Tag: Adam Smith

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 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.

Liberating the Invisible-Hand from Libertarianism

by Charles M Rupert, posted in Political Economy, Politics

Libertarianism often conceives of the “invisible-hand” explanation as a form of get-out-of-jail-free card. It is not the only doctrine to do so, others include neoliberalism and some strains of conservatism. In this essay, I will lay out why libertarians are inclined to believe in the absolving ability of the invisible-hand and why that may be wrong. To begin with, I will examine Robert Nozick’s concept of “invisible-hand explanations”. From there I speculate about how “invisible-hand explanations” are used by libertarians to exonerate individuals from claims of extortion and exploitation. Finally, I will show why such extortion does, in fact, take place despite the invisible-hand mechanism at work. In this essay, I will mean “extortion” to be the unacceptable situation of profiting from the unproductive coercing or defrauding of another to loss, and by “intention”, I mean deciding with reasonable knowledge of the expected outcome of one’s actions.

Nozick wrote, “[a]n invisible–hand explanation explains what looks to be the product of someone’s intentional design, as not brought about by intentional design.” The emphasis here is on the unintentional quality of a complex process. No one intends the results of the process that brings about a good or bad result. While there is a concerted effort, the effort is not coordinated because it is unknown. Each actor is acting in the dark, irrespectively of all the other actors, and consequently cannot know what the ultimate result of their efforts will be. The quintessential example is the self-interest of individual proprietors to feed, cloth, and shelter society. After all, every morning Philadelphia gets food from all over the country to feed its citizens and no one has to coordinate the effort. 

Nozick’s concern with the invisible-hand is for protecting the rights of the beneficiaries of such unintentional processes from intentional efforts at redistribution by others who feel the need to correct the results of such unintentional processes because they feel the results to be unfair, unjust, or just plain bad. But Nozick and other’s of a similar mind, defend these results as fair and just, even if they are not “good”. They claim, it is not the fault of these beneficiaries that they are beneficiaries, since the entire process that made them such developed unintentionally. I will not belabor the reader with an extended discussion of Nozick’s and other’s arguments for such an explanation. Instead, I will simply assert that this argument is used most often to defend against redistributive efforts by the left by claiming the lack of intentionality legitimates the uneven distribution of wealth on principle. Negative appearing outcomes say where one person is made insanely wealthy while tens of thousands of others work incessantly for near-poverty wages only seems unfair because of a vestigial sense of sentimentality, left-over from our primitive ancestors and an unhealthy obsession on human affairs being justified by logical reason. The question we will concern ourselves with is: when is an individual responsible for extortion? Libertarians do not deny that extortion exists. What Nozick et al. do argue is that when the process that creates what appears to be extortion is the result of an “invisible-hand explanation”, i.e. it is unintentional, no individual can be held responsible for extorting anyone. If no one is responsible for the extortion, it is not, in fact, extortion, our feelings of unfairness are misguided.

To really understand what Nozick et al. are up to, let us examine some concrete examples. Imagine you are carrying a briefcase with a quarter of a million dollars in it. You hail a taxi. Stepping in, the driver, with full knowledge of the money you carry, tells you to gift it to them or they will shoot you; they then credibly produce a pistol and aim it at you. You are of course free to choose. You can refuse to hand over the briefcase and take the bullet. Likewise, you can trade the money for your personal well being. Either way, we might say that since you were free to choose, no “robbery” took place. However, I think most of us would agree that your choice in the matter was coerced. 

The trouble with coercion is that it’s not always condemnable according to these theorists. We can easily imagine a scenario where you are nearly starving and a man offers you a job where you would work for an income that is equivalent to five percent of the value of whatever you create by your labor. You are of course free to starve, but if you take the job most libertarians would say that you chose this freely and were not really coerced. So, libertarians and neoliberals have left the burden of explaining what the difference is between the first and second cases.  It is here, where they must maintain that the former case is an example of extortion while the latter is not, that the “invisible-hand explanation” is deployed. 

The difference, they claim, is that the first case is intentional and the second case is not. The taxi driver who pulled the gun on you, set up the situation in order to get the money from you; while the boss who offers you five-percent is merely leveraging a natural situation that they neither created nor intended. While it is somewhat arbitrary whether or not and to what extent the taxi driver and the boss are creators of their situations, the point is nevertheless valid. The situation the boss exploited is not one of his own design, but that of the taxi driver is. Left here it would be reasonable to conclude that the first case is extortion and the second case is not.

But let us not leave it there, instead, let us further examine this by asking: what is it about intention that makes the first case extortion? We might speculate that Nozick et al. believe that intention is the product of specific knowledge and that without knowledge there can be no intent. This would make sense to us intuitively. Returning to the taxi, imagine this time that you merely left your money-laden briefcase in the backseat of the taxi after paying the fare. The driver takes off with it and it’s not until hours later you realize it has gone missing. Let’s further imagine that the driver about that same time discovers the money in their vehicle and claims it. Has the driver stolen or extorted your money from you? We are inclined to say no. This is simply a case of lost and found: you lost money and the driver found it. The driver lacked knowledge of the money about to come into their possession through some unintended process. This lack of knowledge equals a lack of intention. The complete lack of intention both on your part and that of the driver, in this case, legitimates the money really belonging to the driver after it was found. So, Nozick et al. would confidently conclude that the case with the boss is more like this case where the gun was pulled because of intentionality. 

But, it has not really been established how intention is made manifest. Let me assert that if we cannot have intention without knowledge, then we cannot have knowledge without intention or in philosopher-speak: knowledge of the consequences is materially equivalent to intentionality. Let us return again to the taxi and say that this third time, you have again forgotten your briefcase, but as you are exiting the vehicle, the taxi driver turns around and notices that the briefcase you brought with you is still in the backseat and not in your hand. Let’s also say that he knows it’s full of money. To be precise, the taxi driver, in this case, didn’t intend for you to leave your money and neither did you so again this case is unintended; however, the driver now has come into possession of the full knowledge that you have forgotten your money and that they stand to benefit from your loss. In this brief moment, a decision presents itself that did not occur when you forgot your money without the driver immediately realizing it. The driver, with full knowledge of the situation, has a choice. If they can choose, the outcome of the situation must–by definition–be an intended outcome. 

The taxi driver then–if choosing not to speak-up–is acting intentionally, hoping to profit from another’s unintended situation. Even though the driver did nothing to bring that situation about it is still intentional in its last act. This last act is sufficient to condemn it as extortion because it is an intentional design to benefit from another’s loss. The driver cannot be saved by our switching criteria from intention to action either. Not taking an action is to act intentionally when the lack of action is the result of a deliberate choice. Choosing to do nothing is an intentional action. Things are different when one acts or does not act without knowledge. Failing to act because of ignorance or confusion is not an intentional act. However, in the full light of knowledge that one will gain by not acting, to not act is intentional, and it is intention which, according to our libertarian theories, condemns an action as extortion.

Let us return now to the boss offering the starving person a five-percent wage. If the boss recognizes that poverty would allow him to depress the wages of the employee then the boss is extorting money from the employee even though the boss did not create the situation of their poverty. The creation of poverty is not the issue, the intention is. The boss is not extorting the employee by offering a lower wage if and only if the boss has no knowledge of the potential employee’s poverty or how that poverty would affect their choice to work for lower wages. By simply knowing that a starving person will accept whatever they can get and that this person is starving, one is in full knowledge of the situation. The choice to use it for leverage must, therefore, be seen as extortion. Contra Nozick and the rest, the boss’s case is more like pointing a gun at a person and demanding their money than it is like them losing their money in your car. The boss knew what it is was they were doing when they suggested a lower wage or they wouldn’t have known to suggest a lower wage at all. 

This illuminates what should have been obvious to Adam Smith and Robert Nozick alike: once the action of the invisible-hand is revealed, it is no longer unintentional, no longer innocent. The problem for libertarians is that the “invisible” part of the “invisible-hand explanation” is precisely what conveys the innocence, namely ignorance; but the “explanation” is the imparting of knowledge, and so promptly does away with the innocence. The unintentional situation is unintentional precisely because no one knows what exactly is happening or what the outcome will be. But the process of explaining that some good or bad outcome is the result of an “invisible-hand mechanism” is to reveal the hand at work! That is to say, explaining anything is to let people know what is happening, how their actions add-up to arrive at a specific outcome. To say that New York is fed by the self-interest of the butcher, the brewer, and the baker is to show us exactly how each contributes to the whole, and subsequently to necessitate our choice of intervening in that mechanism’s workings or to leave it alone. Either way, the leaf has fallen away and we stand nude in the full sun of knowledge.

Adam Smith himself–by the act of explaining the action of the invisible-hand in the market–made it possible to choose whether or not to hazard making corrections or by inaction leaves the system to its own devices and endure whatever consequences may come. So, the fact is that since Adam Smith’s time, the evils of economic activity brought about by the revealed workings of any invisible-hand at work are the result of an intentional choice on the part of those in power not to mitigate them. It may be that a choice to meddle will turn out worse than not meddling, but we cannot hide behind the “invisible-hand explanation” anymore. It is not invisible at all, it is a human hand, our hand, the hand of those in power and it moves as they will.