. It notes that most ancients, including the Greeks and Romans, were ok with abortion, even very late. Early Christians, following an Aristotelian emphasis on form and a spiritual sense of ensouling matter, settled on the “quickening” (around 18 weeks). For them, the quickening symbolized the moment when a fetus first became “human” and was granted a soul by God, recognizable by its independent movement and human appearance. The decision also notes that even where abortion was illegal, it was not considered the same thing as murder, and often was treated by law as a misdemeanor rather than a felony.

When it comes down to it then, Roe v. Wade reflects our values quite well. It shows that both sides of the debate do respect both women’s autonomy and children’s right to life. Even meager honest reflection will reveal just how true this is. No “pro-life” advocate wants to have their or their mothers’, wives’, or daughters’ medical decision made for them by others. They believe that people should make their own medical decisions based on their own interests for themselves, perhaps with the counsel of a medical professional, but without the interference of the state. They just make an exception for unwanted pregnancies. At the same time, “pro-choice” women are hardly murderers. They do not advocate for abortions, only for women’s right to make the choice for themselves. They would not demand the right of parents who want to have a baby to abort. The argument then is really about whether or not society should be allowed to draw the line on medical intervention for individuals. On this point, I’m ardently libertarian. I don’t think society could make medical decisions for me, so it definitely shouldn’t. Arguably then, either you are for the state making your medical decisions for you (somewhere “death panels” still echos in the distance), or not. On that point, I think we are nearly universally agreed. “Pro-life” advocates then need to demonstrate why abortion is an exception to the rule, and the best grounds they have for it is a child’s right to life.

Of course, there are many other issues surrounding abortion. For example, whether outlawing it prevents abortions or just makes the abortions less safe. But where to draw the line returns again and again as the central problem. Most conservatives want to draw the line at conception, thus tying responsibility directly to sexual intercourse. This argument is often presented as assumed or scientific. “Life begins at conception” so the argument begins. However, conception is just as arbitrary a place to draw the line like any other; life may well begin when the sperm and egg are produced in the respective parents, or when the respective parents are themselves born, or on the other hand, when the fetus first begins to have the “form” of a human being, or when the independent multi-celled organism first attaches itself to the mother, forming not only what will become the baby but also the extra-bits of organic matter, like the placenta. In this final case, the blastocyte was no more the development of a future baby than it was the development of a future placenta.

Many feminists want to draw the line around the third trimester, with a few as late as pre-birth. Again these limits are not saying where we should actually draw the line, they are demarcating the arena in which an individual should be free to choose. Taken as a whole, these “pro-life” and “pro-choice” arguments are both markedly pro-choice. But what is more revealing is that they also both jointly create the window for abortion. Before conception, all of us agree that preventing the life process (as prevention or abstinence) is acceptable. After birth, all of us agree that aborting the life process is unacceptable. Thus, the political debate is one about setting boundaries, not drawing the actual line itself.

As I said, where we draw the actual line is ultimately arbitrary, which is why it is impossible to agree on it politically. What we usually argue over, but shouldn’t, is everything else that gets stirred-up in the mix. Questions of responsibility, sexual punishment, oppression, and much, much more are important questions, but not really as connected to the abortion debate as most of us would like to believe. We would all be infinitely better off if we could admit that we are very close on this issue, politically, a mere 24 weeks apart, and inside that window is where the abortion line should be drawn, with particular exceptions granted, such as in the case of medical emergencies, rape, and incest.

That would leave us free to deal with the real issue: whether society should draw the line for every woman or leave the window open for each individual woman to decide for herself. The former position is not “pro-life”. It is anti-choice. It is not about protecting life but rather about controlling it. The latter is “pro-choice”, but not pro-abortion, in the sense that it leaves women free to not abort, that is to choose life. This is why I am pro-choice. I believe that within the structures that we (nearly) universally find acceptable and where the particular choice is rather arbitrary, free choice ought to exist. So, while it is acceptable that society (both men and women) may determine the window in which the abortion line can be drawn, the actual choice of where to draw the line itself, within that window, must belong to the individual woman for herself.

Who Is Saving Up for the Future?

by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Ethics, Philosophy, Political Economy, Politics

In the neoliberal picture of economics, it is a common assumption that workers are indirect beneficiaries from the saving and reinvestment of capitalists in their privately owned businesses. Capitalism thereby provides these laborers with jobs, income, and indeed their very lives. This notion can be found from Bernard de Mandeville (The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits) to Friedrich Hayek (The Fatal Conceit), and popularized in the war cry of Gordon Gekko, “Greed is… good. Greed is right, greed works.” Of course, we are not really talking about “greed” here but “savings and investment”. Put simply, the idea is that by following their own self-interests the capitalists, inadvertently and out of necessity, provide for an army of workers who would otherwise be unable to survive. This all sounds straightforward enough, but there is a problem. This argument is curved three hundred and sixty degrees.

The neoliberalism assumes that the act of saving for new capital expenditures must be the product of the lone action of the enterprises’ owners. Part of the reason for believing this is cultural. The law and most people have–without good reason, mind you–assumed that the product of an enterprise’s efforts belongs exclusively to the owners of its capital. This is the fundamental assumption of capitalism. It is from this assumption that it seems to follow that the reinvestment in an enterprise’s capital is an act of its “owners”. Another reason, more classist and derogatory, comes from a long history of intellectual’s belief that lowly wage-workers were incapable of managing money. The stereotype of the drunken field hand or dock worker embodies the sentiment. Given them more money, according to this classist logic, and they would thoughtlessly spend it on gambling games, booze, and prostitution. This prejudice lingers on centuries later the wreck of capitalist poverty created such desperate people for whom a minutes entertainment was the best they could hope for, and despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is nevertheless the source but not the problem with the neoliberal argument. To see why we’ll need to examine the process of profit from sales.

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The neoliberal’s capitalist model looks something like this: the owner of the capital (material components) of an enterprise is assumed to be “owner” of the enterprise itself, and this is true whether or not they work for the company or have ever even laid eyes upon it. As the “owner” of the enterprise, they have rights that extend to the products of the enterprise’s industry. The owners of capital then, own the fruits of labor’s efforts based squarely on the strength of the assumption. As “owners”, they are at liberty to sell these items, (including service labor) for any price they can get and keep all of the profits thereof for themselves. The labor of workers has been assumed to have been contracted out, paid in advance, through fair and just negotiations, before the manufacture and sale of the “product”. The risk of a failure at the market is assumed also to belong entirely to the capitalist and is often invoked as the justification for their keeping the “surplus-value” or profit from sales, over and above the costs of production. If you accept this model, then it does follow that capitalists are saving for the future good of all of society and therefore what is good for the capitalists is the best anyone, capitalist or otherwise, can hope for.

I, obviously, do not accept a neoliberal capitalist model. Against it, I offer the following alternative: when a “product” is sold at the market the price is fixed by the consumers, that is the proceeds of the sale are ultimately set by demand for the product and have nothing whatsoever to do with the way the product was brought about. Consumers lack knowledge of production methods and set price based on relative utility over the cost of a product or service to themselves (this is the Austrian theory). But from the manufacturers’ point of view, the profit of sale comes back somewhat mysteriously, set entirely by the market, with little (including advertising) they can do to change it. It is impossible to tell from this perspective whose productive contributions made the product profitable. The labor of one person and the materials of another are so combined that both were equally necessary for there to be realized any profit at all. If we don’t just assume the capitalist tradition of arbitrarily favoring the material owners of the things in an enterprise as the legal owners of the enterprise itself (and hence its products), we would have to ask ourselves how the profits, set by the market, ought to be divided among the respective contributors to production.

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If we make the uncontroversial assumption that the rewards of group efforts ought to be shared evenly with respect to individual effort then there seems to be no reason to accept the fundamental assumption of capitalism. What gives capitalists the priority claim except for mere arbitrary tradition? And if we reject their claim, then the notion that workers owe their lives and livelihoods to capitalist’s self-interest goes right out the window; for if the profit is evenly shared then so too would be any saving and reinvestment in the capital of the enterprise. Worker’s can be seen to have been forced to save, so that money could be invested into the capital of an enterprise which they will benefit from only in the sense that the grist mill benefits from laboring because then its owners’ oil its parts. In short, if the profits are evenly shared, the savings are also.

But the stereotype persists, so that were the workers not “forced” to save, they would be very unlikely to reinvest, choosing instead to drink away their profits. I find this notion laughable, as I think of all the sodden millionaires, slurping Moet & Chandon, at some gala or another; no one accuses them of monetary impropriety. The fact is that laborers have more reason to invest in a company they own and work at than either an investor or an employee. The point here is that seen my way, the saving-act is really just as or even more legitimately an effort of laborers. We could view and should view laborers as the legitimate owners of the product, and so they either should have been paid more for their labor or they forwent the enjoyment of that income to invest it in the enterprises’ capital. It’s the assumption that capitalists should be considered the rightful owners of the products of industry and not all the members of that company that makes the neoliberal argument circular. The neoliberal cannot both assume the ownership of the products and use that assumption to justify the ownership of the means of production. This argument fails to prove that it is the capitalist who is really providing for the livelihood of the workers. It may just turn out that it is the workers who are really saving the money thus providing not only for themselves but all of the capitalist’s excessive wealth in addition.

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It would surprise few on the left to learn that a similar kind of argument was used in defense of slavery in antebellum America. The idea was that slaves, being nearly as dumb as animals, couldn’t be expected to provide for themselves outside their native habitats. Being now caught up in an “extended order” (to use Hayek’s term for a society where almost none provide everything for themselves a bit anachronistically) they would not be able to survive without the slave-masters to provide for them. They owe their livelihoods and their very lives to the master’s efforts. So, the well-intended sympathies of intellectual elites and moralists who would abolish slavery can’t see that they would destroy the very material foundations that made the slave’s lives possible in the first place. But we know better today! It was not the slaves who depended on the masters’ benevolence for their livelihood, it was the masters who depended on the slave’s labors for theirs. It was mere contrivance that–like a funhouse mirror–makes it appear upside-down. Sadly, the “funhouse” is the “courthouse” and the “mirror of distortion” is the “law”.

The neoliberal argument pits an ideological morality against a supposed material economic necessity but is itself a reversal of the truth. The ideological morality is an empty vision that all too conveniently enables the mechanisms of economic oppression. The material economic necessity is built with the sweat of labor. The laborers provide the material necessity and the capitalists appropriate the excess with ideological morality.

To save money is exactly the same thing as to earn money, profit is savings and savings is profit, from an individual point of view. It is only when we consider society as a whole that we can see that the two are not the same. This Keynesian insight has largely been forgotten, but it plays a role both in the need to establish a guaranteed income and in arguing against the neoliberal conception of capitalism.

Marx wrote: “Political economy, the science of wealth, is, therefore, at the same time, the science of renunciation, of privation and of saving, which actually succeeds in depriving man of fresh air and of physical activity. This science of a marvelous industry is at the same time the science of asceticism. Its true ideal is the ascetic but usurious miser and the ascetic but productive slave… The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the public house, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc. the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt–your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the savings of your alienated being. Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth.” (Marx’s Concept of Man, 144)

If the saving that enables both the reinvestment and the profits of the wealthy is, in fact, a forced saving on labor, then they are the “ascetic but productive slave” Marx mentions. And as I said above, the strength of the neoliberal argument for savings is carried entirely by assumption. We need only ask ourselves, by what right can capitalist’s claim ownership if we do not accept the neoliberal argument from tradition? Here I think is where the argument for private property ownership laid out in Locke, based on both a need for exclusive use and expenditure of labor to acquire comes into play. It is from this justification that we can see the neoliberal assumption to be false. And what is more, it not only reveals the assumption to be false but proves that it is laborers that are or could be the true owners of the means of production. They alone could meet both of the necessary conditions for private property ownership.

 

A Guaranteed Income

by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Political Economy, Politics

Every man speculates upon creating a new need in another in order to force him to a new sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence, and to entice him into a new kind of pleasure and thereby into economic ruin. Everyone tries to establish over others an alien power in order to find there the satisfaction of his own egoistic need.

– Karl Marx, Marx’s Concept of Man, 140

It should be noted in the above quote, taken from Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844, that Marx indicates that it is “[e]very man” and not just capitalists who have an interest in exploitation. The capitalist is not unique in the desire to exploit others, that is common to us all, says Marx. What separates capitalists from everyone else is that they have the means to exploit. If we are not all free, then none of us are, and this is precisely why.

In this post, I want to give a libertarian socialist defense of universal basic income. This will require some specific definitions to the notion of “universal” and “basic” and it will require a defense that is not reliant on consequences. In other words, to be a libertarian socialist defense, it cannot say “hey, see how this, and this, and this would be better with a UBI!” Such arguments are all well and good and have been made repeatedly by others with better data and research than I care to possess. See here, here, and here for arguments of that kind. Instead, I want to present us with a socialist argument for, what I will call a guaranteed income. The reason for a socialist argument is that without a rupture with capitalism, a universal basic income would really just subsidize wages for employers.

Before I present the argument I need to be clear about what I’m suggesting. The “guaranteed income” is not really universal and “basic” is too abstract to be of any value. What I intend is an income for people whose labor is less traditionally rewarding in a capitalist society, but is nevertheless important. The first and foremost of these types of labor is what I’m calling austerity. Austerity is the labor of making do with less. Austerity is the job of the poor. They learn to live with less so everyone else can have more, more cheaply. This is thrift and it is so often exploited that I don’t think another living soul has ever even suggested that the rich exploit the poverty of the poor. They take the benefit of being poor, which is free time, and remove the ability of the poor to be industrious for their own gain. I will spare us the details but suffice it to say that it takes a lot of work to be poor in a capitalist society, see Nickled and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich for why. Other types of labor are better known as labor if still unpaid or underpaid. Domestic labor is at the head of this class, followed shortly by child-rearing and education, and the copious amounts of internships and art gigs people do in the hope of building a portfolio.

Free labor that benefits another is another class like austerity that I’ll be mentioning. This one already has a name. It is called slavery. A guaranteed income, as we will see, conforms slavery into austerity, where one has little but their free time is, in fact, their own. However, it is not necessary to be fair that everyone would receive this income, it is only necessary that everyone could receive this income and merely for being alive. In this sense, it’s not really universally applied despite being guaranteed to all. Everyone is guaranteed some income if they choose to take it and don’t already make more than it offers. But how much should it offer?

I recommend that the price of the income be pegged to some sort of productivity index. There are several to choose from: the Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Happiness, Genuine Progress Indicator, the Happy Planet Index, and more. Whichever index we light on, we’ll want to set a standard level for the guaranteed income, say around a quarter to a third of the per-capita distribution. This would vary, year by year, and have the important fact of driving people back onto the labor market when productivity slacks. It will no doubt find a reasonable equilibrium and the point at which comes to rest will mark the divide between the interest in free time and that of affluence.

That brings me to my argument. We might start by graphing these mutually exclusive human interest: free time and affluence. They represent the twin concerns of political economy: how to maximize non-labor time while also maximizing prosperity. The Marx quote above echos the understanding of the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians before them: if you want to be free and prosperous, then you must have slaves, which, morality aside, makes complete sense. The only way to exist in a state of wealth and ease is to have others produce the wealth without their enjoying it so that you can. Capitalism supposedly offered a way to avoid this economic truth, but it was Karl Marx and his theory of exploitation that pointed out that capitalism only nominally abolishes slavery. Marx showed that what appears to be contracting between free individuals is actually coerced and ultimately exploitative, i.e. wage-slavery. This form of slavery only paints a patena of voluntary decision-making over the forced slavery of explicit slave-society.

This entire system of human interests can then be mapped out for us. (Forgive the crudeness of my graphs.) In figure one below I have place affluence or relative wealth on the vertical axis and the amount of time one would need to spend laboring versus the amount of time one has free on the horizontal axis.

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Fig. 1: Graph depicting human interests established under capitalism.

In a capitalist system, the red line represents everyone’s prospects giving the uncheck desire to place all others in a state of laboring for their own benefit and not the benefit of the laborer. You can see near the equilibrium point (0,0) the line is diagonal showing that the more you work, the more you make, the less you work, the more free time you might enjoy, but at some point, and that point is arbitrarily illustrated here, the line bends around in both directions. So that we might extrapolate four classes of individuals in a capitalist society.  Those that labor little to none at all we might call the capitalist class, or what Marx called the bourgeoisie, depicted below in blue. Those that work excessively and yet “enjoy” intolerable poverty we call the slave class, depicted in black below. The two in the middle, which could conceivably be seen as one class (under socialism) is characterized by the idea that the more they labor, the more wealth they enjoy or the less they work the more free time they enjoy, these are the laboring class or proletariat and the austere class respectively, depicted in purple and green below.

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Fig. 2: Graph showing the division of class interests based on income and free time.

We can see that there is an artificial arc here against what our morality would tell us; that the more you work the more prosperity you ought to enjoy. We can then divide the graph into four zones along the axes.

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Fig 3. Graph depicting the ideal quadrants of human interests.

Each zone in figure three represents a potential set of individual interests. Here, the capitalist zone is the most desirable since it works the least and enjoys the highest degree of wealth. However, having a capitalist class necessitates a slave class, and what is more, the capitalist class will always be pushing every other into the slave class. This is similar, but not exactly the same as, what game theorists call a prisoner’s dilemma. Every individual having an interest in being a capitalist will naturally result in the overwhelming number of people existing in the slave class. A constant pressure to rise on the line will force everyone else down the line. But also like the prisoner’s dilemma, a simple solution exists: make a rule. In this case, we must eliminate the ability to make money from another’s effort.

On the one hand, doing this must involve abolishing the form of rent which I have spoken of before. But that is not enough. Even with the mechanisms of the exploitation of labor removed, the mechanism for exploitation of free time would still exist. The result would be a “capitalism of the proletariat”, a new kind of socialist dystopia. This is why we need a guaranteed income, it effectively straightens out the curve so that every individual is left free to choose between the level of free time and the level of affluence they would like to enjoy. If the curves we saw on the line represent exploitation, then their elimination under socialism entails a lack of exploitation.

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Fig. 4: Graph depicting what a guaranteed income (socialism) does to human interests.

You’ll note in figure four above, that the red line never enters either the slave or the capitalist zones. This is necessary, should there be a capitalist, there must be slaves. Thus the only way we will all be free is if none of us are allowed to be capitalists. To guarantee an income would be one of two steps necessary to effectively and actually abolish slavery for the first time in recorded human history.

The Horseshoes and Hand Grenades Theory of Richard Wolff

by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Philosophy, Political Economy

Dr. Richard D. Wolff is a prime example of that critically endangered species known as Marxian economists. His critique of capitalism centers mostly on Marx’s theory of surplus-value and it is, at least since the financial crisis of 2007, increasing useful. Wolff made his case for a new model of socialism back in 2012 when we were still coasting off the Occupy movement’s meager momentum and with a nearly-sympathetic ear in the White House. In his book, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, he lays out his plan to replace capitalism with genuine socialism, which he distinguishes based on how the surplus-value of labor is allocated in a society. He dismisses Soviet-style socialist programs as “state capitalism”, where the surplus-value of labor is extracted by the state-apparatus in precisely the same way that capitalist do in what he terms “private capitalism”. I make similar distinctions, calling Soviet-style communism, a truly refined, monopolistic capitalism for the same reasons Dr. Wolff articulates.

For Wolff, there is only one way for a state to become truly socialist and that is to have what he calls “worker self-directed enterprises” or WSDEs. (He may be Marxian, but he shares the economists’ penchant for acronyms.) Such enterprises he concludes allow all the decisions and all the surplus-value to be wholly controlled by the workers engaged in the enterprise itself. This is what Marx intended by “socialism”, although not “communism”. It was self-controlled workplaces that required the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, which Marx saw as an intermediary between capitalism and communism. Wolff agrees, stressing that WSDEs will sufficiently resolve capitalism into genuine socialism.

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Dr. Richard D. Wolff

To some extent, I believe Wolff is correct. The step he outlines is absolutely necessary for the evolution of capitalism (whether private or state, in his terms) to socialism. However, it is not sufficient. It does not address other forms for rent, such as landlordism and interest-driven banking. Neither does it treat the action of all workers, taken as a whole, as the monopoly Marx does. This oversight would leave the pressure to make a living off of one’s labor intact. Under Wolff’s plan, the proletariat inherits the role of the bourgeoisie, not so much replacing the political role of capitalism but collapsing the two Marxian economic classes into one. Again, this is a necessary first step, but the problem should be obvious: if you didn’t work, you would be oppressed by those who do, and a new sort of forced austerity would be exploited by the proletarians.

The laborers would enact a kind of “capitalism of the proletariat” which would perhaps be the worst kind of socialist dystopia because it would be a form of capitalism that looks more like genuine socialism than any other yet conceived. It would prove too difficult to suss out the difference for many on the left and make its systemic problems hard to overcome than capitalism. The “capitalism of the proletariat” would look socialist because of the working class would be in charge, but only the working class as it was formerly conceived of by capitalists. The unpaid laborers, the sick, the old, the dreamers, the drifters, the poets and–dare I say it–the philosophers might all too soon feel themselves to be the new underclass in a world were “labor” is the new capital. We would have to look at other interests, such as our stake in having free time, and adjust our economic models accordingly if we were to escape this new nightmare. I don’t mean to sound upset with Wolff. Frankly, I think his work is brilliant. It’s just that we need more than WSDEs to convert capitalism into socialism.

 

 

 

A Libertarian Socialist Conception of Private Property

by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Philosophy, Political Economy, Politics
[Economists] forget that… it is use which determines the value of a thing, and that use is determined by fashion.
– Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts

The left has been suspicious of private property since Pierre-Joseph Proudhon brazenly declared it to be nothing more than theft in 1840. His friend, Karl Marx, saw it as the root of capitalism’s exploitation, a superfluous invention of the bourgeoisie that would be dispensed with in the future. Anarchists’ generally see it as an agent of control. Even the most sympathetic socialists treat private property as a necessary evil. Those on the left who refuse to denounce private property are all-too-quickly labeled as faux-socialists, unwitting capitalist apologists, or even disingenuous counter-revolutionary agents.

On the right, private property rights are often so strongly enforced that they trump even the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Such a strong defense of private property is ironic, precisely because the justification for private property is typically based on “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, especially the right to life. These “background rights” perform the justificatory work for private property rights.

I want to engage this conversation from a third direction. I want to begin from a neutral position, neither assured of private property’s virtue nor its defamation. To start, I think we need a tight definition of what private property is. Then, I think we need to explain the fact that so many independent societies throughout history have lighted on the idea of private property. What particular problem did property solve? Then can it be justified to the satisfaction of socialism? To avoid suspense, I’ll sum my conclusions now: 1) private property is no different from personal property, 2) private property is common to many cultures because it solves the problem of how to divvy up the common world, and 3) private property can be justified for socialists when it is based on the background right to life and the pursuit of happiness.

The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few. In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
– Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 2

There is, in the leftist tradition, an important metaphysical division of the concept of property. The first, largely implicit in Marx’s work, is the split between productive property and consumables. Marx paid little attention to the latter if he mentioned them at all. He, like all the great economists of his day, focused almost exclusively on the “means of production”. The productive property were the things you needed to produce consumables, which included the tools, machinery, and raw and pre-fabricated materials of which the consumable consisted. When Marx speaks of abolishing private property in the above quote, he intends only this productive property. He is also quick to defend the productive property of the “petty artisan and of the small peasant”, saying, “There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it and is still destroying it daily.” Marx is saying there is no need to abolish the camera of the photographer or the laptop of the freelance writer. So he means only the large-scale productive property, i.e. the factories, great machinery, and other types of great capital that requires a social body to utilize it. The consumable property goes by the name of “personal property” while the large-scale productive property goes by the name “private property”.

This division saves the left from the accusation that communism or socialism removes your right to use your tooth-brush exclusively. In other words, you have to share your tooth-brush with other people. This argument is devised to reduce socialism to absurdity. If you wouldn’t want to share your toothbrush, you couldn’t even share food-stuffs or water or air, at least not as you eat, drink, and breathe it. So it does make a compelling argument against which socialism must resolve. The division of property into personal and private is the traditional solution. However, the division of property introduces its own problems. The most important of these and the only one I will treat here is the indistinguishability of personal from private property. 

We can see the crack in precisely where Marx claimed there is no need to take away the private property of the individual proprietor. Here Marx is admitting that the tools of the individual crafter should belong to the individual crafter; their productive powers are thus not sufficient reason to socialize them. The common understanding is that it is then only those tools that require social operation which must be socialized–I am ignoring here a similar argument that certain types of property of, e.g. land, must be socialized irrespective of how it is used for the simple reason that Marx did not make this argument. The problem with the argument that only social operations must be socialized is that even socially operated machinery is individually exclusive as it is used. To make this concrete imagine an assembly line of ten persons. Each person has a specific spot on the line and performs their unique task. Each spot on the assembly line then may legitimately be conceived of as the exclusive property of the individual proprietor.

While such a conception is dangerous because each individual proprietor, save the first and the last, would be faced with a monopoly on either side of themselves, that is a single provider of the materials they need to do their work and a single consumer of their finished product (viz. the unconsumable, partially-worked commodity). It is more harmonious to conceive of them as all part of a single entity, each cooperating rather than competing. Still, even under the auspice of cooperation, each has an exclusive need to be able to use their part of the whole. The right to exclude others from their part is no different for the workers on the assembly line than it is for the individual proprietor whom Marx exonerated from the abolition of private property. We have only two ways of resolving this inconsistency: either abolish all private property, including the photographer’s camera and the writer’s laptop or do away with the distinction between personal property and private property altogether. As we agreed above that the former is absurd, we are left only with the latter.

What does this mean? It means that we cannot, as Marx commands, abolish private property. This means that capital and capitalist can’t simply be dispensed with. This is not a vindication of capitalism, as those on the right would like to assert. While getting rid of capitalists is not an option, what is left open to us is the modification of what can and cannot be done with private property. That is precisely what the rights of property owners entails them to do. The rights of private property ownership have their limitations, even the most right-wing libertarian will agree. For example, your “right” to own a gun and your “right” to do with your private property as you please, cannot be combined to justify any homicide you may like to commit. 

What lies behind the left’s condemnation of private property is the capitalist’s claim of a right to the surplus-value of a worker’s labor. This claim is justified, according to the apologists of capitalism, by the “ownership” of the means of production. Ownership then it is implied, entails the right to allow others to use said means to produce products for less than the value those products fetch at market. The chief problem the left has with private property then is that it can be used as a means for the exploitation of other people’s labor. Marx details of the process in the first volume of Capital. But even there, private property does not so much create the exploitation as it is simply the vehicle for it. Property relations are social relations, not between human beings and things, but between human beings and other human beings. This is what makes economics political in the first place. 

Given this, our question becomes: can the capitalist really justify the right from ownership? To answer this question we will need to examine what justifies private ownership in the first place. I’ll start with John Locke’s justification of private property. In brief, Locke argued that the private consumption of the material world was vital to every individual. We cannot consume in common, even if we produce that way. This makes private property necessary in order to be enjoyed. The question for Locke then became, how is it that I come to exclude the whole of humanity in order to enjoy this or that particular thing? Or more concretely, by what right do I pluck an apple from the common tree so that I may eat it and by eating it, exclude all others from its enjoyment? When did it become mine alone to enjoy? We all agree that after digestion, it is exclusively mine, but when did it first become so? He traces back the right to my act of plucking the apple. With this labor expenditure, I have the right to that apple. So, generalizing from this, it is my labor that makes things mine. Locke would go on to lay the foundations of the first labor theory of value, but it is his labor theory of property that concerns us. This theory is the basis of private property rights upon which capitalism is founded.

Unfortunately for the bourgeoisie and Marx alike, the private property right established by Locke is not one based solely upon labor. Labor identifies which particular things are justified, but it does so under the pretense that we are going to use them. Locke himself said that one cannot claim a thing, merely to deprive others of its enjoyment. Ultimately then, it is the need to eat, in conjunction with the labor of plucking that justifies my claim to the apple and so the right to exclude the rest of humanity from the apple’s enjoyment.

Marx misses this. Elaborating in Capital that the value of commodities comes entirely from the labor required to produce them. We may deduce from this that the justification for using commodities according to Marx would come entirely from having labored to acquire a thing, either by producing it or trading “dead labor” for it. Use, the consumption element of commodities, plays little to no role in Marx, who argued that either goods and services have a use-value or they do not, there are no quantifiable degrees of use-value. Equally, there would be no reasoning for use in owning, only labor. For Marx ownership is derived merely from labor and trade.

But no one asserts this claim more than the bourgeoisie. The capitalist claim of ownership is justified entirely by the idea of labor exchanged for a good. That Marx and capitalism agree so completely on this subject is the greatest tragedic irony of the post-enlightenment history. Locke, as I said, founded the labor theory of property and of value on the unquestionable human need to consume individually. Labor alone is therefore insufficient to justify ownership of anything, and correspondingly, it is insufficient to justify the total value of anything. We lack the consumptive side, the input of use-value. This is where Marx made his most fatal error. He said that “use” could not be counted in the final estimation of value. He assumed more than argued that “use” has no quantifiable value because it is a quality, i.e. things either have a use-value or they do not. This is wrong.

Use-value, it turns out, is quantifiable, and what is more, it is quantifiable in units of labor. I have made the argument for use-values quantifiability before, see The Genius and Folly of Karl Marx, Part Two. What is confusing for us is that the labor-units for use-value are inverted from units of labor in exchange. They act like negative numbers to positive ones, so that use-value functions more like “labor saved” while an exchange-value represents “labor expended”. For example, to make a hammer, it might take X amount of total (socially-necessary) labor to produce and bring the hammer to market, this–according to Marx–would be the hammer’s value, assuming there was someone out there with a use for a hammer. However, this is just the minimum that the hammer’s manufacturer would want to sell it for, it does not represent the value of the hammer to the user. The final value is how much labor it saves its consumer over the amount of labor that consumer would have to shell out for it. A hammer’s cost then is subjectively determined by the consumer, not by the producer, and it is never objectively derived as Marx hoped to prove.

But all is not lost for Marx, because both use-value and exchange-value are determined as units of labor. In other words, labor remains the sole source of value for everything in exchange, just as Marx said. Private property becomes justifiable in the twin aspects of labor: labor-spent and labor-saved. I ignore here a metaphysical discussion of labor-saved, except to say that Marx himself saw labor-saved as the “value of capital”. It was the private aspect of capital that Marx and the left railed against. The “means of production” of which most capital consists is problematic only when in private hands.

This, however, is where libertarian socialism breaks with Marxism. It is not the private nature of the ownership of the “means of production” that is the problem. The problem is the fact that capitalists are not and never were the rightful owners of them. Capitalism is contradictory because it violates the justification for private property ownership established by Locke. Capitalists maintain their claim to rightful ownership through the justification of expenditure of labor, but since they have neither the desire nor a possibility of using the “means of production” exclusively their claim of ownership over them is wholly unjustified. It is, in fact, the workers and ONLY the workers who can meet both necessary conditions for ownership. First, they do have an exclusive need of the materials in question, and second, they (through the extraction of surplus-labor) have paid for them. This argument holds true for other forms of “rent”, for example, the tenant who uses the house has the priority claim to ownership of the house if they pay rent.

What is exploitative about capitalism is that the rightful owners of the means of production are not the “legal owners” according to the political structures drafted by capitalists. The inherent villainy of private property is a Marxist red herring, no pun intended. The upshot of this concept of private property is that we have a clear path and reason for removing capitalism’s exploitative element. It will require workers to become the rightful owners of the enterprises in which they work, as is suggested by Dr. Richard Wolff. But it goes beyond just that, it will require the abolition of the form of rent everywhere in society, except where the rentee is the public. It will also require a guarantee of income, but for reasons that are not expressly clear here. But that is all. We needn’t abandon private property nor do we need outlandish distinctions, (e.g. private property vs. personal property or labor vs. “socially necessary” labor) that prove only necessary to bolster the failings in Marx’s theory. The solution is more simple and more elegant, ownership of property is the right of the people who need it, who use it, and who paid for it; and not the state, the community, the government, or investors.

 

The Wealth of Nations, Revisited

by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Ethics, Philosophy, Political Economy, Politics, Social Responsibility

A Contradiction of Interests

I’m not sure if this is a real contradiction or not. But it seems to me that Adam Smith has a perspective problem. Smith famously argues that what is best for the individual is best for the society, and yet at the same time he argues that slavery is not best for the society because slaves lack individual incentive to work hard. This may be true, but it certainly seems to serve as a counter-example to the notion that what is best for the individual is what is best for the society. For when he suggests this, we must sincerely ask, which individual? The slave or the slaveholder?

What is true in Smith’s slave argument is that it is not best for the slave to be a slave, and correspondingly it would not be best for a society that the slave be so either. The slave’s disincentive to work would lead to less work performed in general, and correspondingly to a less productive society. However, is that which is best for the slaves or the best for the slaveholders? As a slaveholder, owning many slaves is what is best individually. If the rule holds, we must conclude that owning slaves is what is best for society. Is this not a contradiction? It cannot be both best and not best for a society to have slaves. Perhaps we could claim that being a slaveholder requires the existence of slaves, which we just said were not beneficial to society. But then the question becomes, why should we take the slave as “the individual” and not the slaveholder, as Smith clearly does? 

Smith’s problem seems to be one of perspective. The value of the rule that societies do best when people are free to pursue their own interests is debatable. It may depend entirely on which individuals’ perspectives we adopt. Is it better that a landlord is allowed to collect rent or that every person own the property they live in? Is it better than an employer negotiate wages before the sale of the product or that laborers are paid in accordance with their efforts? These perspective questions shoot holes all through the idea that liberty is the best policy and its more general precept that individual interests can be used as the best guide for social action.

The Utopia of Competition

It seems to me that competition itself becomes romanticized under most libertarian writers. The reason for this is if they use it as a cure-all for many economic injustices. The assumption works like this: as long as the rules are fair, then competition will lead to the best possible use of resources. And so it would, as long as we had some way to ensure the fairness of the rules. What does it mean to be fair? Who decides what is fair? On what basis is that decision to be made?

One can always succeed in competitions through two different methods. The first method is exactly what the libertarian writers imagine, a system where everybody follows the rules, the rules are fair, and then the winner deserves what they get, and this would work out best for society, just as Adam Smith suggested. The reason is that if everyone competed this way, we would all benefit from the maximized effort competition elicits. But unfortunately, there are no umpires or referees in economics, no one to turn to and say, “Hey, that’s not fair!”.

The second method for success in competition is free and unrestricted. Players follow their own best self-interest, and when the “rules” of fair play get in the way, they abandon them. In this method, one might succeed by making their competition under-perform or advance themselves through some form of subterfuge. This method focuses on distinguishing oneself by making all of the others look worse. This, of course, is a natural tendency of free competition that ultimately degrades society.

So we have a choice. Either competition is regulated to enforce an external set of rules that foster fair-play or economic competition is not good for society. If we were to have the former, a sport-like instead of war-like competition, then we would have to insist that the players do not get to dominate the body that makes up the rules. In real terms, this means that businesses would have to have minimal effect on political determinations of economics.

The Fable of the Bees?

It is perhaps ironic that Mandeville’s “The Fable of the Bees” features so heavily in Smith’s thought. The poem presents the idea that it is private vice (greed) that drive humanity to the public good (prosperity). The irony is not what climate change and over-use of pesticide have done to the bees, but the fact that Mandeville chose bee’s as his perfect society turned waywardly toward virtue to the ruin of all.

Bees are hive-minded totalitarians. The structure of bee society is based on homogeneity. The hive is comprised of nearly identical genetically speaking. The small individuality comes in the form of castes: the Queen, the product of royal jelly is tasked exclusively with all the breeding for the entire colony; the drones, a small subset of males, whose only function is impregnating the Queen; and the workers who do everything else to make the colony run. There is some break down among the work performed by the workers but this too is regulated exclusively by age. The high organization by nature is related to the Orwellian suppression of individuality inherent in bee society.  

There is no private vice in bee society because there is no individuality. Private vice requires individuals whose interests, even if entirely dependent on the efforts of others for their survival, can still conceive of themselves outside of the society. If private vices are public virtues then it perhaps proves that what is best for the individual is not what is best for society and vice versa. For it seems that public vices can just as well be private virtues.

Reflections on Bhaskar Sunkara’s The Socialist Manifesto

by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Political Economy

Bhaskar Sunkara, the founding editor and publisher of Jacobin Magazine, did a Q&A last night in Philadelphia’s Westside to promote his new book, The Socialist Manifesto. It was hosted by the Philly chapter of the DSA. I was in attendance with about a hundred other, mostly young, mostly hopeful, progressives and socialists and at least one stodgy old Marxist. The “action” came at the very beginning when Sunkara was attacked, (had a yogurt-like substance thrown on him and was briefly accosted) by one of two black bloc anarchists, apparently over a beef they had with one of his tweets. Personally, the emphasis on anonymity and malicious behavior that characterizes black bloc tactics betrays a kind of conservatism more often found among internet trolls than radical activists, but I digress.

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Bhaskar Sunkara

After a quick change, Sunkara masterfully presented his work. The book, which I was fortunate enough to read in the twenty-four hours before his talk, is somewhat mislabelled. Sunkara explained his original title, “Socialism in Our Times” was rejected by the publisher’s marketers, who retitled it, with his permission, “The Socialist Manifesto”. The book, however, is not really a manifesto. Most of its 288 pages are devoted to a quasi-scholarly history of socialism from the era of Karl Marx to the 2018 American midterm election. In its selections and interpretation, Sunkara quietly gestures to his larger objective, invigorating a long-dormant socialist organization that is capable of challenging capitalism’s domination of the political-economic world.  

By his own admission, of which I am in complete agreement, the best part of Sunkara’s book is its first chapter, where he jovially lays out a vision of a socialist world not too different from ours. What is different is important, making small changes with big implications. It is the most theoretical part of his book. The vision he lays out is ideologically socialist and ruptures from capitalism, but it also deviates from the traditional socialist programs. It is more libertarian, less communist, emphasizing bottom-up socialism over top-down. I have very few quarrels with it and in general, find it a hopeful take on the modern socialist theory.

The main issue I had with the book is that there is no defense of the vision. It is presented and then merely assumed. From the second chapter onward, the book embarks on a long narrative history, not so much of socialism’s varied theoretical debates but on its practical efforts to build, organize, and maintain itself as well as challenge capitalist forces and survive antagonist forces allied against it from both within and without. The book’s final chapter provides a list of socialist commandments, drawn from the lessons of the history Sunkara elaborates.

I am not averse to books of practical socialist politics, but the title of Sunkara’s book had me excited that we were finally going to be moving towards a new kind of socialist theory. One that takes a decisive step away from Marx. I understand that it was not Sunkara’s choice for the title, so I don’t blame him for baiting and switching. I fear that without a new theory of socialism, the best socialist can hope to do is “occupy the state” as Sunkara said of Léon Blum. We are still waiting on a vision.

 

We see in Concepts not Phenomena

by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Charles Sanders Peirce once noted that it is an achievement of human excellence to see the world as an artist. What he meant is to see the world as it really appears, and specifically not as we conceptualize it. Similarly, Claude Monet once said of his friend and fellow painter Edouard Manet, “He comes to paint the people, I have come to paint the light.” This comment speaks volumes about what we see when we see what we see.  If that sounds confusing it is because what we see remains constant but what we see it as can change. Monet and Manet were in the same place and painting the same scene, but they painted it vastly differently because Manet was painting the concepts as he knew them while Monet was painting the phenomena as he experienced it.

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Manet’s realism (left) captures the vision of our mind’s eye; Monet’s impressionism (right) captures light as our eyes see.

I want to explore what that means. What did Peirce have in mind when he drew his distinction between phenomena and concept. I suspect that to see the world “like an artist” is to see the world precisely devoid of concepts. That is to peel back every single layer of cognition. We often think of this as what “the eye” sees, or what we see without the “mind’s eye”. Phenomena, we take to be primary to human cognition, like Immanuel Kant, from whom I take the word. The phenomena for Kant came from the unknowable noumena or the thing-in-itself. The noumena–if there is such a thing–is the thing outside of our experience of it, an object before we experience it. Kant held noumena to be beyond our ability to know. Human knowledge, he claimed, is limited to what we experience, that is phenomena. We do not see a chair, for example, what we see is patches of color in a familiar shape we “recognize” as a chaise lounge. We do not hear a song, we hear frequencies of airwaves, that we recognize as Bon Jovi.

This stands against many long-held theories of epistemology and human cognition. The traditional view, since John Locke anyway, is simply that we experience the world through our senses, and those senses give us reliable information, which we then conceptualize into the things we know. This picture, I believe, is completely backward.

No doubt our senses present us with reliable phenomena, qua phenomena, but that is not really what we experience. What we experience are concepts; concepts mapped onto the phenomena before or at the same time we experience them. Really, the human phenomenal experience is all about mapping concepts. Concepts are all we’re concerned with. When I look at a table and chairs, I don’t see colors and shapes and tints and shades and other static phenomena, even though all these are what we might say my eyes can “see”. When I look at a table and chairs, I see a “table and chairs”, that is the concepts “table” and “chairs” applied precognitively to the phenomena. I didn’t have to think about it. I didn’t have to ask myself, “what is that?” and answer myself, “that is a table and chairs”. I simply saw a table and chairs. Whatever part of my mind applies the concepts I know to the phenomena I experience, does so without the acknowledgment of my conscious mind. And what is more, I’m satisfied with my knowledge of the table and chairs because I can apply “table” and “chairs” to the phenomena of my eyes.

To really see what I mean, let’s examine this from another angle. Look at children’s drawings the world over and you will see art, not as the artist sees the world, but as the rationalist see it. The child draws the world of concepts. The humans they depict have the right parts to make them visually identifiable as human: one head, round; two eyes, in the center of the head; one nose underneath the eyes and one mouth underneath the nose; a body; two arms; two legs; perhaps hands with five fingers each; feet; perhaps even a heart. There is nothing of “realism” in the child’s work. Every child is a minimalist. What is relevant here is that to “see the world as an artist” is to unlearn what comes so natural to us that even very young children can do it: seeing the world in concepts.

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It is important to note that when we see the world in concepts, we are the ones applying the concepts, but we do not create the concepts. We take them from our experience of the unconceptualized world and our culture. When we don’t know what something is, what we mean to say is we have no conceptualization for the pattern of phenomena we are experiencing. Lacking a concept, we don’t even have a name for what we experience and so we are reduced to gesture, verbal or physical, and wonder. The child’s primordial and perennial question, “What’s that?”, is the basis of all human understanding. It is from this question that we build up batteries of concepts into the storehouse of knowledge.

The real point here is that human beings apply the concepts we see and we apply them in such a way that we do not recognize our own hand in their application. We experience them as out there in the world, coming to us through our eyes. But this is both false and dangerous. It is because of this inconspicuous application that we experience our own biases as “natural”. We cannot see ourselves standing before the light and so see our shadow as something manifest in the world. This gap between what we see and how we see it is perhaps the greatest source of epistemological error. The gap is perilous to transverse when dealing with observable phenomena, but it is doubly perilous when the phenomena in question must be inferred from the phenomena that can be observed, for here we must jump the gap twice! 

The Philosophy of Politics

by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

Politics is a broad term. It is often used to describe everything from being an asshole on the internet to being a statesman and nation founder. It is denigrated and revered, usually at the same time. This post is my attempt to create some clarity around the question: what is politics? I do not want to give a hackneyed definition, such as a litany of the term’s historical development or a cross-reference of modern usages of the term. What I want to do is identify and explore the different ways people talk about politics, so that we can perhaps begin to understand when we are talking about different things that all fit loosely under the umbrella of politics.

To this end, I conceive of four approaches to politics that I feel need to be sketched out. Listing them from the most abstract to the most concrete, we have: “the political”, “political architecture”, “politics”, and finally “realpolitik”. The four share a concern for group identity, shared ideology, group direction, shared responsibility, and group action. But each takes a particular concern as paramount. I should be understood that all four of these ways of talking about politics are necessary at particular times and all are vital to a culture of flourishing political debate. All four must see their particular concerns addressed in order for a society to resolve an issue. To solve a political problem in three of the four ways is not to solve it at all. Hopefully, this will be clearer after I introduce the differences between them in greater detail.

The Political

By far the most abstract is a sort of metaphysics of politics; the concept of the political as Carl Schmitt saw it. Its primary focus is on how to create and maintain group unity. Imagine a Maslowian hierarchy of political needs, the political is the base. It is the formation of a group, who counts as its members, who are responsible for its duties, who are the beneficiaries of its privileges, but most importantly can the group maintain itself in its given formation? i.e. is it able to cohere? Schmitt elaborated the primary action of the political as determining the friend/enemy distinction. It is the establishment of an “us” by the identification of a “them” which we are not and do not like. Us and those like us, are friends and those unlike us are enemies. This relationship is primary and will determine how we treat others in our sphere of influence.

For example, what is the role of poor blacks in the USA? Are they really citizens? Do we (white America) have an obligation to treat them as citizens, that is to treat them just like us? Are they accretions upon the body politic? Enemies, who may be used for labor and discarded? What we say and what we do will be partially determined by whether or not we really consider them just like us?

Schmitt’s distinction is but one way to affect unity, others included shared economic benefit, shared culture/language, simple homeostasis, and—on small scales—kinship (and possibility others). There are many ways group identity can form and dissolve, but at the base, without group identity, there are no more political questions to even ask. To call a group of people a society, of any kind, is to assume the kind of political connection discussed under the concept of the political.

Political Architecture

The second most abstract topic of political discussion is what I have termed political architecture; which we might define as the organization and arrangement of power structures and institutions in a given society. The focus of political architecture is largely on how to effectively and efficiently deploy the power that comes from “group effort”. The many battles over the “rationality” of politics, from Carl Schmitt to Michael Oakeshott, fall under this category. Political architecture deals in terms of democracy, monarchy, aristocracy, and anarchy. Its terms are those of organization and arrangement, law and principle, government and property. As well as terms of design, such as the separation of powers, the nature of sovereignty, how to affect the popular will, and much more. This is the realm of order, harmony, stability, and security.

By far the most important question of political architecture is striking the balance between liberty and equality. Always with an eye to the necessity of maintaining group cohesion, a political architecture cannot go too far afield in either direction. We cannot even conceive of a polity where there are but one abusive tyrant and a whole mightly population of abused subjects. This is because such an arrangement is unstable, it will tip over into chaos, despite the many horrors chaos brings. 

The goal of political architecture is to establish the minimum number of institutions to effect relative and fair equality. The “minimum number” preserves freedom, while the institutions protect the equality vital to group cohesion. All the grand schemes of political arrangement and political economy are attempts to find the balance in whatever situation a group of people happens to find themselves. It is important to note that, no one solution is right for all situations and so political arrangments and political economies, to remain stable would change with the situation.

Politics

The third most abstract is what we could call politics proper, i.e. the traditional idea of politics, as it was held by the ancients. This type of politics deals with the human condition, the current situation, economic need, justice, balancing the needs of the people, and much, much more. The primary focus in standard politics is deciding where to direct our group resources and energy and when, where, how, and—most importantly—why to use the power of group unity, including the institutions that harness and focus that power. This includes the creation and enforcement of policy, the allocation of resources, declaring and fighting wars, and the settlement of inter-member disputes. It always has an eye towards the maintenance of unity, but its concerns are particular and practical, unlike the general and theoretical concerns of political architecture. 

Realpolitik

The least abstract, or most “real” approach to politics, goes by the label realpolitik. This approach focuses on the effective use of the existing power structures to achieve desired ends among the rival choices of politics proper. This is the aspect of politics that is the most disreputable and deals with the strategies of sub-unities or factions to attain control of the power of group effort and use it to better their own situation. The strategic maneuvering of realpolitik is limited only by the prevailing political architecture and the constant pressure to retain group unity. When unity fails, it’s always factional strife behind the dissolution.

The goal of realpolitik is managing logistics. How do we actually get the job done? The proverb of the mice who decided to hang a bell around the cat’s neck but cannot decide on who will attempt the feat is a question of realpolitik. The best-laid plans of a presidential candidate mean nothing if they lose the election. Winning elections then are just as important as making decisions, if that is what the political architecture calls for. This, of course, brings up the ugly business of gaming politics: gerrymandering, suppressing votes or buying them, and much, much more. This also includes the political and economic viability of enforcing the ideals and decisions of the other forms of political conversation.

All four approaches impact others and affect them in particular and limited ways. Some can be used to delimit and control others to some extent, but all four are always present and necessary in every polity. There is a strong relationship between the political and politics proper, and between political architecture and realpolitik. The former pair creates unity and maintains it in a real, concrete way. The latter pair prevents abuse of unity while managing to get needs met and actions accomplished.

The political and political architecture constitutes the realm of political theory or political philosophy, as they form the primary assumptions upon which all other political decisions are based. These two deal with the possible and the impossible. Politics and realpolitik are better informed by political science as they deal in the observable world of the probable and the improbable. Let me reiterate that there is no conflict between these aspects, merely different goals.

Beyond all four aspects lies the realm of ethics, in two distinct senses. First as virtue ethics, which instills in the individual the skills and abilities to get along well in a given political arrangement and culture, and then pure ethics, including the ethics of care, which hope to determine individual actions about what is to be done in the concrete situation. Ethics are not politics, but they do relate to it because they form the preconditions and boundaries of politics. Ethics is to politics as wood is to a table. A table is made from some substance, but the essential “tableness” of the table has nothing to do with which particular substance that it is formed from. Ethics then can disagree with our politics, that is the two can be in discord so that realities do not match ideals, or they may try to agree with political consideration so that either the individual or the polity itself must be changed into harmony. This is because all forms of ethics deal with the individual and politics deal with groups.