Sure, the tone and presentation is a bit ridiculous... and the bit about "shmoo" is sort of hilarious in an embarrassing way. But I think this is on the whole really quite good. This aired on the BBC in the 80s, I'm told, as a sort of response to Milton Friedman's 1980 pro-capitalist "Free to Choose" TV series.
The second part is much better than the first, not that the first part is bad. The points about productivity, unemployment and leisure time are particularly poignant right now (e.g. "The same system that overworks people in the interests of profit, also deprives them entirely of work when it's not profitable to employ them.") Such arguments are almost never made in the licit, consensus media. The reasons why not are obvious: this forms the basis of the one of most intuitive, simple arguments for socialism. The questions we must ask are: why not use the highly developed productive forces to shorten toil and maximize human potential? Why squander such productive potential by putting it all in the service of enriching the ruling class?
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
G.A. Cohen BBC Video: "Against Capitalism"
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Hilarious anti-feminist letter in LRB from 1992
The following is a letter to the editor of LRB regarding a book review by G.A. Cohen:
From E.J. Mishan
Much as I enjoyed Professor Cohen’s review of Thomas Nagel’s Equality and Partiality (LRB, 14 May), it was hardly possible to avoid noticing his recourse to ‘she’ and ‘her’ instead of the standard ‘he’ and ‘him’ to indicate either sex. Is this departure from grammatical convention a bid to establish enlightened credentials, or is it part of his private campaign to add the weight of his authority to the promotion of peripheral women’s lib desiderata? The traditional usage of ‘he’ as an alternative to ‘one’ goes back centuries and – notwithstanding the exigencies of fashion – is wholly unambiguous. In contrast, the self-conscious departure from common usage in this respect invariably imparts something of a mental jolt to the reader.
Perhaps the editors will agree that occasional recourse to this practice does nothing to realise the goals of the women’s liberation movement. These goals, in any case, are being realised chiefly through economic forces: with the growth of mass affluence in the West, affordable domestic labour-saving innovations have made housewives all but expendable. And while such innovations push women out of the home, so do other innovations facilitate their employment in industry and commerce.
There is really no call, then, for our hyper-conscientious progressives to subscribe to the more eccentric tactics of those ‘conscious-raising’ zealots scattered along the fringes of the feminist movement.
E.J. Mishan
London NW11
This is hilarious. This guy is really pissed off because G.A. Cohen didn't unreflectively adhere to a traditional, sexist norm of language use.
But I actually agree with some of what Mr. (presumably, right?) Mishan has to say. I agree with him when he writes that "the traditional usage of ‘he’ as an alternative to ‘one’ goes back centuries and – notwithstanding the exigencies of fashion – is wholly unambiguous." This is true. The traditional use of "he" and "mankind" is unambiguous: male pronouns, and perhaps men in general, are alleged to be the appropriate stand-ins for humanity as such. This is why we should unambiguously oppose this practice.
I also find it hilarious that Mishan claims that "this practice does nothing to realise the goals of the women’s liberation movement" (as though he cares). The funny thing is that one frequently hears this refrain from opponents of feminism: "but it doesn't really matter whether or not we say 'mankind' or 'humanity'... so why bother?". My reply here is always the same. If it doesn't matter, if it's not important one way or the other, then why are you so angry and disgruntled that we're departing from traditional practice? It seems to matter quite a lot to the likes of Mishan that I say "him" and "mankind" and so on.
I should note as well that I also agree that "the self-conscious departure from common usage in this respect invariably imparts something of a mental jolt to the reader." This is precisely the fucking point. If it didn't ruffle the feathers of doddering old sexists like Mishan, it wouldn't be worth the effort. The point is precisely to destabilize a traditional practice, "that goes back centuries", which contributes to the reproduction of sexism. The more acute the "mental jolt" that this elicits from misogynist wankers like the author of the letter, the better.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
G.A. Cohen's "Why Not Socialism?"
Amazon.com has been telling me via email for months that I "should" buy G.A. Cohen's Why Not Socialism (2009: Princeton UP). I recently gave in and ordered it.
The format is similar to Harry Frankfurt's (surprising) bestseller On Bullshit: very short, elegantly concise and "small enough to fit in a coat pocket."
I found it to be a quick, enjoyable read. I felt that it captured the ethical core of what has, in general, animated and moved the socialist complaint against market society. But passionate and committed as Cohen's account is in putting forward the case, he is still quite sober about the challenges facing the feasibility of socialism. But for me this only makes his case more strongly that the "the question that forms the title of this book is not intended rhetorically".
The book begins by drawing attention to the way people interact on camping trips, which, Cohen argues, is a case where we strongly favor a socialist form of life over feasible alternatives. On a camping trip,
There is no hierarchy among us; our common aim is that each of us should have a good time, doing, so far as is possible, the things that she or he likes best (some of those things we do together; others we do separately). We have facilities with which to carry out our enterprise: we have, for example, pots and pans, oil, coffee, fishing rods, canoes, a soccer ball, decks of cards and so forth. And, as is usual on camping trips, we avail ourselves of those facilities collectively: even if they are privately owned things, they are under collective control for the duration of the trip, and we have shared understandings about who is going to use them and when, and under what circumstances, and why.To drive the point home, Cohen imagines what it would be like if we were to run a camping trip according to market principles and strict private-ownership. Here's one example:
Following a three-hour time-off-for-personal-exploration period, an excited Sylvia returns to the campsite and annouces: "I've stumbled upon a huge apple tree, full of perfect apples." "Great," others exclaim, "now we can all have applesauce, and apple pie, and apple strudel!" "Provided, of course," so Sylvia rejoins, "that you reduce my labor burden, and/or furnish me with more room in the tent, and/or with more bacon at breakfast." Her claim to (a kind of) ownership of the tree revolts the others.Cohen's point is that most of us would hate this. We'd correctly complain that Sylvia, in the case imgained above, was being a schmuck.
Now this isn't yet to mount a serious argument for socialism on a wide-scale; it's only to make plausible the principles that we seem to strongly prefer on camping trips (but also, when there are natural disasters and in other cases as well...). But what are theses principles that are implicit in the camping trip?
Cohen argues that there are two: an egalitarian principle (a radical version of equality of opportunity) and a principle of community.
By radical equality of opportunity, Cohen means, simply, that social justice abhors the arbitrary. In other words, factors that limit (or expand) a person's life chances or opportunities on the basis of arbitrary circumstances or chance are unjust; one's relative standing with respect to others should (on the basis of justice alone) owe to nothing except that person's choices and preferences. A person's opportunities should be in no way be limited on the basis of the family she is born into, her initial class status, her race, her natural endowments and talents, etc.
But this version of equality of opportunity, Cohen points out, is consistent with certain kinds of inequality. Importantly, it permits inequalities that result from (1) regrettable choices that people make as well as (2) from what philosophers call "option luck". The familiar case that explains (1) is the parable about the grasshopper and the ant. But (2) is a bit more complex. "Option luck" is tantamount to a deliberate gamble: imagine a case in which two people with equal opportunities both deliberately gamble on something that has 50/50 odds. They both make a similar choice but one ends up with a lot more than the other as a result. Call this "standard gambling".
Now (2) is called "option luck" because it's a deliberate, chosen gamble which was avoidable. But Cohen points out that "market gambling differs strongly from standard gambling" in that the "market is hardly avoidable in a market society... The market, one might say, is a casino from which it is difficult to escape, and the inequalities that it produces are tainted for that reason." He continues:
Whatever else is true, it is certainly safe to say that the yawning gulf between rich and poor in capitalist countries is not largely due to luck and the lack of it in optional gambling, but is rather a result of unavoidable gambling and straightforward brute luck, where no kind of gambling is involved.So that's the "egalitarian principle". The other principle, community, is characterized by the anti-market norm whereby you serve somebody not on the basis of fear or greed (the dominant characteristics of purely market-based relations), but on the basis of serving them and being served by them in a reciprocal way. "Communal reciprocity", Cohen notes, is a "committment to my fellow human beings as such", not a kind of interaction based on instrumentally maximizing your own benefit by using people most efficiently.
The remainder of the book is devoted to showing that these principles are both desirable and feasible on a wide scale.
Importantly, Cohen makes the point that there are two senses in which socialism might be infeasible: (1) because 'human nature' is allegedly fundamentally selfish and/or because we lack the proper "social technology" to make it happen, or (2) because "any attempt to realize the socialst ideal runs up against entrenched capitalst power".
It's (1) that he's interested in here, since (2) is a question of tactics and strategy about which it is difficult to say anything general.
What Cohen has to say about (1) is honest and convincing. He's not convinced by the "we're too selfish" objection, but he is convinced that we (socialists) don't yet have an institutional scheme that fully fits the principles outlined above. There are plenty of options more desirable than laissez-faire, to be sure. But there is no magic fix, no easy solutions to how to organize a society according to socialist principles. But, and this is crucial, this does not mean that we, in principle, cannot ever devise such technological/institutional arrangements. In fact, the technological/prudential considerations here say nothing of the worthiness of the principles outlined above, so if we really do find them convincing we ought to keep trying, no matter how hard, to realize them as long as we believe they are more desirable than the instrumental reason and fear/greed motivations of markets.
Timely as this is, I've yet to see it on the shelves at Borders or Barnes and Noble. Hopefully that changes. It would certainly be biting if Americans went crazy over a tiny book (by a philosopher) about bullshit, but yawned and failed to even notice a comparable book about justice.
Monday, September 14, 2009
More on the Origins of Private Property
"The first man [sic] who, having enclosed a piece of land, took it into his [sic] head to say, "This is mine", and found people simple enough to believe him [sic], 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 the ditch and cried out to his fellow men, 'Do not listen to this impostor! You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone, and the earth to no one!" - (Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality)A while ago, I posted on the origins of private property and aired out a couple of broad questions raised by the sort of thoughts articulated above by Rousseau: why was the original privatization of parts of the earth not a theft of what rightly should (have continued to) be held in common?
As Cohen puts it, "in the history of anything that is now privately owned there was at least one moment at which something privately unowned was taken into private ownership." Thus, if "someone claims a right so something they legally own, we may ask, apart from how they in particular came to own it, with what right it came to be anyone's private property at all".
Now most of the time this is a topic that the Right does well to avoid. When topics like the nationalization of natural resources are broached, the Right-wing response is to cry 'theft!', since those who own them today supposedly came to own them by just means (i.e. they bought the titles to them). But this obscures the question of why certain natural resources should be thought of as potential objects of private property at all.
Interestingly, those concerned to defend private property under capitalism have tended to focus most all of their energies on circulation, acquisition, trade and transfers. But very little of their energies have been spent explaining how the institution of private property with respect to certain resources, for example, was originally justified. If, as Cohen points out, the "market is merely a redistribution of titles which buying and selling are themselves unable to create", then we have to know how "the titles which necessarily precede market activity acquire legitimacy in the first place".
One historically important account of the creation of private property is given by John Locke. Locke argued that "an agent may appropriate (as private property) what he [sic] mixes his labor with, provided that he [sic] leaves enough and as good for others and does not waste what he takes".
I think the interesting part of this account is the thought about "leaving enough and as good for others". But this is not, in general, the part of Locke's account that you hear most frequently from those on the Right who actually talk about this stuff. They prefer to focus on the "mixing one's labor" part. But a quick glance at this part of Locke's theory reveals that it is the most dubious aspect of his account.
Even Robert Nozick, probably the smartest defender of capitalism to date, ridicules this aspect of Locke's theory. For example, in Anarchy, State and Utopia Nozick notes that:
"Locke views property rights in an unowned object as originating through someone's mixing his [sic] labor with it. But what are the boundaries of what labor is mixed with? If a private astronaut clears a place on Mars, has he mixed his labor with (so that he comes to own) the whole planet, or the whole uninhabited universe, or just a particular plot? Which plot does an act bring under ownership? The minimal area such that an act decreases entropy in that area, and not elsewhere? Can virgin land (for the purposes of ecological investigation by high-flying airplane) come under ownership by a Lockean process? Building a fence around a territory presumably would make one the owner of only the fence (and the land immediately underneath it)."He continues:
"Why isn't mixing what I own with what I don't a way of losing what I own rather than a way of gaining what I dont? If I own a can of tomato juice and spill it in the sea so that its molecules (made radioactive, so I can check this) mingle evenly throughout the sea, do I thereby come to own the sea, or have I foolishly dissipated my tomato juice?"Clearly this isn't so simple and, as Nozick points out, there are a lot of aporias facing the Lockean idea of 'mixing labor' with an unowned object.
*One clarificatory note here: when I speak of private property I am not, in the first instance, referring to someone's private collection of baseball cards, their bedroom, their 'personal belongings' and so forth. I'm interested first of all in the big picture, i.e. the large-scale institutions, natural resources, energy, land, etc. that we all (even under the divisive, competitive pressures of capitalism) rely upon for survival.
Today, just about everything we need to survive is private property, with a few notable exceptions. But the exceptions are extremely instructive. Why, if private property is simply the most just and efficient way of organizing society, isn't everything private property? Surely neoliberalism has made a strong go of trying to succeed in privatizing everything, but what's the story with those notable exceptions that seem off the table even to the most brazen Right-wingers?
What are some of the examples? For starters: roads, water, Fire departments, police, libraries, parks (municipal and otherwise), the majority of the military, a large percentage of schools.
In the U.K., access to health care is not commodified and hospitals are public institutions. To convert from the U.K. system to the disastrous scheme we have in the U.S., would be to relinquish democratic, public authority over a vital social institution and hand it over to private interests. No matter what those unhappy with the NHS in the U.K. may say about their own system, the prospects of this transformation (from public to private) in the U.K. are slim to none. Even under Margaret Thatcher, there was never a moment when the complete privatization of the NHS was even on the radar. When minor changes are made to the NHS that threaten to introduce fees of any kind, public outrage follows.
In U.S., we have the opposite situation, in a way. We have a mostly free-market health care system, with the exception of Medicaid and Medicare. As it stands, Medicare is basically the only part of our system that works right, and has been proven over many years of reliable functioning.
But the majority of the system is dominated by for-profit insurance companies. And uproar ensues whenever any part of it is slated to become public. Instead of complaining about the introduction of fees (which we can think of a form of regressive taxation), in our country the outrage from the political establishment is over the possibility of making any part of health insurance public or democratic.
Republican senators regularly complain that the Public Option would have been unfair, since the private insurance industry would not be able to compete. Obama's bone-headed response to this objection, of course, is to reaffirm the GOP's reverence for the private insurance industry and claim "no, no... its not going to make it so they cannot compete, it will just keep them honest... they're still going to be making money, dont worry for second about that!"
But this business about "not being able to compete" obscures the bigger question, namely why should our health insurance institutions be allowed to be in private hands at all? Why should something we all depend on and need be subject to the profit-driven interests of speculators and capitalists? Why shouldn't these institutions be entirely public, and designed ONLY to best serve those who need insurance, rather than to primarily serve the profit-interests of those who have investments in the insurance industry? In short, why is it legitimate to even think of these institutions as potential objects of private property? How is the acceptance of private ownership in this case not an acceptance of a kind of theft, or usurpation, of what should rightly be held in common by all?
Friday, August 28, 2009
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.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.
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."
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.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
G.A. Cohen (1941-2009)
The Canadian-born political philosopher and author of the 1978 Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense, Gerald Allen Cohen, died yesterday of a stroke. My encounter with his work as an undergraduate was an important part of my intellectual and political development, and I regret that I never had an opportunity to meet him. Despite having never met him, I was pained by a feeling of loss when I read of his death last evening.
I read KMTH as well as If You're an Egalitarian How Come You're So Rich? and History, Freedom and Labour at a time when I had come to believe, as a result of the general trajectory of Anglo-American political philosophy, that Marxism was an intellectual dead end. Cohen's sharp critical writings and intellectual rigour changed this considerably. It wasn't that I'd read and been dissatisfied with other radical thinkers on the Left at that time: I simply hadn't read them for the reason that Left politics had little voice or presence in the mainstream philosophical literature.
I recall reading Robert Nozick's defense of right-wing libertarianism in Anarchy, State and Utopia and feeling really disturbed by the position it put me in. On the one hand, I've never had any sympathy for Nozick's pro-capitalist libertarian conclusions, but many of the arguments he put forward against egalitarianism were formidable. The eye-opening thing for me was that the replies from the liberal-left, primarily from John Rawls, always left me wanting a more forceful and fundamental rejection of the trajectory of Nozick's project. It seemed to me at the time, given the way I felt about Nozick's brand of bare-knuckles capitalism, that Rawls shared too much with Nozick for me to feel comfortable with his arguments against libertarians. I was left with a series of questions: What about capitalism itself? What about racial oppression? What about the wage system as such? What about ownership of the means of production? What about class power?
It was at this time that I read Cohen's book Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality in which he took Nozick seriously and gave a sharp socialist response to many of the central premises of Nozick's neoliberal tract. What was most influential for me was that Cohen didn't take for granted that 'capitalism is the best we can do'. I felt like this opened up an entire universe of possible political options that had hitherto been unfathomable within the horizons of the language of "liberal vs. conservative" that dominates so much of the narrow discussion of politics in the US. In a way I suddenly felt like politics Left of 'liberal' was a live option.
I've always found Cohen's writings to be tightly argued, refreshingly Left-wing, readable, as well as acerbic and witty to boot. His most recent effort, Rescuing Equality and Justice, is no exception. This is a serious loss.
(PS: keep an eye open for the book pictured above "Why not socialism?" which will be coming out this month in a similar format to Harry Frankfurt's popular "On Bullshit".)
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Is Marxism a "conspiracy theory of history"?
I often hear this accusation leveled at Marxists of various stripes, but it is also thrown around to discredit non-Marxist radicals as well. Noam Chomsky is a good example of the latter case, whose radical critiques of current social/political conditions have been mocked by the likes of conservative writer Tom Wolfe, who once said of Chomsky's politics: "I know Chomsky seems to think that somewhere, there is this control room where a bunch of capitalists are conspiring to deceive and dominate everyone... I hate to be the one to tell him, but that room doesn't exist".
Of course, this is not what Chomsky or any serious Marxist would claim at all. Most of their claims have to do with ways that systemic social/economic features impact the circulation of certain ideas and why certain groups are empowered by the economic organization of contemporary societies while others are systematically disadvantaged.
As Marxist G.A. Cohen points out, many radicals have responded to the 'conspiracy theory' charge by emphasizing the aspects of their social theory that do not turn at all on the potentially conspiratorial actions of individuals. But going too much on the defensive here is also a kind of mistake, for as Cohen points out "there is more collective design in history than an inflexible rejection of 'conspiracy theories' would allow." Moreover, there must be a "richer scope" for the elaboration of purposive-actions by individuals when explaining history than any 'anti-conspiracy theory' posture allows. The mistake of forgetting the need for this 'richer scope' has been made by some 20th century Marxists (Louis Althusser is a prominent example) who wanted to eliminate the actions of individuals entirely from social theory/historiography, preferring instead to critically focus on the explanatory power of processes and structure. But subscribing to the need for 'richer scope' here hardly commits us to the crackpot-logic of conspiracy theorists. The move I'm advocating here is that those on the radical Left (i.e. the folks who speak of 'ruling classes', dominant groups, etc.) should resist throwing out the baby with the bathwater when they reject the logic of 'conspiracy theories'.
OK, what do I mean by this? Well, it would be pretty implausible if I told you that certain widespread beliefs and values in society were only prevalent because individual members of the ruling class had actively brought it about that they were widespread and had also created them (out of whole cloth). There's really no evidence for this kind of claim and it sounds wildly implausible in the sense that you'd need a "Matrix"-like story to make it sound possible. For even in the most authoritarian societies we can point to in history, we've never seen a range of direct ideological coercion as totalizing the above example would have it. Simple physical coercion and domination by force does not generally mean that people actually believe in, or mentally submit to the imperatives of the regime, even though they may cynically repeat the 'Official ideology' in order to survive and operate on a daily basis.
Stalinism is a good example of this phenomenon (although Nazism doesn't fit this mold... it was a kind of collective insanity of a much different, and far more horrifying sort... come to think of it I don't really think its helpful at all to try to understand Stalinism and Nazism together at all, for they were extremely different disasters). For although there were harsh physical sanctions under Stalin for any explicit public deviation from Official ideology, the regime had no way of ensuring that people actually believed the Official ideology, indeed, it often appeared as though it was already understood in many day-to-day proceedings that lip-service to the Official doctrine was nothing other than a mere formality. Notice, however, that in the implausible example of "total ruling-class domination" I mentioned above, the claim is that what people actually believe has been manipulated and sustained through and through by the conspiracy of a small group of elites. There is no way to make this story even sound possible without some "Matrix-like" (brain-in-a-vat) narrative, which takes us out of the realm of critical social theory and into Science Fiction.
Nonetheless, although dominant beliefs in society are not usually themeselves created and instilled by the actions of elites, it has often been the case throughout history that dominant groups have sought to maintain or protect (or, alternatively, resist and subvert) certain widespread beliefs in order to maintain their power. As Cohen points out, "while many ideologies are not normally invented to fit the purposes they serve, a fairly deliberate and quite concerted effort to maintain and protect and existing ideology is not unusual".
Cohen points us here to Marxist British Historian Christopher Hill's work on 17th century nobility in England as an example. According to Hill, the gentry and nobility "doubted that they would still be able to control the State without the help of the church" and therefore "rallied to the defense of the episcopacy in 1641...for explicitly social reasons". In other words "ruling class persons with not special devotion to an Anglican God frankly professed that the established church was required to ensure political obedience, and acted on that inspiration".
This kind of 'conspiracy' is an indisputable fact of history. As Cohen notes, "conspiracy is a natural effect when men of like insight into the requirements of continued class domination get together, and such men do get together." And they typically are men. (btw: here's a recent example).
But, and this is a great point about how Marxism and other critical social theories are not founded on an aggregation of the 'purposive actions of individual actors, "sentences beginning 'the ruling class have decided...' do not necessarily entail the convocation of an assembly. Ruling class persons meet and instruct one another in an overlapping milieux of government, recreation, and practical affairs, and a collective policy emerges even when they were never all in one place at a time".
Addendum: It also seems pretty clear that this 'conspiracy theory' accusation is something that many different stripes of feminism confront quite often as well. This is very much true of feminist historiography and the typical conservative responses to it. I can't remember how many times I've heard some moron complain that any feminist claim about widespread oppression of women really just means that there is some "conpiratorial clique of men who want to dominate them just for the fun of it". Or, they say something like: "feminism means that every man secretly enjoys being an oppressor", or more crudely that "all men are evil". I suppose what these conservative folks really want is for people to stop critically questioning culture, gender roles, the sexual division of labor, the family, marriage, heterosexuality, etc. So I would want to respond to these anti-feminist claims in ways that are similar to the Marxist responses above (i.e. by arguing for more structural, historical and cultural forms of oppression without leaving out entirely the intentionally-oppressive actions of individuals as well).
A few more jottings about Class
In previous posts I've focused in on one (Marxian) way of understanding class that I've argued has a certain critical potential and relative precision lacking in more commonplace or colloquial deployments of the concept.
According to the Marxist way of thinking about class that interests me, class is defined with reference to the position of people in the economic structure, to their relative holdings of power based on this position.
G.A. Cohen puts this nicely: "A person's class is established by nothing but her objective place in the network of ownership relations, however difficult it may be to identify such places neatly. Her consciousness, culture, and politics do not enter the definition of her class position."
In other words, class ought not be defined as necessarily including certain consumption habits, culture, consciousness, political conviction, etc. (even though it may turn out to be the case in many circumstances where we do, in fact, find a contingent correlation between class (defined structurally) and these other features).
One prominent objector (on the Marxist Left) to this way of conceiving of class is the important historian (of "The Making of the English Working Class" fame) E.P. Thompson. He has argued against structural definitions of class in many places, but most notably in the preface to the book I named above as his major claim to fame.
G.A. Cohen summarizes Thompson's argument neatly as follows.
Premise: "The connection between production relations on the one hand and consciousness, politics and culture on the other is not simple. There is logic in it but not law"
Conclusion: "Class is not a matter of production relations alone, but involves the culture and politics growing out of them. Class embraces a process of self-creation on the part of the production-relations-defined groups."
In the premise listed above, Thompson is worried about austerely "mathematical" definitions of class in which it might (wrongly) appear possible to "deduce the class consciousness which 'it' [i.e. the working-class defined as a 'thing'] ought to have (but seldom does have) if 'it' was properly aware of 'its' own real interests". Now the worry is well founded. Thompson recoils at some Marxist accounts (one thinks of Eastern-bloc 'diamat' and Stalinist orthodoxy) which reify the members of the working-class such that they can be manipulated mathematically and expected to be mechanically determined by certain economic features of society. This is a worry any sane person should share.
Nonetheless, Thompson's worries do not entail his conclusion that we shouldn't define class structurally. Again, Cohen puts this succinctly:
Thompson has it that: "production relations do not mechanically determine class consciousness" (call this p). He concludes, therefore, that "class may not be defined purely in terms of production relations" (call this q).
As Cohen (correctly, in my view) points out, p is true, but q simply doesn't follow from it. "We are at liberty", Cohen argues, "to define class with more ore less (if not, perhaps, 'mathematical') precision, by reference to production relations, without inferring, as Thompson says we are then bound to do, that the culture and consciousness of a class may be readily deduced from its objective position within production relations." One analytic reason why not is that, typically, Marxist conceptions of class are supposed to be deployed in order to aid in explaining some features of social consciousness and culture. This would not be possible if certain ossified features of consciousness and culture were written into the definition of class itself.
So class is a rather precise matter if we understand it in this way, that is if we understand it as a critical/analytic tool that enables us to talk about the relationship that people in societies stand with respect to the economic organization of production in those societies. What's not so precise (and I think being able to say so is an advantage of thinking about class in this way), is how class interacts with many other political considerations, with culture, with consciousness, etc. The precision of thinking about class structurally, in part derives from the fact that we have severed any necessary, a priori, connection between someone's class and their consciousness, politics, etc.
It seems to me that this way of thinking about class cuts down on the possible megalomania of the class-designator as a way of explaining all other political/social phenomena that sometimes arises in vulgar-Marxist arguments. Understanding class structurally makes clear what the relative advantages of class analysis are, while also being totally unambiguous about where the concept has nothing to say. In other words, this conception of class is ripe for intersectionality theses, rather than being shaped beforehand to resist such attempts at uncovering ways in which different modes of domination interact.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
The Origins of Private Property
Libertarians, or, to name them more accurately, entitlement theorists, are wont to maintain that the market legitimates the distribution of goods it generates, since the market is a process in which people exercise their legitimately self-owned powers. But every market-generated distribution is only a redistribution of titles which buying and selling are themselves unable to create, and the upshot of market activity is consequently no more legitimate than the titles with which it operates. How, then, do the titles which necessarily precede market activity acquire legitimacy in the first place?
Imagine if the next president attempted to take a particular industry into public ownership without compensation (say a resource-extraction sector like coal), s/he would be attacked for being (among myriad other horrendous things) a thief. That is, such an action would be tantamount to stealing the rightful property of the ‘owners’ of the natural resources in question, violating sacrosanct property rights.
The question of what would constitute a rightful original acquisition of private property enjoys a certain priority over the question of what constitutes a rightful subsequent transfer of it, on any definition of private property, since unless private property can be formed, it cannot, a fortiori, be transferred.
Note that even now not everything around us is privately owned, and most people would agree that what remains privately unowned, such as the air we breathe and the pavements we tread, should not be available for privatization. But the better part of what we need to live is, by now, private property. Why was its original privatization not a theft of what rightly should be held in common?
- G.A. Cohen, on libertarianism (entitlement theory), from an article in New Left Review
But, as Cohen points out in the excerpt above, how did sources of vital natural resources come to be thought of as the rightful property of an individual in the first place? How was this initial seizure not theft? Set aside the difficult questions of how to negotiate (with the aim of social justice) the transfer or redistribution of large holdings of natural resources already deemed private property…How do natural resources become the sort of thing that can be purchased and hoarded by individuals in the first place?
This thought puts an interesting spin on issues like nationalization of energy resources as well as agrarian land reform. Instead of dismissing these measures out of hand because they violate 'property rights', why not instead ask how the titles in question obtained their legitimacy and unassailable legal status? Why not ask, for instance, how the enormous estates of Third World post-colonial oligarchs came to be transfigured into legally sanctioned rock-solid holdings?
Once we throw off the dogma that markets and private property are "natural" institutions, an entire universe of interesting political questions crops up.
