Power, Domination and the System

On the radical Left, broadly construed, there is a long history of debates concerning the relationship between the agency of dominant groups and the structure of social systems. On the one hand, talk of the 1%, for instance, calls to mind a dominant group—a ruling class—which stands over and above the majority of society. On the other hand, it is part and parcel of radical politics to condemn not just this or that dominant group, but the entire system. I suggested in a recent post that we don't have to see these two complaints as at odd with one another.

Still, numerous questions remain: Is power always exercised by one agent over another? Or is power built into the infrastructure of the system itself? Is domination, a familiar concept in the vocabulary of the Left, always a matter of one agent dominating another? Or does it make sense to speak of people being dominated by a system?

A couple of examples might illustrate the problems lurking for anyone trying to answer the questions above. Compare and contrast, for example, radical feminists who conceive of gender oppression as dyadic relation of domination between dominator (man) and dominated (woman), with post-structuralist feminists (influenced by Foucault, for example) who understand gender domination as a process in which agents are produced by a certain regime or system of power. (Note that I by no means aim to suggest that these are the only two viable positions on offer). The former—and it must be conceded that we're oversimplifying here—tend to tie domination to a certain kind of social relationship between an agent of domination and a subject of domination. The latter, however, might argue that domination is not something agents can be said to do to other agents at all; agents are dominated not by other people, but by non-agential features of social life (e.g. agents may be said to be dominated by institutions, social norms, practices, or by the system itself).

This same debate, in slightly different forms, surfaces in critical race theory as well as in the Marxist tradition. In the Marxist tradition, the debate between Miliband and Poulantzas in the pages of New Left Review during 1970s is exemplary. I've argued elsewhere that the debate between so-called "structuralists" and "instrumentalists" over the character of the State generally misses the mark; both fail to adequately theorize the complex dialectic between structure and agency, system and lifeworld.

Still, there are a lot of things going on in these debates—far more than a simple disagreement about the nature of social domination. But in this post I'd like to say something about the question of whether it makes sense to say that someone is dominated by a social system. I'd like to keep this discussion within a broadly materialist register, so I'm going to ignore approaches that reduce everything to linguistic/discursive matters. My question is this: does it make sense, within a materialist social theory, to speak of persons being dominated by a system? It clearly makes sense, in my view, to speak of some agent (or group of agents) dominating another agent (or group of agents). What's not so clear is whether it makes sense to say that someone can be dominated by some entity that is not an agent.

In most treatments of this question, players in the debate tend to talk past one another or dismiss the merits of the other's view entirely. This was to some extent evident in the famous Miliband-Poulantzas debate of the 1970s. It is evident in the contemporary literature in political theory on domination, and it surfaces quite often in exchanges between theorists sympathetic to Foucault's writings on power and those who are not. A more nuanced assessment is needed.

I stress, however, that these are not merely academic questions. The question of the relationship between dominant groups and the system we live under—capitalism—is in some ways a key question on the table in the Occupy movement. Marxists, in particular, need a nuanced way of emphasizing both that the system must be changed, on the one hand, and that it makes sense to speak of struggling against a ruling class on the other. There are also complicated questions about how various kinds of oppression tie into the ruling class model and the system of capitalism. Gaining clarity on these matters is politically important.

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Let's begin with the example of dyadic social relationship between dominator and dominated. Let's say that the relationship is social (rather than merely personal) in the sense that it is structured by background conditions of various kinds (e.g. institutions, practices, laws, norms, social expectations, etc.) What makes a social relationship an instance of domination is that one party has a certain kind of power—a certain kind of unsavory influence or sway—over the other. That sway could be grounded in various ways. For example, it could emanate from dependence, vulnerability, coercive power, institutionalized authority, etc. But what matters is that one agent stands above the other in a problematic way, on the model of master/slave or master/servant.

Importantly, this kind of social relationship exists whether or not the master is benevolent or relatively gracious. A master who treats his subordinates relatively well is still a master. As Fredrick Douglass puts it:

"My feelings [toward slave masters] were not the result of any marked cruelty in the treatment I received; they sprung from the consideration of my being a slave at all. It was slavery—not its mere incidents—that I hated."

Paternalism—no matter how nicely administered or well intended—is still paternalism. What's problematic is a certain kind of social relationship—not, in the first instance, how well superiors treat those beneath them. Advocates of "socialism-from-above" systematically miss this point. Hence, apart from defending technocrats and administrative layers of elites who lord over dis-empowered populations of subjects, they place themselves in the same camp as philanthropic capitalists—think of Jeffrey Sachs—who propose a increased flow of aid and resources from powerful to powerless groups (while leaving the asymmetrical relations of power fully intact). To stand for socialism-from-below is to stand uncompromisingly against relations of domination as such, regardless of whether the "superiors" in question—be they bureaucrats, lords, or capitalists—are relatively benevolent or gracious. To stand for socialism-from-below means to stand firmly against social relations in which some group enjoys a certain kind of arbitrary, discretionary power over others. Socialism means empowering the masses of the population to take control of their own destiny and run society themselves.

Now, the point here isn't that the consequences of domination (e.g. poverty, deprivation, etc.) don't matter; on the contrary, the point is that the causes of those consequences—certain kinds of social relationships—are more fundamental than the consequences themselves. Merely examining a person's standard of living or level of consumption isn't good enough. Even if I have a relatively high standard of living, I am dominated if I am dependent on small, powerful class of people for employment and for the goods I need to survive.

So, even when the consequences of domination are relatively good—in the case of a benevolent tyrant—the relations of domination don't cease to be unjust. The Marxist complaint against capitalism, after all, isn't in the first instance that it distributes certain kinds of social goods unequally. That's because the essence of the Marxist complaint isn't about distribution; it's about production. We remain trapped in a liberal framework if we only think in terms of how given social goods get parceled out. Redistribution takes the existing relations of production as given and asks how we can mitigate the effects of capitalism. Marxist politics aren't fundamentally about taxation and redistribution; they are about founding society anew by transforming the structure of social production. Rather than merely examining how already-existing goods should get distributed, Marxism examines the exploitative social relations built into the basic structure of society, thereby laying bare how distributions come about in the first place.

But Marxists are concerned with more than just exploitation. Marxists have long argued that capitalism is a system built upon social relations of domination. There is a sense in which workers' lives in capitalism cannot ever be fully their own. Workers' lives—on the shop floor as much as in society writ large—are largely determined by the decisions of capitalists. Absent collective resistance from workers themselves, capitalists unilaterally make decisions about investment, the organization of the workplace, what is produced, the pace of work, wages and benefits, interest rates, levels of employment, and so on. Workers are, of course, denied the material benefits—high levels of comfort, consumption, financial security, etc.—that accrue from membership in the ruling class. But capitalists—because of their dominant position in the production process—enjoy a degree of decision-making power and control over their own lives that workers cannot never enjoy within capitalism.

In the workplace, the boss is a dictator. Without the collective power that comes from being organized in trade unions, individual workers are under the complete control of the boss while they're on the clock. They are forced to take orders, to do what they're told, to play a role in the boss's overall project, whatever that may be. When under the eye of superiors, workers are forced to work at the bosses pace. They are forced to show up when they're told to show up, and they forced to accept the wages that are handed down to them without complaint. They are to have no say in any of this. The only power the isolated individual worker has is the power to quit—and, ultimately, try to get a job working for a different capitalist. "If you don't like, you can leave... and there are plenty of others waiting to take your place."

So, the boss is clearly in a dominant position vis-a-vis the workers. The social relationship between worker and capitalist is one in which the capitalist enjoys a high degree of arbitrary, discretionary power over the worker's life. Workers are barred from participating in the governance of the workplace, where the discretionary power of capitalists reigns supreme. Their work-lives are determined by a group who neither shares their interests nor intends to share any of its power.

Of course, domination doesn't stop at the factory gates. Liberal reformers have often made this mistake and argued that because the working class has the vote it follows that the capitalists only dominate workers in the workplace. Outside the workplace, the argument goes, workers and capitalists are equals because they both enjoy equal political power.

If there were times in history when this argument could get at least get some traction—e.g. when there were a strong working-class political parties vying for majorities in government—it rings hollow today. It is obvious that the State is a class State—a capitalist State. It is not a neutral vessel that the working-class can lay hold of. The State is little more than a "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."

So, the ruling class enjoys dominance not simply in the workplace but in society writ large. In controlling both the State, as well as the overall direction of the productive process as a whole, the ruling class dominates all other classes in society—working class and middle class alike. Of course, the threat posed by the working class to ruling class power means that the State will come down particularly hard on workers, sometimes leaving middle class groups relatively unscathed by comparison. But it remains true that the middle class is under the thumb of the ruling class and enjoys no substantial means of attenuating its power.

***

What I just sketched was the "dominant-group" model of power and domination. The focus is on certain kinds of social relationships between persons (or groups of persons). It is conceded, of course, that these relationships don't rest on thin air—they are structured by background conditions (e.g. law, norms, practices, institutions, economic organizations, etc.). But domination itself is only said to exist between agents—domination without agents is not possible.

Now, many—especially those influenced by post-structuralism but also proponents of structuralist versions of Marxism—will reject this as foolish. Some might argue that agents are nothing but the mere products of power or material processes. Others would stress the epistemic priority of functionalist explanations that derive from a theory of the system as a whole—as opposed to action-theoretic explanations that focus on the intentions and purposes of agents.

These opponents of the dominant-group model don't aim to extend or broaden the analysis. On the contrary, they seek to deny the conceptual space occupied by the dominant-group theorists entirely. For these opponents—call them eliminativists—it is fundamentally problematic to define power or domination in terms of relations between agents. Agents are just epiphenomena—what matters fundamentally is structure, systemic processes, the basic function of social institutions, and macro-level forces. It is fair, I think, to attribute this sort of view to Althusser, for example.

I think eliminativists are radically mistaken. I won't argue for that claim here (although I've criticized their views elsewhere (e.g. here), because I'd like to explore the more interesting debate between dominant-group theorists, on the one hand, and those who seek to extend and broaden our conception domination to include agent-agent domination as well as system-agent domination.

***

So, while preserving the analysis of agent-agent domination, I'd like to consider certain cases of system-agent domination. Why consider such cases? I think it would be a mistake to say that we should because we need to capture the unintentional character of certain kinds of domination. The dominant-group model, as I understand it, already captures that. Nor would it be correct to say that we need to understand system-agent domination because otherwise considerations of institutional structure fall by the wayside. The dominant-group model also captures such concerns insofar as it is a basic premise of that theory that social relations of domination are—in order to be such—structured by background conditions that include institutional structure.

The reason, in my estimation, why we need to consider system-agent cases of domination is that there are compelling examples, especially in Marxism, that go unexplained by a solely agent-agent approach.

What I have in mind, for example, is Marx's claim in capitalism people are dominated by accumulated dead labor. Humanity comes to be dominated by its own products. For example, as Alan Ryan puts it:

"Marx supposes that under capitalism, there are two sorts of oppression at work, rather than one. Capitalists oppress workers, driving them as hard as they can to extract maximum surplus value from them. But this is not because capitalists are individually brutal; they themselves are driven by their capital. The irrationality of a capitalist economy in which production is dictated by the accidents of market interaction is read by Marx as the blind tyranny of capital over its human subjects. The fact that capital is in any case only dead labor leads Marx to tremendous rhetorical flights in which he describes capital as a vampire, renewing its life-in-death by sucking the blood of living laborers...what humanity has done is create Frankenstein's monster; so far from the world submitting to human control, it has been set in motion as a blind force tyrannizing over all of us... Capital dominates all of us and turns all of us into its purposes."

The image of Frankenstein is apt. We needn't develop this fecund metaphor fully in order to see that capitalism is like a monster humanity has created which is entirely out of control. With the historical development of capitalism we get the tyranny of the bottom line, the iron cage of instrumental rationality, a tendency toward universal commodification, reified consciousness, and all the rest of it. But the paradox is this: history is made by human beings—it's not the case that it is merely something that happens to us. What we do or don't do in the here and now has historical ramifications. So, what we have is a situation in which a product of accumulated human actions—capitalism—comes to lord over and dominate the very beings whose actions and historical development brought it into existence. A system constructed by human beings through a complex dialectic of historical development comes to appear as something natural, inevitable, and immutable. The system destroys the natural environment, degrades human relationships, and shackles humanity to an end—accumulation for accumulation's sake—which it cannot really endorse and remain truly human. And we seem to have to ability to steer or control the system within the horizons of capitalism.

Even capitalists, who are a dominant group in a position to lord over and exploit the working majority, are shackled by the pressures of the system. A capitalist who refuses to re-invest today's profit in expanded production, who refuses to drive down wages and fight unionization drives is not likely to remain a capitalist for long. The coercive force of market competition locks capitalists into a situation in which their forced to sink or swim, accumulate or go bust.

But it's not as though all actions undertaken by the ruling class are wholly determined by the system. The ruling class, which is a group of consciously acting agents, makes blunders, fails to recognize their class interests, and sometimes even fail to do what the system demands of them. To say that they are in some sense dominated by a system they can neither wholly control nor fully understand is not to say that they lack agency. Nor is it to deny that they have power over others and, as occupants of a certain office in the economic structure of society, are in a position to make important decisions within a constrained set of possibilities.

The ruling class deserves the righteous scorn of the toiling majority. It is a mistake to think that the problematic structural features of the system absolve the ruling class of culpability of various kinds. In the heat of struggle against ruling class repression, to not feel this righteous anger is a political failing of a certain kind. If I'm a leftist in Chile in 1973, I resent the repressive counter-revolutionary violence instigated by the ruling class in a way that I cannot resent a natural disaster. We need to preserve the power of the dominant-group model while also allowing that domination is a relation that can obtain between agents and a system. Reductionist and eliminitivist positions distort the terrain here considerably.

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Human beings make their own history, but not in conditions of their own choosing. As Alasdair MacIntyre once noted, phrases of this sort abound in Marx's work, and the goal of socialists has got to be to eliminate that "but", the caveat that must always accompany acknowledgements of the fact that we make our own history in the context of class society.

For that to be a goal, it has to be possible. Eliminativists foreclose it as a possibility. But in focusing on the workings of social systems as concrete, historical totalities, system-level analysis catches all sorts of processes that would go unnoticed from the perspective of the participant in social practices. We don't capture everything that matters if we only talk in terms of the conscious actions of dominant groups. But the system we criticize isn't natural, although some functionalist social theorists (e.g. Luhmann) would disagree. It is a human construction. As such, it is in our power to consciously change it.

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Is the Wealth of the Rich Legitimate? Part 3

In previous posts (here and here) I've examined two stories that the rich tell to explain why their wealth is legitimate. Or, more precisely, I've considered and rejected two arguments meant to show that the wealth of capitalists is legitimate. The first was that capitalists deserve their wealth because their incomes are exactly proportional to their productive contributions to society. The second was that the wealth of capitalists is their reward for taking risks. We saw that neither argument succeeded in showing that wealth of the rich is legitimate. But another important argument, which we have yet to consider, still looms large. That argument is that wealth of capitalists is legitimate because it flows into their hands by way of voluntary market transactions between individuals.

Before we look at that argument more closely, let me situate it within the overall context of attempts to justify capitalism. As I see it, there are three main strategies: consequentialist, rights-based and desert-based. We've already seen two desert-based attempts at justification. Desert-based arguments claim that the wealth of capitalists is legitimate because they can be said to deserve it (e.g. because it matches their productive contributions or because proportionally rewards some risky activity that yields a productive contribution). I examined two desert-based arguments already and argued that they were untenable.

Consequentialist arguments, on the other hand, claim that capitalist wealth is justified because it is a means to desirable consequences (e.g. overall economic growth, socially useful innovation, etc.). Most consequentialist arguments for capitalism focus on incentives (not on what we can be said to deserve or have a right to). We have seen at least one consequentialist argument already within the post on risk-taking, namely, that some capitalists need big shares of wealth in order to incentivize or motivate them to take risks to innovate. That particular argument is consequentialist because it says that big cash rewards (for capitalists) are a necessary means to good overall consequences (i.e. generating socially useful innovations). I'll examine consequentialist arguments in more detail in part 4, which will be the final installment of this series on the wealth of the rich. The main focus of this post, however, will be to refute rights-based justifications of capitalism. Rights-based arguments claim that capitalist wealth is legitimate because they acquired it through a series of legitimate, voluntary individual market transactions.

The typical rights-based argument for capitalism goes something like this: Provided that there is "no force or fraud", everything a capitalist can get from the market is legitimately theirs. Or, put another way, because the market is nothing more than a space for free individual exchange, everything that results from it is legitimate. Why should voluntary exchanges between individuals yield legitimate holdings? Because voluntary market exchange, it is argued, tends to exemplify individual freedom. On this view, people are free if they enjoy certain rights of non-interference. But because the market is (allegedly) no more than an aggregation of free, voluntary individual exchanges, it follows that any third party interference with market activity would curtail freedom (and violate the rights) of market participants.

The most famous statement of this argument was given by right-wing philosopher Robert Nozick in his 1974 book Anarchy, State and Utopia. In that book, he puts forward a thought experiment involving Wilt Chamberlain that purports to show that capitalist market distributions are just (and that any interference with them is illegitimate). The gist of it is this. Suppose that lots of people want to see Wilt Chamberlain play basketball. Suppose that they are each more than willing to part with $5 to see him. So, Chamberlain collects a $5 admission fee from each person who wants to come see him play. Each person, let us suppose, is freely and voluntarily making the choice to pay $5 for a ticket to see him play. At the end of the day, Chamberlain has amassed quite a fortune from ticket sales. But it looks as if he's done so in a way that is 100% unobjectionable. After all, hasn't he done no more than transacted with hundreds of individual persons, all of whom were very pleased to pay $5 to see him play?

Nozick's point is two-fold. First, it appears as though any interference with this process would be wrong. After all, would a third-party be justified in paternalistically judging that the fans shouldn't spend $5 on a ticket? Would it be fair if someone prevented Chamberlain from individually interacting with any of the fans who purchase the tickets? Nozick's point is that any interference with this process would be tantamount to "prohibiting capitalist acts between consenting adults." Put more plainly, it would interfere with the freedom (and the right to non-interference) of those involved. Second, it looks as if any redistribution of Chamberlain's earnings would unjustly tinker with his legitimate holdings. After all, if he acquired all of his earnings fair and square, and if each individual transaction freely gave them to him through a market exchange, what gives some third party the right to interfere? Wouldn't any redistribution, or social system that prevented such free exchanges, curtail the freedom of people like Chamberlain and his fans to come together for mutual gain?

Before I show why Nozick's argument doesn't work, let's get even clearer about what it attempts to show. Notice that Nozick is not saying that Wilt Chamberlain deserves the money he receives. Neither is he saying that the fans deserve to see him play. Desert doesn't enter into it. Nozick's own view--and other hard-Right defenders of capitalism are with him on this--is that it would require a lot of third party interference to actually have a society in which we could be sure that everyone got what they "deserved". In other words, he thought there would have to be some agency charged with monitoring whether someone was industrious, thrifty, lazy, etc. in order to see that they got what they deserved. So, unlike many a defender of capitalism, Nozick isn't naive enough to think that capitalism simply gives each what they deserve. What he does think, however, is that capitalism is the only system in which freedom from external interference reigns supreme. The Chamberlain example is supposed to show us that allowing voluntary market exchanges typically produces inequalities of wealth that are fully justified. Any other kind of social system--or any redistribution of Chamberlain's wealth--would, for Nozick, require that we sideline individual freedom for the sake of something else.

There are number of well-known problems with the argument. I make no claims to being original here--a good number of the most convincing criticisms are made by G.A. Cohen in Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality.

One problem is that it is far from clear that a "voluntary" market exchange is therefore one that is freely entered into. This problem is simply not addressed by the WC parable. Take the case of price-gouging during natural disasters. Now, if I sell you a bottle of water for $100 in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, and you're really thirsty, there's a sense in which I'm not coercing you to buy the bottle. You could walk away and try to find water somewhere else. So if you buy my $100 bottle of Aquafina, there's a sense in which it is voluntary. But are you free in such a case? Hardly. You are disempowered, desperate and vulnerable to exploitative treatment from people like me. Moreover, I'm in a dominant position with respect to you because I have some crucial thing you need to survive, and I am under no duress to give it to you whereas you are under a lot of pressure to get it. Lots of market exchanges, while not quite as vivid or extreme as this, are very similar. Market transactions between buyer (capitalist) and seller (worker) of labor-power are lopsided. And, of course, the worker is forced (and thereby made unfree) to sell her labor-power to a capitalist on the market because she has no other means to earn a living. Prenuptial agreements are often lopsided in favor of men because they have more bargaining power (maybe because of sexist social norms, maybe because they are the "bread winner", etc.). There are any number of examples here. The point is that market exchanges--from the perspective of freedom alone--look a lot less innocent than the WC example lets on once we examine the real world. Nozick isn't for the greatest overall amount of individual freedom in society. He's simply against certain restrictions on the property rights of owners of property. Accordingly, he rejects redistributing wealth from the 1% to the 99% in order to increase the aggregate amount of freedom in society. As I've noted elsewhere, this is one reason that the epithet "libertarian" simply cannot reasonably apply to those who defend capitalism.

Another problem is the following. The fans in the example are imagined to want nothing more than to see Chamberlain play. But there will surely be a gap between what they think they're getting and what will actually result from their aggregated transactions. The fact that they want to see WC play doesn't mean that they want him to individually amass a huge fortune. Neither does the fact that they're willing to pay $5 to see him play mean that they voluntarily consent to the power over others that a large mass of wealth might grant WC. Holdings in capitalist societies are, after all, not simply means of consumption, but sources of power. Suppose everything is put up for sale on the market, and that someone uses his wealth to purchase what were previously public streets in a particular city (I borrow this example from Elizabeth Anderson's paper "The ethical limitations of the market"). This quite obviously leaves open the door for a great deal of tyranny. When roads are publicly owned, I need not ask anyone for their permission to use them. I am free to move about where I please and I need not bow or scrape before some particular owner. But when the roads are the private property of another person, Nozick thinks the guns of the State must be used to protect whatever arbitrary decisions the owner makes regarding their property. So if, for example, the owner forced everyone to get his explicit permission to use the roads, that would be protected by the coercive power of law. Or, if he only allowed roads to be used on Tuesdays, that would fly as well. Or, he could charge an exorbitant fee. The point is that all the non-owners of the road would be subject to arbitrary restraints on their freedom of movement and association by owners. They would be forced to subject themselves to whatever crazy terms the owners demand. Nozick could have no complaint about any of this. Stronger still, Nozick would staunchly oppose any democratic decision-making process that aimed to regulate or reclaim ownership of the roads. Thus, we see what side he's really on: property owners come first, even if the vast majority is made less free as a result of their actions.

But Nozick wants us to think that the resulting consequences of the market transactions in the WC example are legitimate because each person voluntarily willed them into being. But, in fact, they didn't. All each fan did--from their individual perspective--was consent to pay a small sum to see WC play. They didn't consent to all of the macro-level economic consequences that might follow from allowing one person to amass large sums of wealth. Nor have the explicitly given WC their blessing to buy up public roads (or whatever else WC might do with his holdings).

All of this is concealed in Nozick's thought experiment. He asks us to blindly jump from the micro-level ("what could be wrong with parting with $5 to see WC play?") to the macro-level without asking how it is that the decisions within the former should justify consequences in the latter. More often than not, the large-scale consequences of market transactions are opaque to individual actors. And, what's more, often the choices of some market actors curtail the choices of others by impacting supply, demand, employment, investment, etc. So it would be absurd to say that the narrow perspective of the individual consumer lends legitimacy to the macro-consequences of the aggregation of millions of uncoordinated individual actions. When I purchase a can of soup, I may be said to have made some voluntary exchange with the owners of the grocery store. But I haven't freely consented to all of the consequences of that transaction, since I may not even know what they will be (or what they are likely to be). Yet Nozick wants to confer legitimacy on the large-scale outcomes of market transactions by appealing to our free consent in small-scale individual transactions. There's a massive gap in the argument here. Everyone knows that capitalism is arranged in such a way that individually "rational" actions produce collectively irrational outcomes that no particular individual endorses. Why should the individual attractiveness of buying a ticket to see WC for $5 grant legitimacy to those macro-level outcomes, particularly when it's hard to see them from the perspective of an individual consumer? It's almost as if Nozick is simply blotting out any critical analysis of the social system itself, preferring instead to keep us focused on small-scale transactions. The ideological effect of keeping us on the micro-level is profound.

Another problem is the following. Just because I'm willing to pay $5 to see Wilt Chamberlain play doesn't entail that I'm willing to pay Wilt Chamberlain that money. I might be willing to part with $5 to see him play, but I might not want him to acquire a disproportionate share of resources (because that would give him unjustifiable power over others, say). Maybe I'm willing to throw into a public pot to see WC, but I'm unwilling to allow one person to amass all of the earnings. Nozick simply glosses over the difference between these two--which clearly adds to the rhetorical power of his example.

There are deeper problems with the WC parable, however. Nozick wants to generalize the WC example to all of society. But once the market rules all spheres of public (and private) life, there's no space left for democracy at all. This doesn't bother Nozick himself, or many so-called "libertarians", because they aren't fans of democratic self-rule.

But suppose that Nozick had swallowed his disdain for democracy and argued instead that markets are democratic since, as in the WC example, people can "vote with their dollars." Notwithstanding the obvious undemocratic fact that "voting with dollars" means that those with more money get more votes, there are still other more fundamental reasons why markets are not democratic. The trading floor of a stock exchange is not like a public forum for deliberation and debate among equals. The market, as André Gorz describes it, "is a place where huge production and sales oligopolies...encounter a fragmented multiplicity of buyers who, because of their dispersed state, are totally powerless... [the consumer] is only able to choose between a variety of products, but he has no power to bring about the production of other articles, more suited to his needs, in place of those offered to him." The problem here is that markets respond to unreflective individualized wants--consumer preferences--expressed by buying or not buying something. Genuine democracy, however, is not fundamentally about unreflective individual wants. Democracy is about the exchange of public reasons between free and equal citizens about matters of collective concern. We could rephrase this in terms of exit vs. voice, consumer vs. citizen. Markets give the consumer (or the seller) freedom of exit. The buyer can simply walk away without buying, just as the seller can say "take it or leave it". But the consumer has no freedom of voice. That is, consumers have no power to shape the background conditions that structure the choices before them in the marketplace. Moreover, they have no say or voice in decisions about what gets produced, how it gets produced, etc. All they have is the freedom to buy or not buy--as consumers they lack any other means of having a voice in the basic structure of the economy. Notice that workers--if they are not organized--also lack freedom of voice and only have the power to quit their job (but no genuine say in their work conditions, what gets produced, etc.).

Freedom of voice, however, is central to any plausible notion of democracy. Democracy means that we collectively base our decisions on collective reasoned argument, not on unreflective individual consumer preferences. For example, if I'm in a convenience store looking to buy a candy bar, it would be absurd for the store owner to come and criticize, question and debate me about my taste in candy. I would be perfectly justified in saying, "look, I don't have to justify myself to you, I just want the goddamn snickers." But the same is not true of relations between citizens in a self-governing society. Democracy requires that we give public justifications--that others could in principle accept--when we advocate for doing this or that. When we democratically decide what to do, it must be based upon free discussion among equal citizens where nothing but the force of the better argument prevails (e.g. not power, not domination, not threats, etc.). Moreover, democratic processes require that citizens be able to hold one another to account. It wouldn't make sense to say that I "prefer" or merely "want" to cut the Pentagon budget in the same way that I prefer or merely want a snickers bar. Similarly, if you were working in a small group on some project, it would be ridiculous if you said "look, I just want to do X" and then followed all questions from your fellows with "look I just do, OK?". What this makes clear is that there is a profound difference between being a consumer and being a citizen in a self-governing society. Defenders of capitalism often generalize the model of the individual consumer to all spheres of life, thereby eliding more important roles such as that of the citizen.

Let me raise one further objection to the rights-based "entitlement" defense of capitalism. In order to transfer ownership titles through voluntary market exchanges, there have to be things--commodities--that can be bought or sold. But the market cannot create commodities--it is only a mechanism for transfer and exchange. Thus, the rights-based defense of capitalism is incomplete without a story about "just acquisition", that is, a story about how previously unowned things can legitimately become commodities (buyable and sellable on markets). I note, in passing, that any consistent advocate of the rights-based argument for capitalism would have to concede that massive redistributions of wealth and reparations would be necessary to correct for the enslavement, expropriation, violence, colonial domination and oppression that was a central part of how the riches of contemporary capitalism were created. Let us set that inconvenient fact aside, however, and ask a different question: how could unowned things in the world come to be legitimately owned by someone? Rousseau had an answer to this question: "the first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, took it into his head to say, "this is mine", and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. The human race would have been spared endless crimes, wars, murders and horrors if someone had pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out with his fellow men, "Do not listen to this impostor! You are lost if you forget the fruits of the earth belong to everyone, and the earth to no one!". In other words, why wasn't the "original acquisition" of previously unowned parts of the earth not a theft of what should be rightfully held in common? And there are further problems here: aren't some things distorted or degraded if they they are turned into commodities? Take friendship. Friendship, properly understood, may not be bought or sold and still remain friendship. Love is the same way. It also seems wrong to allow (as Nozick does) human beings to be bought and sold as property. Moreover, isn't there something wrong with allowing rights to free speech to be bought and sold on markets? And isn't it wrong to allow people to purchase and sell political influence, justice in the courts, political offices, fire protection, honors (e.g. the Pulitzer Prize), etc.? If this is true--and I think it's obvious that it is--we see quite clearly that generalizing the model of "voluntary market exchange" to all spheres of life makes no sense. It generates irrationalities, unfreedom, lack of democratic voice, and oppression.

So where does this leave us in terms of the rights-based defense of capitalism? What we've seen is that entitlement on the basis of voluntary exchange cannot be generalized to all spheres of life without giving up on the ideals of freedom, equality and democracy. But does that mean that a socialist society would forbid all voluntary exchanges? Of course not. The defining feature of socialism, after all, isn't located within the sphere of exchange or distribution but within production. Socialism has to do with who owns and controls society's means of production. Socialists argue that the people should democratically own and control them; capitalists argue that a small class should own them and all others should be excluded. So, socialists need not deny that there is a role for voluntary exchanges (whether they be in the form of gifts or in the form of market exchanges). What socialists do have to say, however, is that certain goods should not ever be treated like commodities. Political power, access to education, the means of production, human beings, etc. should never be bought and sold through market transactions. Let candy bars be bought and sold, but leave the important features of our shared life together under the jurisdiction of democracy from below.

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Private Property and Freedom

In the previous post, I poked holes in the attempt by many on the Right to ground politics on an allegedly fundamental right to private property. Now, it hardly needs to be said that what moves ordinary people in political argument is not lectures about natural rights. Far more moving is talk of freedom, liberation, emancipation. And for good reason. Liberation is, after all, a far more worthy and valuable goal than the abstract, troubled notion of a "natural right" to property.

Unsurprisingly, Right-wing defenders of private property in the means of production have tended to try to clothe their arguments in the language of freedom. More often than not, it is simply assumed that there is a one-to-one identity between private property rights and freedom. As I've argued elsewhere, once we reflect on this assumption it quickly becomes clear that it is false. But let's spend a moment spelling out why.

What is freedom? Right-wingers can't respond to this question by saying "freedom is not having one's right to property infringed upon", for this is circular. We already know that Right-wingers think there is a fundamental right to private property. What we want to know is why we should believe them that there's an intrinsic link between the institution of private property and freedom. So, the answer to our question can't be that freedom is private property and private property is freedom, for that begs the question.

Suppose, then, that a Right-winger tries the following argument: Private property rights equip an owner of some thing with freedom to do as she pleases with that thing without interference from others. To violate the right, then, is to curtail freedom. That's the connection between property rights and freedom.

So far so good. But this argument is hopelessly incomplete. First of all, the argument lacks the appropriate scope to help us know what a free society would look like. It only focuses on one particular owner of some good and tells us that interference with her ability to dispose of that good as she pleases would limit her freedom. It surely does. But societies are much bigger, much more complex affairs than this example lets on. When one individual owns a thing, that presupposes the non-ownership of all other individuals in the society. Ownership, then, isn't a relation between individual persons and objects. It is a social relation: it relates owners to non-owners in specific ways, detailing what each party may and may not do. So, every claim to ownership entails a claim to non-ownership, a claim to exclusion, on the part of others. But, non-ownership, insofar as it excludes non-owners from the use of certain goods, is freedom-limiting. If I lack food or shelter, private property law will coercively prevent me from camping out on a rich person's land and eating fruit from trees growing on it. If I want to find shelter and food on the land of the wealthy, I am coercively prevented from doing so by the regime of private property. That is a very real limit on my freedom: I am coercively prevented from doing that thing that I'd like to do by external force. Families that are being forcibly removed from their homes during the economic crisis hardly need to be told that this coercive process severely limits their freedom to live without interference.

So what does the Right say about such cases? They say that the restriction on the freedom of the non-owner is right and just. The state should intervene on the behalf of the owner. But why? Because, they'll likely say, the "owner has rights". But why?

Here they can tell a story (like the ones refuted in the previous post) about why we supposedly have such rights. Or they can tell a story about why the owner supposedly deserves her land because she worked for it, etc. But what they can't say is that we have such rights because they promote freedom, since the very case we're considering is one in which the freedom of a non-owner is denied! It's vacuous to say that "freedom is curtailed for the sake of freedom" -for what is it that decides that the freedom of the owner should trump that of the non-owner?

Let's change gears for a moment. Suppose you wanted to create a society with maximum overall freedom in it. Ownership, as we've seen, is a social relationship that regulates owners and non-owners. So there's a question of whether different ways of organizing these social relationships make for more or less freedom. Which of the following arrangements, for example, generate more overall freedom?

1. A society in which 2% of the population owns 98% of the property.
2. A society in which the ownership of property is more or less equally distributed.

To be sure, this is a rather abstract, and problematic, question to ask. But it makes one thing clear. It looks as though the freedom of the propertyless 98% of the population in (1) is going to be much less than it would be in (2). Insofar as the vast majority of the population is propertyless, their freedom to live without facing coercive state interference on behalf the owners (constituting only 2% of the population) of the majority of society's property is severely limited. It is obvious, then, that there is more overall freedom in society (2). So imagine the following scenario. Imagine we're in society (1) and, we ask a Right-winger who, supposedly, believes that freedom is the most fundamental political value the following: "Shouldn't we reorganize our society so that it's more like (2) and less like (1)?". The Right-winger will, of course, say no. That would interfere with the property rights of the 2% who own most of the property. But in saying this, the Right-winger shows her true colors. Freedom-enhancing changes to society are not to be undertaken if they interfere with the "sacred" institution of private property. So private property rights trump freedom for those on the Right who (unjustly) call themselves "liberatarians".

But how is it putatively "natural" property rights are supposedly so fundamental and important that we can't even violate them to promote greater individual freedom? My response would be that they aren't so fundamental or important. In fact I don't even think there's any reason to think that there are such things as "natural" property rights at all. Property is a social institution governing the use of certain things. It can be configured in all kinds of different ways--depending on the kind of society we're talking about. It seems to me insane to claim that human beings by nature come packaged with "rights" to particular, specific institutional arrangements that fit cleanly with the functional demands of a modern capitalist economy. For most of human history such a thing would have made no sense.

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Hegel and Marx on Freedom

"For Hegel freedom consists in being in a certain reflective and deliberative relation to oneself, which itself is possible, so it is argued, only if one is also already in a certain (ultimately institutional, norm-governed) relations to others, if one is a participant in certain practices... Put most simply, for an action to count as mine, it must make a certain kind of sense to the agent, and that means it must fit in intelligibly within a whole complex of practices and institutions within which doing this now could have coherent meaning... On his view, all of the standard conditions of action (e.g. "doing it voluntarily, uncoerced") could be fulfilled, yet we would not want to say that the action is truly "mine" such that I could fully or truly stand behind it, own up to it, and claim ownership of it... Hegel denies that we can separate the moral-psychological, individual dimension of freedom from social relations of dependence and independence said to be equally constitutive of freedom..." Robert Pippin, Hegel's Practical Philosophy, p.4-7

There is much about this that is very attractive as a conception of freedom. Hegel rejects the impoverished "negative" liberal conception of freedom that claims that we are free to the extent that we, as isolated individuals, are not "interfered" with by external coercion. Whereas this anemic view of freedom begins from the idea that persons are asocial atoms unto themselves, Hegel's conception of freedom proceeds from the fact that we are not isolated individual atoms: the institutions, traditions, practices, norms and social relations which surround us are partly constitutive of us. To be free is, therefore, not to be cut off from these constitutive features of human life. To be free is to stand in the right kind of relation with respect to oneself and others. It is to be able to affirm the basic institutions of social life; it is to be able to see oneself and be at home in such institutions.

But, of course, life under modern capitalism is such that we cannot rationally be at home in our society. We cannot see ourselves in the basic institutions of society (e.g. the market, private ownership of the means of production, etc.), since they lord over us as something alien to us, something not under our control. As I noted in a previous post:

"Consider the well-worn idea that you 'can't buck the market'. We have become so used to things as 'market forces'...that you are just as likely to come to grief as if you ignored natural forces -gravity, magnetism and so on.... you'd better do what the market says or else you will be in trouble. But what is the market? Simply the accumulated effects of innumerable human decisions about production and consumption. It is, thus, our own product, from which it follows that, once more, we come to be dominated by our own product."

Think of the terms in which the present financial crisis is described. People in the media talk about the economy as though it were a natural disaster, completely beyond our control, laying waste to human lives in its wake. But the market is no force of nature; it is something that human beings constructed. And what we've built up, we can tear down. "The market is like a monster we have accidentally created, but which now comes to rule our lives". Capitalism is, thus, in Marx's words, "the complete domination of dead matter over men". We cannot affirm the basic institutions of capitalist societies as our own since they dominate us. They are not the products of deliberative, collectively exercised reason, as are the expressions of a democratic process. The basic institutions of capitalism are the products of a system whose basic function is to generate profit for the ruling class. The result is that work, daily life, leisure, the majority of cultural production, etc. all tend to be structured around this unsavory, inhuman end of profit accumulation. This condition of not being able to affirm and recognize our social condition as our own is what Hegel called alienation. Freedom, then, is a kind of "non-alienation", an achievement in which alienation is overcome by way of a socially-grounded self-determination.

Moving from Hegel to Marx, it's worth saying a bit more about why contemporary capitalism is both alienating and unfree. By any measure, capitalism has succeeded in developing the forces of production (e.g. technology, productive instruments and techniques, instrumentally useful technical knowledge, etc.) to a very high degree. But rather than putting this powerful productive capacity in the service of meeting human needs, developing human talents and capabilities, creating the conditions for flourishing, etc... instead, almost all human potential is subjected to, and dominated by, the need to increase profit. Growth for the sake of growth, accumulation for the sake of accumulation, profit for the sake of profit. These are the unsavory priorities that shape social life under capitalism.

Whereas a free society would be one in which the productive forces were put in the service of human interests... ours is one in which human interests are subordinated to the expansion of the productive forces for the sake of expansion. Whereas a rational society would be one in which capital was subordinated to human ends, ours is a society in which human ends are subordinated to the dictates of capital. Whereas capitalism makes us feel as though we're the playthings of larger economic and social forces beyond our control... a socialist society would be one in which we could take control over our own lives by democractizing the basic structure of society. We can only call a society our own when we are able to say of the basic goals of that society that they are the products of our collective deliberations.

It should be obvious why so much of Hegel's conception of freedom appealed to Marx. To be sure, Hegel did not properly understand what the institutions and basic structure of modernity are like. Moreover, whereas Hegel claimed that modern capitalism was a product of a rational historical process, Marx was unrelenting in showing this to be false. History, Marx argued, is not the gradual unfolding of reason, culminating in modern capitalism. History is a political struggle among different groups, framed by the way in which the social surplus is produced. Capitalism, therefore, is not the rational overcoming of alienation, but merely another form of alienation, another class society like those that preceded it. The difference, however, is that capitalism, for the first time, creates the conditions for a free society in a way that previous societies did not. Whereas a free, egalitarian society may not have been possible in the Bronze Age, capitalist societies have made possible such a high degree of productivity that we can satisfy all basic human needs without working ourselves to death doing it. For the first time in human history, the high level of development of the productive forces under capitalism make possible a society free from alienation, class domination and objectively necessary poverty and suffering.

Freedom would not be to walk through a supermarket perusing 20 different brands of toilet cleaner without "external interference"... freedom would be to see in basic social institutions the mark of human, democratic reason. It would be to see oneself, as a member of a modern democratic society, in the basic structure of society and, thus, to be able to reflectively endorse and affirm that society. Such is not possible when the iron law of profit dictates what is to receive investment and what is to wither on the vine. It is not possible to reflectively endorse and affirm what is imposed upon us in the interests of inhuman ends. That is to say, it is not possible to be fully free in a society in which the commanding heights of the economy is governed by the demands of profit and controlled by a small class of capitalists.

In light of the above we can make sense of Alasdair MacIntyre's claim that "...at least one philosophy course, and, more adequately two, should be required of every undergraduate. Of course an education of this kind would require a major shift in our resources and priorities, and, if successful, it would produce in our students habits of mind which would unfit them for the contemporary world. But to unfit our students for the contemporary world ought in any case to be one of our educational aims." To "unfit" students for the modern age, as I'm reading it, means to get them to think critically, i.e. to become aware of alienation (to see clearly the sense in which we cannot truly be at home, and hence free, in modern capitalism). A good education would not be one that subordinated all curricula to the capricious demands of the labor market. A good education would be one which produced in us "habits of mind which would unfit them for the contemporary world" in such a way that they would come to demand that the world itself change. Rather than pandering to the world as it is, good education would challenge us to think seriously about how to change it for the better and truly make it our own.

It should be obvious, but it's nonetheless worth saying, that bureaucratic central planning is equally condemned by this view of freedom. The mechanistic distortions of Stalinism are anathema to freedom. If the basic institutions of society are under the control of a bureaucratic nomenklatura, this is hardly better than capitalism. In such a case we would still feel that we were subject to forces beyond our control, forces which were emphatically not the products of collective, democratic deliberation. For if the state, rather than private capitalists, dominates production there is still the question: but who controls the state? Thus, it should be obvious that taking this Hegelian-Marxist view of freedom leaves only one route to overcoming alienation and class domination: the most radical form of democracy. Only when we're all able to interact with each other as equal co-legislators are we fully free. As long as social relations of domination exist, freedom is not possible. Thus, freedom and equality are not antagonistic others, but mutually constitutive aspects of the same goal.

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More on Freedom

Those on the Right are promiscuous in their use of the language of freedom. This is not a new trend. Bourgeois revolutionaries intent on overturning feudalism in order to expand the power of industrialists and merchants made frequent use of it as well. But though the elites professed to struggle on behalf of liberty against the ossified hierarchies of feudal societies, there was always a vast gap between their rhetoric and the reality they defended. This gap did not go unnoticed by the oppressed and the poor.

Take the English Revolution. It's a popularly held, but false and ideologically distorted, view that the English Revolution was waged on the basis of broad agreement among a mass of "people" who all shared the goal of smashing feudalism and replacing it with a regime of liberty. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Christopher Hill makes extremely clear in his wonderful, politically sharp The World Turned Upside Down, the reasons that the poorest and most oppressed members of English society had for revolting were far different from those of Bourgeois leaders who wanted to establish capitalism. Hill writes:

Within the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century which resulted in the triumph of the Protestant Ethic -the ideology of the propertied class- there threatened another, quite different, revolution. Its success 'might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic.

Political formations among oppressed classes, such as the Levellers, the Ranters, etc. were inspired to revolt on the basis of resistance to both the aristocracy and the emerging capitalist class. They threatened to carry the ideas (freedom, equality, democracy) through to their full realization, which would've meant all of the things Hill mentions above: rejecting the elite rule of capitalists, smashing private ownership of major productive assets, establishing wide participatory democracy over against the top-down structure of industrial capitalism, etc.

This is just to say, even during the paradigmatic Bourgeois revolutions in Europe, the supposed birth place of the values often abused in the defense of capitalism, we find that there were large swaths of people who took the idea of freedom seriously, but did not think for a moment that this idea could be realized under capitalism. On the contrary, they took themselves to be struggling against ruling classes as such, whether they be the old Aristocracy or the new capitalist class.

There are plenty of other examples: anti-colonial struggles in the 20th century, the black liberation movements of the 1960s in the US, the New Left student movements that rocked the world in 1968, the womens' liberation movement, Stonewall and the movement to smash glbt oppression, etc. All of these movements, in one way or another, took the idea of emancipation, of freedom, quite seriously. They thought it actually meant something more than the ability to choose between Wheaties and Cheerios; they were all inspired by the goal of smashing certain social relations of domination. They were interested in freedom from the weight of oppressive institutions, social norms, dominant groups, etc.

With such a politically rich history, it's frustrating that the neoliberal Right has attained a near monopoly on the language of freedom. We can't allow them to get away with this. We can't allow neoliberal ideology to distort the way we think about freedom, nor can we retreat and concede the concept to right-wingers. In truth, neoliberals ("libertarians", capitalist-apologists, whatever) have no ground to stand on when they talk about freedom. Their view is riddled with contradictions, it is self-undermining. You can't say you stand for "individual freedom", as "libertarians" say they do, and propose a social order that subordinates all individuals to the alienating machinery of profit and growth for growth's sake. You can't say you stand for individual liberty and defend a social order that leaves the vast majority of people in chains. The fact that the Right can speak the language of freedom and keep a straight face is remarkable. This needs to be challenged.

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Marx, Democracy, Freedom and Equality

It is fashionable in some post-structuralist circles to argue that ideas like freedom, equality and democracy are rotten to the core. This is, of course, not entirely true (take Derrida, for instance, who said that "I can think of nothing less outdated than the classic emancipatory ideal" and who spent the last years of his life talking about a nebulous, unclear "democracy to come").

Nonetheless, some critics of the global capitalist order, even some self-proclaimed Marxists, have wanted to say that the values of freedom, equality and democracy are themselves the mere ideological products of capitalist domination.

I can't go into too much detail here. This is a massive topic. But I'd like to jot down some quick rebuttals to this mistaken view (with emphasis on its incarnation within Marxism in particular).

Marx himself did not think that freedom, equality, and democracy, were, in themselves, nothing but mere capitalist ideology. To be sure, like all facets of life in contemporary societies, capitalism has attempted to appropriate, defang and efface these values. The result is that George Bush (and now Obama) can speak blithely of freedom and democracy at the same moment as they bow to the wishes of corporations, occupy and bomb foreign countries, and impose austerity for working people while making the rich richer. But does this mean that Marxists stand against freedom and democracy as such?

Of course not. Marx argued, as those who've read him are aware, that the problem with liberal capitalist societies wasn't that they had all the wrong values. His claim was that the dominant values (freedom, equality, democratic self-determination) could not be realized under capitalism. Thus, and his text "On the Jewish Question" here is exemplary, his argument was that the self-image of liberal societies was a sham. (His historical writings, particularly the writings on the Paris Commune are excellent here as well). Marx's claim is that such bourgeois societies could not ever deliver on the promises they made without undergoing revolutionary change; their basic structure, according to Marx, was shot through with contradictions.

Why? Why can't capitalist societies realize the values of freedom and equality? Why can't they be democratic?

Marx's answer is remarkably short and succinct: because capitalist societies are societies in which the major means of production are owned and controlled by a small class of capitalists. Production is for the profit (of this class) and not for social need.

Freedom (i.e. being free from exploitation and oppression, being autonomous and self-determining) is not fully possible for all in capitalist societies, because production under capitalism requires the exploitation of the labor of those who do not own any means of production. That is the vast majority of people in contemporary societies. When you hear a rich politician blathering about freedom, ask: whose freedom? Who is made more free by cutting education and spending vast sums on bailouts and war? Whose freedoms are increased by deregulation, privatization and cuts to social spending?

Capitalist societies have unequal social relations built into their very infrastructure. Thus, the capitalist mode of production erodes people's capacities for free, self-determining action in various other ways as well (e.g. by commodifying culture and media, by reducing people to passive consumers rather than active self-determining citizens, by placing them at the whim of crisis-prone financial markets, causing them to grovel and take on alienating jobs in order to subsist, etc.).

As we've seen above, freedom for all classes is not possible in capitalist societies (more freedom for rich capitalists does not mean more freedom for working people). Why is this so? The reason for this unfreedom is closely linked to the fact of systematic inequalities in capitalism. There is vastly unequal ownership and control of productive assets in capitalist societies, and as a result, working people (those who own no means of production) are unfree. Because of unequal, private ownership of the means of production, ordinary people have no say in big economic decisions and investments that have massive effects on their lives and well-being. Because of unequal concentration of productive wealth, electoral institutions and representatives are constantly under the tutelage of moneyed interests. Inequality and unfreedom are inextricably linked. Equality and freedom are inextricably linked.

Democracy is not far from the discussion here at all. Democracy is the realization of freedom and equality: all have an equal say, an equal voice, in the major social decisions that determine the conditions in which they live their lives. The interests of all are owed equal concern in such decisions: that is what democracy is about.

But capitalism is necessarily and profoundly undemocratic.

Market relations endow consumers only with freedom of exit (i.e. the freedom not to buy something), but no freedom of voice to determine how things are produced. Capitalism, as we saw above, concentrates decision-making and control of production in the hands of a small, gilded elite. Markets operate on the basis of "effective demand" not human needs. Moreover, markets encourage decision making on the basis of unreflective, lowly (ideological) consumer "preferences", rather than reflective principles about which we deliberate and discuss amongst one another. Capitalism allows millions to suffer neglect, disease, poverty and other social ills that erode their capacity to be effective participants in self-government. Capitalism isolates us, divides us, and alienates us from fellow human beings, thus damaging our capacity to be co-legislators in the production of our collective social life. Capitalism encourages and relies upon the anti-democratic destruction caused by racism, sexism and other modes of oppression.

Socialists fight for real democracy (socialist democracy, democracy-from-below, etc.) against the necessarily ineffective set of electoral institutions masquerading as "democratic" in contemporary capitalist societies.

Equality, freedom and democracy, then, are inextricably linked. Their meaning was borne out of struggle against exploitation and oppression. Their practical import has yet to be truly tested. They must be wrested from the control of bourgeois ideologists in the media and political establishment. The gap between these values and our own society is staggering; they should be the basis for struggle for below, not the window-dressing for exploitation, neocolonial oppression and domination worldwide.

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Liberalism, Freedom and "Totalitarianism"

Liberal political theorist Isaiah Berlin is famous for a paper, "Two Concepts of Liberty", in which he distinguishes what he calls "negative liberty" from "positive liberty" and concludes that the latter inevitably leads to "totalitarianism". Preserving "negative liberty" is the task of a liberal society, whereas fostering "positive liberty" cannot but lead to oppression. The point of the conclusion is to proscribe any politics other than liberalism, on the ground that it plants the seeds of "totalitarianism".

I, for one, find that the closer you look at the distinction between negative and positive liberty, the more confusing it becomes. Raymond Geuss (2005) gives us a helpful rough shot at summarizing what Berlin thought he meant by the distinction:

1. Negative Liberty means that somebody is free to the extent to which there are no (external) obstacles to the action of that person (in some particular domain).
   
2. Positive Liberty means that somebody is free to the extent that they are self-governing or self-legislating.
   

I'll leave aside whether this distinction is clear or exhaustive. Let's say it is.

Now here's how caring about positive liberty is supposed to lead to 'totalitarianism' (I will always place this term in scare quotes, because I don't think its legitimate; historically it derives from a Cold War politics that simply equated Fascism with Communism, which lives on in contemporary neoconservatism... we have plenty of other, more specific, terms to describe oppression under Stalinism, Nazism, etc.).

Berlin's argument, as summarized by Geuss:

1. To be negatively free means simply to be in a state in which one has unobstructed opportunities for action, but to be positively free means actually to live and act in a certain way.
   
2. If freedom is a way of life, someone else might know better than I do what constitutes that way of life.
   
3. Anyone who knew (better than I did myself) in what my positive freedom would consist could legitimately force me to adopt that way of life and in so doing would be forcing me to be free.
   

And of course, 'forcing someone to be free' is the hallmark of 'totalitarianism' and oppression. Berlin wants us to conclude from this that liberal capitalism is the best we can do, and anything else just inevitably leads to oppression.

But, as Geuss points out, there at least 3 main problems with this argument.

First of all "it would be a mistake to assume that freedom in a positive sense must be an exercise concept, just because it is not a mere opportunity concept. Positive freedom might designate the possession of a faculty or capacity which may or may not be exercised."

Second, Berlin's argument could not hold true for "all positive conceptions of freedom" since we could have a positive conception of freedom which consisted of "individual autonomy", and according to "such a conception it would be an integral part of the free way of life that the individual living it has chosen that life rather than being forced to adopt it."

Third, step 3. in the argument is dubious. It is not obvious that simply because "I know what would be good for you... that I have a warrant to coerce you, especially not if the good in question (say, autonomy) is one which has value only if you chose it freely, so that in using coercion I destroy it".

To make this third probelm with the argument even clearer, Geuss proposes we add a forth step to the 3-step argument above:

4. There is a social agency (e.g. the State) who is really me (or: who is the "real me") and thus all of whose actions are really mine so that none of its actions against me can even in principle count as coercion.

Now if we simply omit step 3. in Berlin's original argument and add 4. instead, we get the "strong and unpleasant conclusions" Berlin wanted to draw. But if that's right, we don't need 3. to arrive at his conclusion about 'totalitarianism'.

In other words, the problem here isn't 'positive liberty'.

The real culprit, it turns out, is a belief about the "relation between individuals and some social agency -something like 4., or like what Berlin calls the 'organicist' conception of society".

As Geuss points out, Hobbes held a "relentlessly negative conception of freedom, but given his theory about the construction of social agency, the Leviathan, he arrives at strongly 'totalitarian' conclusions".

On the flipside, Hegel and Marx (both of whom Berlin wanted to marginalize) "specifically reject the 'organicist' conception of society if by that is meant the view that human individuals are no more than accidents of social substance or organs of a social whole".

What I take away from this is that one way liberalism makes a case for itself is by making a boogey-man of anything that isn't liberal. It's an indirect argument: it's not that liberal capitalism is awesome, it's just that everything else is really bad, so you should be a liberal.

But if you take seriously the thought that capitalism is not the best that we can do, this indirect argument really begins to lose its force. This is why neoconservatives have a vested interest in occluding questions like this by trying to equate the objectives of the Left with the horrors of Fascism. That the Left, and not centrist liberals, have historically been the most strident opponents and activists in the fight against Fascism is merely an inconvenient fact of history for these folks.

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They're not 'libertarians'

As G.A. Cohen explains:

"Anarchy, State and Utopia is routinely characterized as libertarian, an epithet which suggests that liberty enjoys unrivaled pride of place in Nozick's political philosophy. But that suggestion is at best misleading. For the primary commitment of his philosophy is not to liberty but to self-ownership."

And self-ownership is different from freedom. The former basically boils down to a reverence for private property, not freedom as such.

Nonetheless, despite the fact that most libertarians do hang their hat on an unswerving attachment to the sanctity of private property, they are nonetheless "promiscuous in their use of the rhetoric of freedom."

But Cohen's point is that we should not let them get away with this swindle. Nor should we go along with their desire to be called 'libertarians'.

Why should we assume there is an intrinsic link between private property and freedom? 'Libertarians' often defend their advocacy of private property on the basis of freedom, but then also explain what they mean by freedom by simply rattling off a list of platitudes about the sanctity of private property. In other words, 'libertarians' "present themselves as defenders of unqualified private property and as unswerving opponents of all restrictions on individual freedom", but it's unclear that they can coherently be both.

Here's why. Cohen points out that only anarchists can claims to be "unswerving opponents of all restrictions on individual freedom". This is because "if the state prevents me from doing something that I want to do, then it places a restriction on my freedom". Notice that neither 'libertarians' nor socialists (like Cohen) are anarchists. Notice also that we are assuming, for the sake of argument, a narrow conception of 'negative freedom' friendly to the 'libertarian' position, where freedom is just being able to do what you want without external interference.

Imagine the following scenario. Say I want to "pitch a tent in your large back garden", "and if I try to do the thing that I want to do, the chances are that the state will intervene on your behalf and when it does, I shall suffer a constraint on my freedom. The same goes for all unpermitted uses of a piece of private property by those who do not own it, and there are always those who do not own it, since 'private ownership by one person presupposes non-ownership on the part of other persons'." But since the 'libertarian'-favored 'free market' rests on private property, it therefore rests on a restriction of freedom, in the narrow sense specified above.

Thus they can hardly complain that " a socialist dispensation restricts freedom, by contrast, with the dispensation they themselves favor". The difference between their view and that of socialists is not as easy as "they restrict freedom and we don't".

"Libertarians" want to say that they prescribe a system in which there is maximal freedom to do whatever one wants, consistent with a set of maximal freedoms for everyone else. In other words they'd like to say that "we support unrestricted individual freedom except where that freedom limits someone else's freedom". But this is plainly not their view. Their view is that maximal individual freedom is allowed only as long as it doesn't coerce other people or interfere with the institution of private property. But private property limits the freedom of those people who don't own something, as in the case of pitching a tent above. Private property creates freedom for some at the same time that it limits freedom for others. "Libertarians" want to say here that this limit on others freedom is just or right, and there are arguments worth considering that try to show that this is the case. But if that is what they really think, they ought to say that at the onset instead of giving us disingenuous claims about why they, and not others , are the privileged defenders of 'maximal freedom' (in short, they're not really 'libertarians', they ought to call themselves something else).

I'd like to say a bit more about why private property restricts the freedom of some at the same time that it provides freedom for others, or why the amount of one's holdings of private property in capitalism correlates positively with the extent to which one is free.

Those on the Right, e.g. 'libertarians', will reject this. They will say that 'people are free to do however they please, and if they lack resources of money then they lack not freedom but just that: resources or money'. Or those on the Right might respond that lack of money might mean 'lack of ability', but not therefore 'lack of freedom'. As it is sometimes put: "lack of money puts limits on what people can do with their freedom."

But as Cohen points out, this view rests on a reified account of money.
Money is not an object, but part of a complex network of social relations of constraints. And in capitalism lack of money means lack of freedom full stop. Perhaps, as 'libertarians' would want to say, certain people's freedom is restricted justly in capitalism (e.g. since they didn't work as hard, or they didn't obtain something via market transactions, or whatever). But notice that in saying why it is just that certain people's freedoms are limited by property, 'libertarians' are already admitting that they lied when they said they, above all else, value individual liberty. For these folks, private property trumps unfettered liberty.

The way that Cohen makes the point that money restricts freedom is brilliant:

"To see this, imagine a society without money, in which courses of action available to people, courses they are free to follow without interference, are laid down by the law. The law says what each person may or may not do... and each person is issued with a set of tickets detailing what she is allowed to do. So I may have a ticket saying I am free to plough this piece of land, another saying that I am free to go to the opera, while you have different tickets, with different freedoms inscribed on them.

Imagine, now, that the structure of options written on the tickets is more complex. Each ticket lays out a disjunction of conjunctions of courses of actions that I may perform (I may do A and B and C OR B and C and D OR E and F and A, and so on). If I try to do something not licensed by my tickets or ticket, armed force intervenes....these tickets say what my freedoms (and my unfreedoms) are.

But a sum of money is nothing but a highly generalized form of such a ticket. A sum of money is a license to perform a disjunction of conjunctions of actions -actions, like, for example, visiting one's sister in Bristol, or taking home the sweater on the counter at Selfridge's.

Suppose that someone is too poor to visit her sister in Bristol. She cannot save, from week to week, enough to buy her way there. Then, as far as her freedom is concerned, this is equivalent to a 'trip to Bristol' not being written on someone's ticket in the imagined non-monetary economy. The woman I descirbed has the capacity to go to Bristol (she can board the train, etc.). But she willl be physically prevented from doing so, or physically ejected from the train... the only way that she will not be prevented from getting and using such things is by offering money to them... thus to have money is to have freedom."

The upshot of this is that 'libertarians' cannot simply fall back on an assumed link between private property and freedom. Money restricts freedom. And they will want to say that it restricts freedom justly, perhaps because of some story they will tell about natural rights or self-ownership. I do not claim to have shown in the above that they can't actually accomplish the task of showing why its good, or why we must limit freedom in certain cases in order to protect the institution of private property. I think there good reasons to think they can't, but that's another issue.

But having the discussion about whether or not restricting freedom in order to preserve private property is just, is a much more productive and interesting conversation than merely allowing 'libertarians' to rattle off their own advertisements claiming that they are the #1 dentist-recommended defenders of freedom.

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Liberty as protection against counterrevolution

Great post at A Very Public Sociologist. Here's a sample:

The workers' state constructed on the bones of what went before would likely be more democratic and free than any form of political rule possible under capitalism, but there remains a key contradiction at its heart. As the rule of the workers become more consolidated and a greater proportion of society falls under its conscious democratic direction the need for security against counterrevolution from within and without remains pressing until capitalism is decisively defeated on a global scale. The Russian revolution and the history of the USSR demonstrates the negative resolution of this contradiction. Actual counterrevolution and the threat of it saw the infant workers' state in that country relied on militarily defeating those who wished to overthrow it. But in so doing, exacerbated by the backwardness and devastation of the country the state became increasingly bureaucratised and turned into the very opposite of a socialist state.

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How did we get so delusional?

At what point does the discourse about healthcare in the mainstream media send me into a hair-pulling, teeth gnashing, fit of rage?

About the same time CNN uncritically says things like this to characterize the opponents of reform:

Specter remained calm most of the time, except when a woman asked if the bill meant a 74-year-old man with cancer would be written off by an overhauled health care system.

"Nobody 74 is going to be written off because they have cancer," he responded angrily. "That's a vicious, untrue rumor."

Is a news outlet no longer capable of then following up with comment on whether or not the bill allows for 74 year olds with cancer to be left to die?! Is it not a matter of fact or fiction? There is in fact a bill in public. There are in fact reporters capable of reading. Let's not leave this as a "here's what this side says, here's what that side says," issue if it isn't one. There's a truth here. Fucking write about it.

And this:

In particular, Republicans and some Democrats reject a government-funded public health insurance option, arguing it would lead to a government takeover of the health care system.

No comment on whether a public option actually could elad to a government takeover, what they actually mean by a government takeover, whether these claims are legitimate or just political fuckery. That's just the end of the article.

I can't take much more of the healthcare debate. I imagine being politically conscious in the early 90s fight could've killed me.

p.s. If I hear one more person say they don't want the government taking away their healthcare OPTIONS I will freak the fuck out. WHAT OPTIONS DO YOU HAVE?! I've never had options. I was either lucky enough to have coverage or unlucky to not have coverage at every point in my life. It has always been completely out of my hands. And what's certain is that when I have had coverage, I haven't had any choices, no say in what that coverage is, in what it covers, in what my deductible is. It's either being paid for by someone or it's not and I have to live with it.

Options presented to you by a for-profit health insurance industry are not options. That's not freedom of choice.

Ok, ok. /rant

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