Is the Property of the 1% Legitimate?

The dominant ideology in our society would have us believe that whatever results from capitalist markets is presumptively just. The idea is that whatever the 1% gets from the market is authoritatively theirs. Thus, pre-tax income appears as something "natural" and taxation appears as something alien, which swoops in from the outside to "intervene" and "interfere" with the "natural" workings of the market.

Some accept this ideology, even as they call for increased taxation on the 1%. While arguing that the present wealth of the 1% is excessive, many continue to assume that pre-tax incomes in capitalist societies are in some sense "natural" and presumptively legitimate. This is expressed in the following thought: "maybe the rich should be taxed more heavily, but at least some of they have is legitimate theirs."

Now, within the horizons of this liberal perspective, I certainly agree that the wealth of the 1% is in some sense "excessive". I also agree that unmet human needs override any ownership claims that might be invoked to argue against re-distributive taxation in a capitalist society. But this concedes far too much to the rich and powerful. We shouldn't just say that the wealth of the 1% is excessive; we should say that it is illegitimate through and through.

To talk of redistribution, after all, is to talk of altering some prior production and distribution of goods. But how does that prior production and distribution come about? And what makes it legitimate in the first place?

It's obvious that the 1% has a vested interest in making sure that the majority of the population think that their wealth is legitimate. It hardly matters whether it's aristocratic privilege, family lineage, racial or sexual supremacy that makes a group dominant. Throughout history dominant groups always try to preserve the basis of their dominance.

Now, dominant groups have at least two (analytically distinct, but in practice interwoven) means of maintaining their dominance. The first is obvious. Dominant groups typically monopolize control of the means of exerting physical repression. If you push too hard against the status quo, dominant groups will always (if possible) push back with physical repression in order to protect their dominant status. This explains the violent force used against the Occupy movement all over the country.

But dominant groups can't maintain their dominance through naked violence alone, at least not for long. Thus all ruling classes are compelled to stabilize their rule by telling stories to the ruled about why their power and privilege is legitimate. As Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

Think of the "divine right" of Kings, the "positive good" doctrine that purported to justify the dominance of Slave owners, the so-called "civilizing mission" that justified colonial domination, or the supposedly "scientific" expertise that justifies the power of bureaucracies. The stories the rich tell about the supposed legitimacy of their wealth are part of a long tradition of lying to the masses to the protect privilege and power of the few.

What stories do the rich tell in our society? By my count there are at least four. Now, it's worth noting that growing numbers of people don't need to be told that these stories are bogus. Millions of people are coming around to the idea that the wealth of the 1% isn't simply excessive, but fundamentally illegitimate. Still, it's worthwhile from time to time to puncture the self-image and self-justifications of those in power. It's worthwhile to go through and debunk the familiar myths handed down from above that purport to show us that the wealth of the ruling class is legitimate.

One common story is that the members of the 1% deserve what they have because they earned it. More precisely, they deserve what they get from the market because it represents their just reward for productive activity. According to this story, the market rewards productive contributions. Thus, the rich deserve their wealth because it must be their proportional reward for their productive contributions to society. Unfortunately this is nothing but a fairy tale. Set aside the bank bailouts showered upon failing financial elites. Capitalists—even the ideal capitalists of the textbook—earn from owning, not from working. The pure capitalist makes precisely zero productive contributions to society and does no productive labor. They pay others to do it and reap the rewards of what they produce. So it can't be that the profits raked in by capitalists are what they deserve for productive contributions to society, since they need not do anything productive.

The second story, related to the first, is that the wealth of the rich is legitimate because it represent their reward for having taken bold risks. The thought is this: capitalists assume risk when they invest their money, so whatever they get in profits must be legitimate. They could have lost it all, but they didn't, so what they get is legitimately theirs. But though this story is told often enough, it is actually quite obscure, even by its own lights. And then there's the fact that workers are forced to assume all of the risk (and then some) assumed by their employer, even though they are entitled to precisely zero of the benefits if the risk pays off. This story is ultimately unconvincing. Rather than proving that the wealth of the 1% is legitimate, upon reflection it undermines the legitimacy of their riches.

But there's a third story that we've yet to consider. That story is that the wealth of the 1% is legitimate because it arises from nothing except free market exchanges. If a voluntary exchange between two consenting adults is unobjectionable, and the accumulation of wealth by the rich arises from nothing but consensual market transactions, it must follow that their wealth is legitimately theirs. And anyone who disagrees must think that a third party should paternalistically "prohibit capitalist acts between consenting adults". But that can't be right. So the wealth of the 1% is legitimate.

Though this argument is rhetorically powerful at first glance, it falls apart rather quickly on closer inspection. First of all, in order for anything to be transferred or exchanged legitimately, it has to already be legitimate property. The market can't create legitimate titles; it can only circulate existing titles. But how did unowned things come to be legitimate property in the first place? How did, for example, natural resources or large swaths of lame come to be private property? By what historical process did society's means of production come to be the private property at all? A quick glance at history shows that violence, brute force, conquest, war, genocide, colonial expropriation and slavery explain the origins of this property. This is what Marx called "primitive accumulation." Insofar as the wealth of the 1% rests on a history of violence and obvious injustice, it is illegitimate, even if acquired through "voluntary" exchanges.

But there's an even deeper problem with this argument. Even if the historical legacy of "primitive accumulation" didn't undermine the legitimacy of the origins of existing property, the idea that capitalism is nothing but an aggregation of genuinely "free" market transactions is ludicrous. Unequal relations of power are constitutive of market exchanges. The equality of citizens deliberative together in a democratic general assembly is never reproduced in the market place. If I, for example, gouge you for a bottle of water during a drought, and you relent because there's nothing else for you to do but cough up $200 for the water, that is a "free" market exchange. You consent to buy the water and I consent to sell it. There are, to be sure, massive asymmetries of power between us, but the transaction satisfies the criterion of "consensual capitalist act between adults." But it is clearly illegitimate for me to profit from the misery and vulnerability of others. Less extreme cases bear the same problems. Workers, who by definition own and control no significant means of production, are forced to work for a capitalist to earn a living, even if they can choose which capitalist work for. But that mere fact gives capitalists a large degree of social power over workers. The labor contract struck between the individual, atomized worker and the employer, then, is hardly free or fair. But it fits the bill of "consensual capitalist acts between adults", because what other choice does the isolated, individual worker have except to consent to her exploitation so that she can earn a living? So much for the virtues of "free" market exchanges as a way of conferring legitimacy on the wealth of the 1%.

The fourth story is that the wealth of the rich is legitimate because it is necessary to produce the greatest overall amount of beneficial economic consequences for all. That is, massive wealth for the 1% is a necessary precondition for economic growth and prosperity. Without it, they would have no incentive to do all of the allegedly marvelous things that they do which, we're told, tend to produce jobs and prosperity for all.

For my money, this is by far the weakest argument of them all. As we've seen, capitalists don't need to do any work at all. They need not do anything productive to earn their profits. So, this argument doesn't even get off the ground, because it assumes that we actually need capitalists to have prosperity and a functioning system of social production. But the fact is that we don't. We do all the work: the boss needs us, but we don't need the boss.

The most obvious objection to this argument, however, arises out of the fact that we're in the midst of a protracted global economic crisis right now. And, perversely, profits have soared to record levels amidst sky-high unemployment and economic misery for the 99%. What's more, the misery of the 99% is directly tied to the record profits which have been largely reaped through bailouts and austerity. But this argument suggests that the cause of our misery is necessary to produce something the 99% does not presently enjoy, namely prosperity and economic security.

A more specific version of the above argument is that the wealth of capitalists is necessary to incentivize innovation. But this argument rests on nothing. It's not as if we have experimental data that prove that all non-capitalist means of generating innovations are flawed. Open-source software is an obvious counter-example, and there are too many others to name. Moreover, as I've already explained, capitalists don't actually do the innovating. That's what they pay R&D departments for (if, in fact, they pay them... often corporate R&D is public subsidized through universities). So the innovation incentive argument simply doesn't show us that the wealth of the 1% is legitimate.

Things aren't looking so good for the idea that the wealth of the 1% is legitimate. It is being undermined daily. After all, the mere fact that the State has to resort to acts of violence to repress resistance and protest from below shows that it's ideological hegemony is fractured and incomplete.

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What's the Point of Education?

If you ask Chicago's Rahm Emanuel—known locally as "Mayor 1%"—the point of education is to provide for the specific needs of the owners of big corporate firms. The owners sketch up the job descriptions, they decide what will be produced, according to what modes of organization, when and where. Schools, then, are nothing more than publicly-subsidized training centers whose curriculum matches the fleeting demands of profit-hungry corporate leaders.

In their classic, must-read book on the topic, Schooling in Capitalist America (2011, Haymarket Re-issue), radical economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis elaborate more on this perspective:

How can we best understand the relationship between education and the capitalist economy? Any adequate explanation must begin with the fact that schools produce workers. The traditional theory explains the increased value of an educated worker by treating the worker as a machine. According to this view, workers have certain technical specifications (skills and motivational patterns) which in any given production situation determine their economic productivity. Productive traits are enhanced through schooling...

...The motivating force in the capitalist economy is the employer's quest for profit. Profits are made through hiring workers and organizing production in such a way that the price paid for workers time—the wage—is less than the value of the goods produced by their labor. [If the price paid for the worker's time (i.e. the wage) wasn't less than the value of the goods the worker produces during her shift, the boss would have no reason to hire her in the first place -t]...

...Schools produce workers...Schools foster types of personal development compatible with the relationships of dominance and subordination in the economic sphere, and finally, schools create surpluses of skilled labor sufficiently extensive to render effective the prime weapon of the employer in disciplining labor—the power to fire and hire.

In short, according to the 1%, the basic goal of education—which includes everything from curriculum to methods of student and teacher evaluation—should be to foster and sustain corporate profitability. Considerations such as human development and flourishing are irrelevant. Developing the talents of students and enabling them to lead free lives doesn't even enter into the picture.

Moreover, to the extent that music, arts, and the humanities fail to provide corporate owners with the sorts of traits that the 1% is looking for, they should be completely eliminated. (Although they're less commonly the object of direct ruling-class ire, I note that the natural sciences are distorted and abused by this educational program as well—especially on the question of how grant money is allocated and so forth). This is just a way of saying that the knowledge and skills woven through disciplines such as literature, philosophy, history, art, anthropology, languages, culture and so on are—as far as the 1% is concerned—useless at best, and dangerous at worst. What's needed, instead, is a surplus of people who empathize with orders, defer gratification, respect the authority of bosses, come to work on time, who possess the technical skills needed to do whatever the boss needs them to do. (For more on this see this (esp. 6:40-onward) as well as this (as yet unreleased) book Capitalism and Education)

***

It's clear that there is no space in this educational vision for the interests of educators, parents and students to be voiced. Their job is to take orders from above. The goals are set for them in advance. Their only use lies in efficiently maximizing those ready-made goals.

It comes as little surprise, then, that more and more of the people charged with running school systems and universities are drawn directly from the corporate world. For example, in the case of the Chicago City Colleges (which used to be called "Peoples' Colleges") a corporate business executive with no specific expertise in higher education, Cheryl Hyman, has been charged with overseeing their "reinvention." In this task, Hyman been assisted by a slew of corporate consultants. As the Reader reports:

[Hyman] was assisted by consultants from McKinsey & Company and the Civic Consulting Alliance (the consulting arm of the Commercial Club of Chicago) who worked, initially pro bono, to "dig into the metrics" with her. By midsummer she'd hired former McKinsey consultant (and Renaissance 2010 Fund official) Alvin Bisarya as vice chancellor of strategy and institutional intelligence. In March 2011, Donald Laackman, a principal at the Civic Consulting Alliance, was installed as president of Harold Washington College. And last January, McKinsey was awarded a half-million-dollar contract for work on City Colleges changes this year.

The idea is that educational institutions should be completely subordinate to, and take their orders from, corporate "experts". Accordingly, the "ignorant" public—students, teachers, and parents—have no meaningful role to play in determining how schools are run. After all, as far as the corporate "experts" are concerned, the students, parents and teachers are noting more than the passive objects of "reform" rather than agents whose interests the school system should serve. For those parents, students or teachers who dare to dissent from this ruling-class consensus, the reply—which is actually a threat—is something like this:

Look, if you're going to survive in this society, you need a job. But to get a job, you have to do what exactly we say. We—the "job creators"—decide what jobs there are and who gets them. If you disobey us, we'll freeze you out of the system and leave you with nothing. So it's either a life of obedience to ready-made goals and (if you're lucky) precarious employment, or a life of destitution and marginalization.

This goes for students and parents as much as it does for teachers. Students and parents are denied a voice and threatened with marginalization if they don't do what the system asks of them. And if educators themselves speak up and try to resist the corporate re-structuring of their curriculum, they are scapegoated, threatened, attacked and punished. Rahm Emanuel and his brutal assault on the Chicago Teachers Union is a case in point.

And, aside from the fact that teachers unions are the most powerful organized labor force in the contemporary United States today—which makes them a clear target for an employing class on a warpath to smash the union movement entirely—unionized educators are also in a position to resist commands from above demanding that they teach only what corporate leaders want them to teach. Hence, the corporate elites have a clear interest in bludgeoning,discrediting and otherwise attacking teachers unions.

The most perverse part of this is that ruling elites use the threat of unemployment to make it appear as if they're performing some kind of philanthropic service by using educational institutions to shoehorn people into low-paying, precarious jobs. By exploiting high unemployment and the economic misery of the 99% (caused by austerity and the global crisis—both forced upon us by the 1%), Rahm and his goons are attempting to sell themselves as "job-creating saviors" of the 99%.

But it's not hard to see through this sham, even by their own lights. If Boeing wants 100 more workers to enter the labor market today (because, say, they want to drive wages down in order to make hiring new people maximally profitable), there's no guarantee that they'll want those 100 people next year. Maybe they'll change their mind because their profit margins aren't high enough, or maybe they'll leave Chicago in search of a more easily exploitable labor force. Though educational institutions are being forced to serve corporate interests, it's not the case that corporate elites are being asked to reciprocate. There is nothing to stop corporations from benefiting in a one-sided way from public funds in the short-run, only to pack up and leave thousands unemployed at a later date.

***

Often, political struggles within the sphere of education are struggles over the question of access: who is granted access to which schools, who isn't, and why. The struggle over access is the struggle against school closures, against teacher layoffs, against tuition hikes and user fees. It is the struggle against a university system financed through the exploitative—and fabulously profitable—student loan industry. Traditionally, working class people and oppressed minorities were completely excluded from the university system. Struggles from below created inroads for previously excluded groups to get a foothold in the university system. But today, the ranks of those being entirely excluded is growing by the day as austerity causes living standards to plummet and tuition and fees to soar. The question of access is a key question. In the context of cruel regimes of austerity being imposed from above, it is perhaps the central question facing millions of ordinary people in the 99% right now.

But the question of access, taken by itself, is only one part of the struggle. After all, what is it that we are fighting to gain access to?

The only way to answer this question is to put forward a perspective on what the point of education is. We already saw the 1%'s answer: educational institutions should either be made to subsidize corporate profits or they should cease to exist entirely. But what kind of answer should the 99% give?

***

Human beings flourish when they are able to cultivate their talents and exercise their capacities for imaginative thinking and creative activity. Living a rich and meaningful life requires that we have the space to reflect and figure out who we are and what we really care about. Leading a free life means honing one's capacity for critical thinking—for seeing the world as it really is rather than the way our leaders want us to see it. Living a free life also means learning about our own history, that is, the often untold stories of groups women and men who struggled against forms oppression and exploitation in the past—in contrast to history-as-seen-from-above which focuses on the alleged "heroics" of a small group of "Great Men". These important—indeed necessary—goals can only be accomplished through education. I don't say that education is sufficient to accomplish these goals, since that would play into the hands of those who argue that teachers and educators should be made responsible for solving all the world's problems. The only way to fully realize human potential is to fight for a different kind of society—a socialist society—where the material conditions for human flourishing could be secured for all. Nonetheless, though hardly sufficient, I do claim that education is a necessary part of fully realizing the promise of such a society.

I stress that these goals I describe above are not "luxuries". They do not describe a life that should only be available to a select few. On the contrary, the goals described above speak to basic human interests that exceed the the narrow goals imposed on us from above by capitalism. As G.A. Cohen puts it:

We have needs beyond the needs to consume and these aren't recognized by capitalism. We have a need, for example, to develop and exercise our talents. When our capacities lie unused, they don't enjoy the zest for life that comes from having one's capacities flourish. People are able to develop themselves only when they get good education. But in a capitalist society, the education of children is threatened by those who would contort education to fit the narrow demands of the labor market....We shouldn't stake our children's future on the hope that the capitalist market will need what's good for them.

...There's a lot of talent in almost every human being. But in a lot of cases that talent goes undeveloped, because people lack the time, energy, resources and facilities to develop it. Throughout history, only a leisured minority has enjoyed this fully. And they did so (and continue to do so) on the backs of a toiling majority...

...The ruling class wants education to be geared toward restoring profitability to the system... But it's dangerous to educate the young too much, because they will become cultivated people who are likely to be less satisfied with the low-paying jobs the market offers them. This might create aspirations that capitalism can't match.... Therefore, people must be "educated to know their place"...

This is a powerful diagnosis of the problem and a vision for how things should be different. The most basic claim is that we shouldn't cater to the tendency in capitalism to view people only as sources of profit, and when they can't be profitably exploited, as redundant and expendable.

Even the members of the ruling class cannot deny the power of this argument. That is why, by and large, the arts and humanities are well-funded and relatively protected at elite colleges and universities. If Rahm and the 1% in Chicago are openly and publicly calling for the complete corporatization of the City Colleges—largely populated by working-class people of color, a large number of them recent immigrants—they are not suggesting that the University of Chicago be transformed into a training facility in which professors and administrators are the mere servants of corporate leaders.

Of course, there are trends—even in the halls of so-called "elite" institutions—toward corporatization. And they need to be rooted out, criticized and fought against. The systematic underfunding and debt-financing of graduate programs in music, creative writing, visual art and film (among other endeavors) is a grave problem even at the "top schools".

But it remains true that the "plan for transformation" of the City Colleges in Chicago—and elsewhere—evinces racist and anti-working-class assumptions on the part of those at the top.

After all, Rahm isn't sending his own children to the corporatized charter schools or public military academies that he favors as models for the Chicago Public School system. He sends his kids to an expensive private school where students have full access to art, music and other "luxuries". And we can bet that he isn't going to send his children to the City Colleges when they graduate from high school. So, for the children of wealth and power, there's one kind of education. But for the children of working class people—and especially working class people of color—there's another kind of education. For Rahm and his buddies, the people at the bottom should be "educated to know their place" so that they can effectively and willingly fill the role that the 1% has selected for them—whether it's as a temporary part of the corporate workforce or as member of the unemployed industrial reserve army.

***

There's a profound contradiction between what the capitalist system—premised as it is on profitability for the employing class—requires and what flourishing human beings require. As long as the basic priorities of society are determined by forces outside of our control, we will be faced with this contradiction. The proponents of the system as it is will say that education should be a mere means for efficiently satisfying ready-made goals determined by the employing class. Proponents of the human interests of the 99% will insist that education be part of putting ordinary human beings in a position to decide for themselves what the basic goals should be.

As long as the priority of the social system is shackled to the ready-made goal of profit maximization for the rich, it will always be possible to paint "non-productive" forms of knowledge as "useless", "irrelevant" or, at best, mere "luxuries" available only to the children of the rich. It will possible to make high-stakes testing and corporatized school structures look necessary and unavoidable.

But right now these market ideologies that are regularly used to legitimize the system are ringing hollow for millions of people. Masses of people rose up and took to the streets last Fall in the US because they are sick and tired of living underneath an economic and political system dominated by the 1%. The Occupy movement awoke a sleeping giant which, although disturbed from its slumber, has yet to realize the full extent of its power to change society. Millions of people are coming around to the idea that the system doesn't serve their interests—and they are hungry for alternatives. The only way to resolve the contradictions plaguing education in a profit-based society is to fight for a different kind of society—one in which the social forces of production are controlled democratically and made to work for human ends rather than for the iron laws of profit accumulation.

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Corey Robin on "Ron Paul's Two Problems"

See Robin's piece here. His argument is that "Ron Paul has two problems, one his and another ours". By "ours" he means "the Left" (more on that below). The problem "we" have is that our side doesn't "really have a vigorous national spokesperson for the issues of war and peace, an end to empire, a challenge to Israel, and so forth, that Paul has in fact been articulating."

Paul's problem is that he is, well, Ron Paul. Set that aside.

Does Robin have a point regarding the need for a strident anti-imperialist voice on "the Left"? Yes and no, depending on what we mean by "the Left". Robin, to his credit, is quite clear what he means by "the Left": "I mean a left that's social democratic (or welfare state liberal or economically progressive or whatever the hell you want to call it". He doesn't come out and say so, but it's possible he also means to say electoral Left and, more specifically, the Left wing of the Democratic Party. He might also mean to say that he wishes that there were a presidential candidate who was both "Left" (in his sense) and also vociferously anti-imperialist.

Now, there is a sense in which I agree with Robin here. All of the political confusion generated by the 2012 campaigns presents challenges for the Left. Anyone who is against the wars, who is attracted to principled anti-imperialist positions, cannot be satisfied with the bellicose, empire-expanding, drone-loving Democratic Party (or its representative in the White House). Thus, in the context of a media that vastly over-inflates the importance of the Republican primaries, some (otherwise left-leaning) people are attracted to Ron Paul's arguments against the wars. It is a shame that some people—who may not have any contact with the organized Left—may be tempted to conclude that Ron Paul-style hard-Right politics are the only anti-war politics on offer. Robin is also surely correct to say that Paul doesn't oppose war and imperialism for the right reasons. He is coming from a pro-nationalist and pro-isolationist (and, I would add, racist) position that informs his anti-immigrant xenophobia as much as his stance against foreign interventions.

I also agree with Robin that it would be nice if there were a visible "Left" figure who had the opportunity to make principled anti-imperialist arguments to a mass television audience. I wish there were a Left figure of this sort who was given the light of day by the media in order to bludgeon the lousy Democrats from the Left. I've even thought a couple of times recently that it would be nice to have a third-party Left candidate who was able to at least get a critical message out via the Presidential media frenzy (although this strategy has its limitations as well). On this much I can agree with Robin.

But there are several deep problems with his analysis.

First, there already is a principled, intellectually rigorous anti-imperialist Left in the US, although it is marginalized by the two-party system and the media. Moreover, the Occupy movement has adopted generally anti-war positions and has frequently made use of slogans such as "end the wars, tax the rich!" and "money for jobs and education, not for wars and occupations". In Chicago, the Occupy movement joined in marching against the occupation of Afghanistan. But Robin seems less interested in these developments than he is in having a "strong national state" that can "ally" with movements. Set aside the problems with this view about the relationship between movements and the State for the moment (I concede that I not have yet not read Robin's elaborations on this topic on his blog). Robin's main lament here seems to be that there is no visible figure or candidate (in the mold of Ron Paul except left-wing) making anti-imperialist arguments on prime time television. That's not, in the first instance at least, a lament that there's no movement—it's an expression of frustration that there are no electoral candidates making use of the "proper channels" to make anti-imperialist arguments. As far as it goes, I wouldn't mind if there were a Nader-like figure making anti-imperialist and anti-austerity arguments on prime time TV right now. But I hardly think that's the be-all-end-all of politics. I'm far more interested in the promise of Occupy, that is, in the power of strikes, mass demonstrations, workplace actions, occupations, mic checks, community pickets, direct actions, and all the rest of it. What's more, it is no exaggeration to say that the resistance of extra-electoral social movements are the key to explaining virtually all progressive changes in his US history. The Democrats, on the other hand, are a graveyard of progressive social movements, not a force for progressive change. The Democrats started every war that the US was involved in during the 20th century—they've never been and never will be anti-imperialist. Movements are the way forward, and the State and the two-party system are nothing but obstacles.

Second, one answer to Robin's complaint that the liberal Left isn't anti-imperialist would be to say, "well, what does that say about the politics of the liberal Left in the US?" He complains that the "welfare state liberal" Left doesn't have enough staunch anti-imperialists, but I would reply that that simply speaks ill of the liberal Left in the US. Paul Krugman, a liberal if ever there was one, has consistently spoken out against the Iraq War. But he's no principled anti-imperialist and doesn't offer wide-ranging "pungent" critiques of imperialism. Neither do the editorial board of the American Prospect or The Nation. Why might that be? One reason has surely got to be that anti-imperialism is, at least in its classical form, generally anti-capitalist. Imperialism is the violent military form that international economic competition takes in a global capitalist system. It makes little sense to impugn one without criticizing the other, given their intimate relationship.

Third, Robin is wrong about the State and gives generally unconvincing arguments against Paul's "federalism". First off, Ron Paul and "libertarians" are not genuine federalists. To be sure, Robin is right that White Supremacists and other reactionaries have inhabited the language of Federalism when it suits them. But it's window-dressing. They aren't for genuine local-level democratic control of anything—just try asking Ron Paul if he'd allow workers in a company town to democratically run the factory themselves without the boss. Paul, after all, is no fan of democracy. He believes that capitalist markets should determine what our society is like—hence his fundamental distrust of the popular will of the people expressed through democratic self-rule. There is a large sense in which a genuinely democratic society would require a massive decentralization of power compared to really existing US capitalism. That point gets lost in Robin's argument re: the need for a strong national state.

Moreover, "libertarians" like Paul are not anti-State. They love the State. Neither are they anti-intervention. They love intervention as well. Everything depends on what the State does and how it intervenes. When workers refuse to obey the authority of their bosses—Ron Paul says call in the authorities to protect the property of the capitalist class. When workers go on strike—Ron Paul says call in the State's bodies of armed men to break the picket. When masses of black people revolt against police brutality and repression—Ron Paul stands firmly with the racist cops in calling for violence from above. When landless peasants try to occupy the land of colonial elites—Ron Paul and libertarians are for vigorous state intervention to stop the peasants from fighting colonial oppression. When movements arise that challenge the legitimacy of capitalism, you can bet that Ron Paul (and every last "libertarian" on the planet) will be rooting for the coercive power of the State military to put down the uprising by force. The fact is, without a coercive, interventionist State, you simply couldn't have the system—capitalism—that Paul favors. At least Fredrich Hayek and Milton Friedman were honest about this feature of their politics (both, after all, were enthusiastic supporters of the brutal Right-wing Pinochet dictatorship given that it was staunchly neoliberal and anti-socialist). Capitalist property relations require a coercive State that maintains the unequal power of the ruling class.

Of course, when the State is forced—by pressure from below generated by movements—to relent and give concessions to try to undercut challenges to its authority, Ron Paul is against those State interventions. When the labor movement explodes in the 1930s and wins concessions from the State (e.g. Social Security, collective bargaining rights, etc.), Ron Paul is against that kind of State activity. When black people die tearing down Jim Crow and, in the process, win modest gains from the political system, Ron Paul is anti-State. When the womens' movement wins abortion rights and anti-harassment legislation, Paul cries foul and whines of excessive "State interference". When people like Ralph Nader challenge the Big Three and win safety regulations on car corporations, Ron Paul complains of a "tyrannical" State.

What this shows is that he, and other defenders of capitalism, love certain interventions and hate others. They love interventions that protect the privileges and powers of property owners. They hate the interventions that reduce the power and privileges of business—even when these "interventions" vastly increase the freedom of marginalized groups.

The fact is that talk of "limited government" is nothing but rhetoric. Those who extol the virtues of "small government" say one thing and do another—they are all about a government that doesn't limit the freedom of the ruling class but they could give a fuck about the freedom of the rest of us. And when the majority of us get restless, all that "small government" talk is lost in the fray of riot gear, bullets, billy clubs, tear gas, and calls for "law and order". The question of whether government should be "big" or "small" is vacuous. It's far better to ask: who controls the government? Whose interests does it serve? Or: to what extent is our whole society—including the economy—genuinely self-governing? And: to what extent do dominant groups make use of the existing government apparatus to extend and consolidate their power? The talk of "big" and "small" government is nothing but ideological bile. Let's talk about power, who has it, how they use it, and what we need to do to fight back.

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Marx Against "Crude Communism"

I can still recall some of the first things I learned about "Communism" in elementary school. According to what we were taught, "Communism" was supposed to be a system which did not reward hard work. We discussed the parable of the ant and the grasshopper, where we were encouraged to conclude that the upshot of the story was that the productive should flourish and the lazy should perish. Since capitalism allegedly exemplified this moral principle of just reward for hard work—never mind that this is totally false—we were supposed to prefer it to "Communist" systems that rewarded the lazy and stultified the diligent.

A close corollary of this teaching was that socialism is little more than a "politics of envy". That is, since socialism is the institutionalization of the principle that the lazy shall be rewarded and the productive shall be punished, it follows that the main motivation to adopt socialist politics must be envy. The poor, the oppressed, the exploited masses of workers are just jealous of what their allegedly hard-working wealthy counterparts have amassed. Everyone wants the same thing, the story goes, and that thing is rather simple: maximum consumption. The only difference, then, between workers and the ruling classes is that the former is denied high levels of consumption whereas the latter is not. Socialists and defenders of capitalism therefore agree that the basic goal of society—whether its socialist or capitalist—should be maximum production and endless consumption for its own sake. Socialism appears here as little more than a leveling down maneuver that aims to realize a certain patterned distribution of material goods. Equality—or, more specifically, possessive equality—appears to reign supreme.

But what has this to do with genuine socialism as Marx himself described it? Nothing whatsoever. In fact, this picture is precisely what Marx excoriated as "crude communism".

Now, to be fair, this image of socialism as conforming to the basic goals of capitalist society, as aiming at consumption and possession, does describe the basic contours of the Stalinist system rather well. But that is no stain on the socialist ideal—it is simply one further reason to think that those state capitalist regimes had nothing to do with socialism properly understood.

Marx weighs in against "crude communism" in many different places, among them in the Manifesto, the Critique of the Gotha Program and in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Let's examine what he says about "crude communism" in the latter text:

"[In crude communism] the domination of material property looms so large that it aims to destroy everything which is incapable of being possessed by everyone as private property. It wishes to eliminated talent, etc. by force. Immediate physical possession seems to it the unique goal of life and existence. The role of worker is not abolished but is extended to all men. The relation of private property remains the relation of the community to the world of things. Finally, this tendency to oppose general private property to private property is expressed in animal form; marriage (which is incontestably a form of exclusive private property) is contrasted with the "community of women", in which women become communal and common property. One may say that this idea of the community of women is the open secret of this entirely crude and unreflective communism. Just as women are to pass from marriage to universal prostitution, so the whole world of wealth is to pass to the relation of universal prostitution with the community. This communism, which negates the personality of man in every sphere, is only the logical expression of private property, which is this negation. Universal envy setting itself up as a power is only a camouflaged form of cupidity which reestablishes itself and satisfies itself in a different way. The thoughts of every individual private property are at least directed against any wealthier private property, in the form of envy and the desire to reduce everything to a common level; so that this envy and leveling in fact constitute the essence of competition. Crude communism is only the culmination of such envy and leveling-down on the basis of a preconceived minimum. How little this abolition of private property represents a genuine appropriation is shown by the abstract negation of the whole world of culture and civilization, and the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and wantless individual who has not only not surpassed private property but has not yet even attained it. The community is only a community of work and of equality of wages paid out by the communal capital, by the community as universal capitalist. The two sides of the relation are raised to a supposed universality; labor as a condition in which everyone is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community."

This critique of "crude communism" is as much a searing indictment of contemporary capitalism as it is an indictment of the state capitalism of the Stalinist regimes. Let's take a close look at specific passages to get clearer on what Marx's socialism is and is not.

First, Marx is not arguing for a leveled, conformist society in which personality and individuality are obliterated. Neither does he stand for a society in which people are not able to develop their talents, cultivate their natural powers, and develop their full potential; on the contrary, the basic aim of a socialist society would be to fully realize these goals. For Marx, it is a profound problem with capitalist societies that "immediate physical possession seems to it the unique goal of life and existence." That is, rather than placing human development at the center, capitalism privileges having and possessing capital at the forefront. Profit trumps human flourishing whenever the two come into conflict (which is often) in capitalism. But Marx's argument against crude communism here is that it doesn't depart from the basic aim of capitalist societies. It merely reproduces them in a slightly different form.

What's more, Marx argues that in "crude communism", "the role of worker is not abolished but is extended to all men. The relation of private property remains the relation of the community to the world of things." There are two deep insights here. First, Marx didn't think that socialism had to do with increasing workers' standard of living, winning better working conditions, shorter work hours, etc. Of course, Marx was for all of these reforms, but he didn't think that they were enough. For Marx, socialism is about full working class self-emancipation—which is equivalent to the worker's self-abolition of her status as worker. That means abolishing the division labor characteristic of capitalism—especially the sharp division between mental and physical labor—and fundamentally restructuring the organization of socially necessary labor. A socialist society, for Marx, is precisely not one in which workers are simply treated better by the bosses than they are in capitalist societies. On the contrary, a socialist society is one in which there are no bosses, no workers as such, indeed no classes at all. No group would enjoy exclusive ownership and control of the social means of production and no group would be dispossessed from it. No propertied group would be in a position to rule over those without property. In short, socialism would not mean leveling-down all to the status and social position of the worker in capitalist societies. It would be a qualitative break from the present in which human development and genuine individuality were possible for all.

The second deep insight is that crude communism preserves the possessive, reifying tendency of capitalism. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels complain that capitalism has torn asunder traditional (i.e. feudal) social relations, norms, practices and rituals with the result that the fundamental bond between individuals consists of little more than cold cash transactions. The point isn't that we should be nostalgic for feudal social formations; the argument is that capitalism tends to colonize human relations, leisure, recreation, even family and "private" life. These spheres come to be ruled by the basic coordinates of capitalist property relations, with money as the mediator and accumulation of profit as the basic aim. To be sure, the colonization and commodification of these domains isn't total or all-encompassing. But one only needs to think of the ways in which Christmas has been packaged, commodified and transformed into a orgy of consumption to see that Marx was on to something here.

Neither is genuine socialism (or genuine communism—I draw no principled distinction here) about "abstractly negating" (a Hegelian concept) all culture and "civilization". On the contrary, it would represent a "determinate negation" within the history of culture and civilization, a dialectical maneuver that takes stock of what is good and true in the present while negating what is false in the act of going beyond it. It would draw on the promise of the elements of existing progressive culture as leverage to forge something new.

This brings us to envy. Envy usually has the form of resenting someone for having something (a good, a status, an ability, an office, etc.) that you wish you had. It is not to be confused with wishing that you had your needs met—envy is about resenting a particular person (or group of persons) who have something you lack but wish you had. Thus, it's often enough, as far as the envious impulse is concerned, that that person is cut down to your level. This kind of sentiment surely simmers underneath those workers who resent other workers for having better pensions or wages. On the other hand, to envy a capitalist, from the perspective of a worker, would be basically to wish you were in their shoes. But the goal of collective working-class liberation is incompatible with the individualist urge to leave the class to join the small clique of rulers. Envy, then, is certainly not a revolutionary impulse. It does not brush against the grain of exploitation and oppression. Nor is it like the sort of righteous anger that we feel toward oppressors of all kinds. Envy is a self-regarding, possessive impulse that is based on avarice. It is a police concept—something that is essential if one wishes to artificially ensure that everyone is off in their own respective corner consuming equal amounts of stuff.

But socialism is not in the first instance about ensuring that everyone earns exactly the same income or possesses exactly the same amount of stuff. Negatively, socialism is a society in which there are no social relations of domination: no exploitation, no oppression, no high and mightiness, no bowing and scraping. Positively, socialism is a free community of equals, or, if you like, freely associated producers who, through organization and democratic self-governance, put human development first. Socialism is about making the flourishing of all human beings the basic priority of social production—not private profit.

This is all a way of saying that envy has no basic place in the argument for socialism. We shouldn't want to be socialists because we're jealous of the nice cars and mansions that the ruling class lavish themselves with. We should be socialists because we cannot tolerate a system in which a small class dominates, oppresses and exploits the majority—all for the sake of the endless accumulation of capital. Envy presupposes the competitive, possessive mindset we are encouraged to adopt in capitalism. Thus, it has no legitimate place in a socialist society.

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The Dialectic of Technophobia and Technomania

"Technology can solve all of our problems" exclaim enthusiastic proponents of what is often called the new "Information Age". With the advent of social media technology like Twitter and Facebook, we've entered an inevitable march toward the best of all possible worlds. "What about global warming", you ask? Well, just give Steve Jobs a couple more months and he'll have that technological problem worked out just like that.

On the other side of the coin, rightfully distressed by the irrational, myopic technomania exemplified above, we get the technophobes. Rather than presenting us with new emancipatory possibilities, Facebook and Twitter are unmitigated disasters they tell us. Others, especially some anti-modernist environmentalists, insist that such technologies are inherently evil and rotten to the core. What we need, such forces suggest, is to fetishize the pre-industrial in itself. We need to simply invert technomania, they tell us, in order to free ourselves from the shackles of the status quo.

The head-butting of these two exaggerated and, I should add, implausible views fits cleanly into the ideological framework that dominates understanding in the "authorized" mainstream media. In lieu of such facile analysis, we need a more complex understanding of what's at work.

As Marxists have long argued, ambivalence is the best attitude to strike with respect to Modernity. The same goes for the high level of development of the productive forces (i.e. technologies of various kinds, productive instruments, technically useful scientific knowledge, etc. ) in modern capitalist societies. "Contradiction" (not in the logical sense, of course) is a crucial concept that Marxism brings to the analysis of such phenomena. At the same time that the possibility of eradicating world poverty is brought into existence, the possibility of global destruction at the hands of atomic bombs is brought about as well. The technological capacity of modern industrial societies makes horrors as terrifying as Auschwitz possible at the same time that it provides the potential for a truly just, human society of equals.

Whereas now, for the first time in human history, we have the technological capacity to feed the world's population without working ourselves to death doing it, such potential is not realized. Whereas the high development of technology and scientific knowledge unlocks the possibility of a radically different kind of world, hitherto un-thikable, this possibility is foreclosed by those in power with the help of these very technologies and sets of scientific knowledge.

This should not be surprising. Technology is paradigmatically that which is of only instrumental value. That is to say, it has no intrinsic value in itself. Hammers are not bearers of intrinsic worth; they are valuable to us only in virtue of what they can be used to accomplish. They are valuable only as a mere means to other goals, other things we value. To value a hammer, or an iPhone, as intrinsically valuable would be to fetishize such things, to impute to them an importance which they could not rationally be said to possess.

So when assessing any instrument or piece of technology, the question cannot be whether the thing is good in itself. The question must be: what goals does it help us to accomplish, and are such goals worthwhile? What ends is it put in the service of, and are they worthy ends? Something may be a better or worse means to some end, but there's always a remainder when we ask whether something is an effective means. There's always something left over: what of the ends themselves? What is it that we're trying to do in the most fundamental sense with the technological capacity we have? What are the ultimate goals?

This is the question occluded by the facile debate among technophobes and those enthralled by technomania. For capitalism, the tacit answer to the question of ultimate goals is clear: perpetual growth for the sake of maximization of profit. But is this an answer we should endorse?

If this is a rotten, unsustainable final end (and I think that it is), this should be no stain on technology as such. Rather it is a stain on the uses to which our impressive technological capacities are subjected to under a rotten system.

The contradictions are paralyzing. Rather than put technology in the service of reducing menial labor and eliminating all forms of poverty and devastation... technology is more often put in the service of producing new weapons and means of exterminating human beings. Soberly grasping such contradictions must be part of any serious analysis of the social and political function of technology in contemporary societies. Any attempt to evaluate new technology under the fetishistic banners of technophobia or technophilia are bound to generate nothing but confusion. Any attempt to break out of the ecologically disastrous trajectory of existing societies must also eschew such facile polemics. Put in the service of worthier goals, certain technologies would have to be part of any sustainable world. But adjusting the goals in this radical way requires a radical transformation of the basic economic structure of contemporary societies. It means rejecting some technologies outright and reconfiguring social life in a way that doesn't depend on planned obsolescence, automobile-scale development, and the profitable wastefulness of capitalism.

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Žižek on Al Jazeera

I think Zizek does reasonably well in this venue. He sets himself apart from facile crisis-mongering, and he handles the questions about greed and tolerance very well. Al Jazeera, as far as I can tell, seems to be the best mass TV station on the planet. Their programming has more substance and, unheard of in the West, a certain amount of sympathy for oppressed and exploited peoples, particularly in the global South. I'm not saying their politics are perfect, but, as I say, for mass commercial TV, they are reasonably good.

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Socialist approaches to the recession

Infrastructure is crumbling all over the country, states are slashing education budgets, public workers are being scapegoated, forced into accepting pay cuts, or being laid off. Working people, all across the board, are being forced to shoulder the consequences of a crisis that they had no hand in creating. Unemployment is very high across the board and show no signs of improving in the immediate future.

Yet, in the midst of the worst crisis since the Great Depression, ours is still an extremely rich society. Our society has the surplus capital and resources necessary to wipe out all of the unmet human needs, gaping holes in municipal and state budgets, etc. Yet the economy is discussed as if it were bad weather, that is, something we could not actively change or alter, which we can merely plan to shield ourselves from (if we're lucky enough to have shelter) when the time comes. Yet the economy is nothing other than a massive accumulation of human actions over time, in the form of coordinated actions, institutions, laws, etc. But how can something created by human beings be so completely out of our control? What's to explain the irrational warpath of capitalist recessions and crises?

Within a Marxist framework, the root problem here is this: capitalism is inherently crisis prone, and during periods of recession massive gluts of capital are hoarded by capitalists since there are no profitable places to invest it. Marxists call this the problem of over-production or over-accumulation.

Why are there so few profitable places to invest in recessions? Part of it has to do with long term problems of capitalism, which we can set to one side here. But at least one reason why profitable investments are not forthcoming now is that effective demand is lacking. In short: because so many people are being laid off, evicted, foreclosed upon, forced to accept furloughs and pay cuts, a large percentage of the population is not in a position to consume in such a way that the commodities capitalist firms sell can be purchased. Most people are short on cash to spend right now, and are cutting back on their level of consumption accordingly. Think of the massive glut of houses and condominiums on the market right now with no potential buyer in sight.

Worse still, if the set of profitable investments is drying up because effective demand is shrinking, many capitalist firms are likely to downsize and operate well below capacity, which, in turn, leads to a further erosion of effective demand. It's not difficult to see that these are mutually reinforcing problems.

It is a peculiar thing about capitalism that it makes it appear rational for individual capitalists to fire workers right now. From their own narrow short-term perspective, it is indeed rational for capitalists to slash the rolls, and cut wages and jobs, although it is completely irrational for all capitalists to do this at a system-wide level all at once. That is, the cumulative result of their individually "rational" decisions to cut jobs cause society's unemployment level to rise considerably, and, hence, effective demand is further eviscerated. And, as we've seen above, further eviscerating working people's living standards means further reinforcing this whole sorry state of affairs in which capitalists find it "rational" to layoff more workers. So, even from their own narrow, exploitative perspective, what's going on right now is eroding the conditions for capitalists to be in a position to reap profits in the future.

If this irrationality isn't a reason to reject capitalism, I don't know what is. Why is it that the functioning of our entire economy is conditional upon a small class of investors making handsome profits for themselves? Why are all of us (and all of our jobs, social institutions, etc.) held hostage by this small class?

Take a step back and think about the big picture here. We have massive amounts of capital on the one hand, and massive amounts of willing human labor on the other. What good reason could be given to keep them separated apart from one another amidst a world of human need? And who is keeping them separated?

The answer to that last question is easy: capitalists. In a capitalist economy, capitalists determine where and whether to invest capital, and whether to employ labor.

So why aren't capitalists employing labor and investing capital in order to meet the massive amount of unmet human needs created by this crisis? Their answer to this question is also easily deduced: capitalists won't combine their capital with labor unless it means they can earn a rate of profit cushy enough to meet their requirements. We forget at our own peril that there is only one thing that motivates capitalists to invest: profit.

For these rational misers, the extent of social misery, poverty, want, suffering, etc. visited upon large swaths of the population just doesn't matter, unless, that is, it negatively impacts their profit rates. If using our society's productive capacity to end misery and suffering is not profitable for the small class of people who own and control our economy, it simply doesn't get done. If changing the conditions people in impoverished ghettos isn't a profitable activity, it doesn't happen. If medically insuring chronically ill people isn't profitable, which it isn't, capitalists won't insure it.

If you find this repulsive, you're not alone. The socialist intuition here is that this system represents an irrational, unjust and therefore indefensible state of affairs.

Everyone, even sober apologists for capitalism, will agree that poverty, vast inequality and want are not objectively necessary in a society as technologically advanced and productive as ours (though suffering, poverty, and vast inequality may have been objectively unavoidable in, say, the Bronze Age). The socialist thought is that if vast inequality and social misery aren't objectively necessary, why are they still a central feature of contemporary societies?

Contra defenders of capitalism, socialists think that the productive forces of society should be made to work for goals worthier than profits for the few. The socialist claim is that our society's technological and productive capacity should be mobilized to meet human needs and to cultivate the conditions in which people can live free and flourishing lives.

What this makes clear is that the problem of capitalism, among other things, is a problem of profoundly misplaced priorities. Rather than subordinating all human beings to the demands of profit, as is the case in capitalist societies, socialists think that economic institutions should be subordinated to human beings. Is it really a radical idea to think that the basic function of social institution should be to maximize human freedom and well-being, rather than enriching a small few at the expense of the many? If everyone were in a position to freely choose either option, I find it difficult to believe that the majority would opt for a society in which they were exploited by a small gilded elite.

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Is Social Spending Out of Control in Washington?

Of course not. It has always been fashionable for those on the Right to complain hysterically of "out of control spending", which translates roughly to "we must slash and burn all public entities with the exception of the Pentagon". But this hysterical line has been particularly popular in recent weeks.

Paul Krugman does an excellent job of exploding this bone-headed myth:

Here’s what you need to know...There never was a big expansion of government spending. In fact, that has been the key problem with economic policy in the Obama years: we never had the kind of fiscal expansion that might have created the millions of jobs we need.

Ask yourself: What major new federal programs have started up since Mr. Obama took office? Health care reform, for the most part, hasn’t kicked in yet, so that can’t be it. So are there giant infrastructure projects under way? No. Are there huge new benefits for low-income workers or the poor? No. Where’s all that spending we keep hearing about? It never happened.

It's obvious that he's correct, though this obvious fact is obscured by all of the hysterical deficit-hawking that we get from Republicans and Democrats alike.

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Soaring profits made possible by austerity for working people

U.S. companies are rebounding quickly from the recession and posting near-historic profits, the result of aggressively re-tooling their operations to cope with lower revenue and an uncertain outlook.

An analysis by The Wall Street Journal found that companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index posted second-quarter profits of $189 billion, up 38% from a year earlier and their sixth-highest quarterly total ever, without adjustment for inflation.

Read the WSJ article here.

The long and short of it is this: the U.S. ruling class is eeking out near-record levels of profit amidst the worst recession since the Great Depression. As unemployment soars, social misery increases, and savage cuts are made to vital social institutions like education... the capitalist class is finding ways to make record profits.

These two phenomena are not unrelated. The list of blows to working people above are the condition of possibility of this corporate bonanza. That is, the surplus appropriated by corporate elites in the form of profit, amidst a global recession when profits are generally low, is coming from downward pressure on wages, cuts to benefits, layoffs, austerity, and so on. In other words, the "aggressive re-tooling" (i.e. the punishing blows to working people discussed above) is the cause of the bonanza.

In the Marxist tradition, there is a word for this process: exploitation. And more exploitation means higher profits. A just society would be one in which this process ceased to be the basis on which production is founded. A just society would be one in which the vast social surplus was mobilized to maximize human potential, rather than to enrich a small class of elites.

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"Neoliberal Anti-Racism" is an Oxymoron

A purportedly "anti-racist" neoliberal politics is nothing of the sort. The two projects, anti-racism on the one hand, and neoliberalism on the other, are worlds apart. Properly understood, there can be no reconciliation between them.

Are there people who will nonetheless claim that they are for abolishing racism, though they are neoliberals? Sure. But what does that prove? It proves only one thing: that there are people out there who have false beliefs about what the relationship between racism and neoliberalism is.

Since we're talking about racism here, let's focus the discussion. Let's stick with the experience of Black people in the US.

At every point in US history, anti-racist struggle has been multifaceted, diverse in terms of tactics and aims, and mixed in its level of militancy. Some currents have offered flawed analyses, some offered a mixed bag of effective resistance but facile conclusions about what liberation would consist in. This is true of the history of every movement against oppression, by the way.

To be sure, there have been many false starts and wrong turns in the movement for Black liberation in this country. There are the Thomas Sowells and Booker T. Washingtons peppered throughout history. But it hardly follows that any one person who merely purports to struggle against racism has had the last word on what Black liberation requires. That should be something for which one has to argue.

And my sense is that, once we get the arguments straight here, the situation in the contemporary United States is such that racism and capitalism are deeply intertwined, with the consequence that one cannot be overturned without the destruction of the other.

There are many reasons for this. First, racism is exacerbated and consolidated by neoliberalism. Because the bare-knuckles capitalism of neoliberalism is anti-democratic, hostile to social spending of any kind, devoted to eviscerating the public sector, etc. it is impossible to redress the deep structural and institutional basis of historical disparities within neoliberalism. That means that redressing the deep racial disparities in the US is foreclosed as a possibility as long as we have no means to meet people's needs by way of redistribution, increased social expenditure, etc. In our society, peoples needs are subordinated to the demands of capital accumulation for the rich. That is no recipe for abolishing the deep inequalities that persist between white and black people on average.

Second, racism functions to stabilize and legitimize capitalist social relations. That is, the ruling class has often stoked racism in order to divide and conquer. Moreover, the exploitation of oppressed populations has often proved to better maximize the profits of Capital. Capital thrives by seizing upon and exploiting social misery all over the globe; this is what the iron law of profit demands. Furthermore, it is clear that it simply will not be possible to build the kind of broad movement all working people need to fight against Capital if racism continues to divide us and subjugate some to the power of others. This isn't a zero-sum game. It's not as though fighting racism means further impoverishing poor whites. To think that is to buy the racist kool-aid pedalled by the proto-fascists in the Tea Bagger movement. The opposite is in fact true: a stronger, more confident movement to abolish racial hierarchies would necessary require redistribution, resistance to the logic of profit, etc.... in short, things that are to the benefit to all workers.

Third, if one is serious about Black people fighting against racist oppression, then one cannot simply think it's sufficient to have a couple of token Black persons sitting in high positions. If one is serious about Black liberation itself, then one is serious about liberating all Black people, i.e. emancipating the masses of Black people in this country from oppression. That is a necessarily egalitarian political goal, which is ipso facto anti-capitalist. Capitalism is sustained by isolating individuals from one another, convincing them that they are merely consumers who vote with their dollars, etc. When someone starts talking about organizing large swaths of people for a project of collective liberation from oppression... one has departed from path blazed by the individualism of capitalism and neoliberalism in particular.

Fourth, the ruling capitalist mythologies about "pulling oneself up by their bootstraps" help to solidify and further entrench racism. As long as structural and historical oppression and exploitation is widely blamed on the victim due to their "lack of character", "work ethic", or "culture of poverty", then we will not be in a position to fight capitalism or racism. As long as the historical and social dimensions of human life are blotted out in favor of capitalist fantasies about "personal responsibility", we will not be in a position to achieve justice of any robust sort.

Fifth, the tendency in advanced capitalist societies is to view other human beings in terms of greed and fear. This instrumentalizing, objectifying way of thinking about human beings characteristic of industrial capitalism (what Marx, Lukacs, and other came to call "reification"), was what Martin Luther King, Jr. was picking up when he said:

When I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are tied together...A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will "thingify" them, make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments... and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say "America, you must be born again!".

We must also point out that all of this "neoliberal anti-racist" bullshit depends on a fallacious conception of what racism is. It is not mere "individual prejudice" or "intolerance" or whatever, as WBM would surely like to pretend that it is. Nor is anti-racism about getting a few token members of color in positions of power within the US ruling structure. That is ultimately an "anti-racism" of fools. Can anyone really believe that if Andy Stern or some other Capital-friendly trade union bureaucrat got a token position in the Obama Administration, that it would therefore be reasonable to say "Ahh, but this proves it: the entire labor movement is neoliberal!". Of course not. (Yet, incidentally, this is precisely WBM's way of making his case).

Racism isn't some surface-level problem of "prejudice". It is institutional and ideological. Racism, most of the time, has little to do with the intentions or prejudices of individuals. As the political philosopher Tommie Shelby puts it:

Rather than focus on the mental states of individuals without regard to
their sociohistorical context, which can often lead us astray, I would suggest
that we view racism as fundamentally a type of ideology. Put briefly and
somewhat crudely, “ideologies” are widely accepted illusory systems of belief
that function to establish or reinforce structures of social oppression. We
should also note that these social illusions, like the belief that blacks are an
inferior “race,” are often, even typically, accepted because of the unacknowl-
edged desires or fears of those who embrace them (e.g., some white workers
have embraced racist beliefs and attitudes when they were anxious about the
entrance of lower-paid blacks into a tight labor market.) Racial ideologies
emerged with the African slave trade and European imperialist domination
of “darker” peoples. These peoples were “racialized” in an effort to legitimize
their subjugation and exploitation: the idea of biological “race,” the linchpin
of the ideology, was used to impute an inherent and unchangeable set
of physically based characteristics to the subordinate Other, an “essential
nature” which supposedly set them apart from and explained why they were
appropriately exploited by the dominant group. This ideology served (and
still serves) to legitimize the subordination and economic exploitation of non-
white people. Even after slavery was abolished and decolonization was well
under way, the ideology continued to have an impact on social relations, as
it functioned to legitimize segregation, uneven socioeconomic development,
a racially segmented labor market, and the social neglect of the urban poor.

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Chomsky refutes capitalist apologist

Listen to the first minute or so of this, if you can make it through the long-winded, and rather unlettered question from the audience that begins the clip.

The guy in the audience basically ends with the thought that capitalism has been triumphant because it has enabled rising standards of living (the clip is from 2006, so most of us will be scratching our heads when we hear this today in the midst of the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression).

Chomsky's response is excellent: slave societies, overtime, often saw a rise in the standard of living, but that doesn't suggest that slave societies were just by any stretch whatsoever. After all, black slaves in the United States were, in some respects, "better off" in the 19th Century than they had been in the 18th Century, but at the end of the day slavery was just as deplorable and horrifying in both centuries. As Malcolm X put it in a different context, "you don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress".

So whatever else is true, the mere fact that capitalism has enabled some modest increases in the standard of living is no argument in its favor, not unless we allow that the argument above is an argument for slavery.

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Must-read: Richard Seymour on American Politics

Excellent Richard Seymour post on the present state of American politics here. Below is an excerpt:

Obama and the Democrats are in trouble. Barring some unforeseeable development on a par with Katrina in terms of scale, the GOP is going to romp the mid-terms on a much reduced turn-out. The capitalist media will say that this is because of the Tea Party 'movement', or because the president moved too far to the left in a centre-right nation. Left-wing anger, and the disillusionment of working class constituencies previously supportive of Obama, will be ignored.

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Ecology and Socialism

Excellent new book from Chris Williams on the ecological crisis earth faces due to capitalism and what we can do to fight it. I'm reading now- perhaps I'll post a bit on it if anything seems response worthy. So far it is extremely straight-forward and sober in its assessments; but it rejects the destructive corporate reformism (e.g. "we just need to pass cap and trade and everything will be fine") and fatalism (e.g. "we're already fucked, so there's no point in struggling") accepted by some cynics in the environmental movement. Williams, of course, is hardly the only person to hold such a position, but it is nonetheless refreshing and stimulating to read (and remarkably clear). Excerpt here. Book here.

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Markets are not democratic

Individuals influence the provision and exchange of commodities mainly through "exit" not "voice" (Hirschman 1970). The counterpart to the customer's freedom to exit a trading relationship is the owner's freedom to say "take it or leave it". The customer has no voice, no right to directly participate in the design of the product or to determine how it is marketed. Where the good being sold is embodied in the person, voice may be alienated to the buyer. Employment contracts in capitalist firms that are unmediated by union negotiation or professional standards place the worker in the same voiceless position as the customer.

[...]

Fraternal activities express a valuation of participants as equals engaged in a common cooperative project. In the democratic tradition this project is collective self rule. The political freedom of a citizen is the freedom to participate equally with fellow citizens in deciding the laws and policies that govern them all. This freedom demands that citizens have the goods they need, such as education, to participate effectively in self-government...The ideal of democratic freedom conflicts with market norms. First, citizens exercise their freedom in a democracy through voice, not just exit. Their freedom is the power to take the initiative in shaping the background conditions of their interactions and the content of the goods they provide in common. It is a freedom to participate in democratic activities, not just to leave the country if they disagree with the government. Second, an ideal democracy distributes goods in accordance with public principles, not in accordance with unexamined wants [e.g. consumer preferences]. Decisions must be justified in publicly acceptable terms. Third, the goods provided by the public are provided on a non-exclusive basis. Everyone, not just those who pay, has access to them.

-Elizabeth Anderson, from her excellent Value in Ethics and Economics (HUP)

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Markets and Transportation

"Let us first turn to other sectors of the economy to which the "straight" market criteria do not apply without very considerable modification. Transportation is a case in point. Thus most of the world recognizes that urban transit benefits those who do not use it (e.g. by reducing congestion and increasing property values), and that it should be provided by a public authority, with a sizable subsidy to cover inevitable losses. Even in Reagan's United States, docks, airports, and rapid-transit systems remained publicly owned. Involved here are external economies (time-saving, convenience) and diseconomies (congestion, pollution) and also elements of system, of network, which render the conventional neoclassical marginal-cost and marginal-profitability analysis both misleading and irrelevant, and the public-service aspect of high importance. Of course, in making decisions one should always compare costs and results, but one can do so only in the context of network, on the one hand, and the purpose of the activity on the other." - Alec Nove, "Central Planning in Capitalism and Socialism"

This last sentence is crucial. This is the antidote for those who confusedly lament the "inefficiencies" of public institutions like urban transportation and extol the alleged virtues of profit-driven markets. First of all, marginal-cost/marginal-profitability analysis is basically useless here and distorts matters considerably. Secondly, asking that public transit be run "like a business" evinces a deep misunderstanding of the function of public transportation.

This is the crux of the issue. To demand that public transit networks "turn a profit" is to misunderstand what a public transit system is.

What, then, is the function of urban public transit? Quite obviously, it is to most effectively facilitate movement of everyone, on a city-wide systemic basis, in a way that is sustainable, comprehensive, egalitarian, efficient, organized, and user-friendly in the broadest sense. It is decidedly not to exploit certain needs that are profitable while ignoring those that aren't, which is precisely what for-profit transportation does. For example: if you're a capitalist, why invest in means of transportation for, say, poor pensioners who are not a good source of profits? Why not just ignore them completely and focus on markets where there is "effective demand" and the potential for hefty returns? This is, incidentally, what happens with health insurance when it is fully commodified: the poor and sick are left by the wayside whereas private insurers "cherry pick" the wealthy and healthy patients that will better aid the company in maximizing profits.

Now, obviously, rejecting neoclassical marginal analysis here doesn't mean that there isn't some cost/benefit analysis to be undertaken at the system-level by a public transit authority regarding how to allocate funds, service, etc. But this analysis will not look much like the rent-seeking behavior of capitalist investors, first and foremost because the relevant benefit here is not "profit" for the transportation authority, but the extent to which the public transit network fulfills its function well. We need to know what the relevant good is that we're trying to maximize before we can begin an analysis of what an optimal public transit system would consist in. Assuming the metric of cash returns on a balance sheet in the ways that capitalist firms do here is to completely miss the issue at hand (yet, this is precisely what neoclassical economic theory does: it elevates the tendentious, narrow logic of the capitalist firm to a universal and quasi-natural status).

A good transportation system is not one that runs a surplus every year. A good transportation system is one that fulfills its function well. Making efficient use of resources is of course of value, but of purely instrumental value. Contrary to the dogmas of deficit-hawks and those who fetishize balanced budgets, a "cheap" but anemic transit system is not a good one.

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