Here.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Some Reflections on Obama's Jobs Bill
I know I'm weighing in a bit late here, but I'd like to say a little bit about the "jobs bill" proposed by Obama.
As always, I think a bit of context is important here. It's not unfair to say that this is too little too late. Obama has spent the lion's share of his tenure in the White House thus far pandering to ruling class interests. From the large share of Goldman alums he brought into his cabinet to the billion dollar bank bailouts, to the extension of Bush's tax breaks for the rich, Obama has time and time again proven his pro-business credentials. And he has time and time again thrown progressives under the bus in order to do it.
Moreover, the recent charade over the debt ceiling evinced a deep-seated allegiance to the interests of finance capital. During that debacle, polls routinely showed widespread disillusionment with the whole mess, and growing anxiety over soaring unemployment figures. Since the onset of the global crisis -and with it, mass unemployment- there has been a need at the Federal level for a comprehensive jobs plan. But Obama has done nothing and said nothing about this problem, until now. Even if it were a serious plan, which it isn't, it would still be too little too late. And even if it did have serious progressive content, which it doesn't, it is little more than a rhetorical campaign move, since Obama is well aware that Congress won't pass it. It's a low-risk move, since he can externalize responsibility by blaming the fact that it doesn't pass on the reactionary Republicans. But anyone who's paid attention during the last 3 years knows that this is little more than a cheap trick. It's not the Republicans who've stopped the Democrats from pursuing modest reforms aimed at easing the pain of working people during the worst crisis since the Depression. It's been the Democrats themselves who've put the breaks of reform. A quick glance at their record during the period when they held supermajorities confirms this. They don't "lack backbone". They simply don't aim to do anything that seriously challenges the pro-business consensus in Washington that grounds the Democratic Party as much as the Republican Party.
On the environment, Obama reversed his position on offshore drilling and came to the defense of the corporate crooks running BP. In Afghanistan, Obama has actually expanded operations. On the Arab Spring, Obama had the same position as his Republican predecessors: keep repressive client regimes "stabilized", arm authoritarian monarchies to the teeth to put the break on popular uprisings, and maintain control of the region given its political/economic significance for global competition. On tax breaks for the super rich, Obama pushed to extend Bush's policies rather than roll them back. On the question of budget cuts, Obama and the Democrats have been more than willing to make punishing cuts to the arts, health care, student aid, education and public transport. On education, Obama and the Democrats have embraced and repackaged Bush's No Child Left Behind while taking a fierce anti-teacher position that would make Reagan blush. On the bank bailouts, Obama continued Bush's policies and defended CEO bonuses. All of these positions were shared by the Democrats in Congress, and by the National party apparatus in general. A progressive party they are not. A party of the people they are not. To blame all of this on the Republicans is to suggest that the Democrats have no agency of their own. But they do have agency, and what they choose to do with it is to butter up the haves at the expense of the have nots.
But what about the content of the "jobs bill"? I haven't looked at it closely, but it's my understanding that it suffers from many of the same problems as the stimulus bill. It is, first of all, much too small to deal with the problem. This isn't a fuzzy, touchy-feely affair: the scale of the problem is objective and easily observed by glancing at unemployment figures. Second, the bill includes a disproportionate share of tax breaks which will do little to address unemployment. The idea that tax breaks for corporations always increases their likeliness to invest in new jobs is discredited nonsense. There is no such automatic relationship, as recent events make crystal clear. And, of course, this bill still does nothing to address the basic contradictions that produced this crisis in the first place. Nor does the bill do anything to address the huge loss of purchasing power and the large levels indebtedness that the working class has sustained as a result the crisis. It would be far too generous to say the bill is weaksauce. It's more like watered down weaksauce lite, except we won't even get to try it because it won't get passed. So I guess it's more like a TV advertisement for weaksauce lite that we're forced to watch even though we can't afford to buy it.
Some liberals are rejoicing that this is the "Obama we voted for in 2008", but that is crazy. They're being taken for a ride.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Rahm vs. Teachers
Before he was elected, Rahm made no secret of his desire to smash the ability of Chicago teachers to have a voice in their workplace. His campaign rhetoric was loaded with anti-union sabre-rattling as well as heaps of praise for privatization/charters. He garnered large swaths of business support with "tough" statements threatening to neutralize the influence of teachers over their own work conditions. His tone was bellicose and uncompromising. This is, after all, the same person who publicly said "fuck the UAW" and called left-leaning supporters of the Democratic Party "fucking morons". So, when you think about it, all of Rahm's anti-teacher baggage was to be expected, given his background in the corporate world and Chicago machine politics. His tenure in the Obama Administration, notable for its glowing embrace and ambitious extension of Bush's failed education policies, did little to assuage fears that Rahm would come down hard on teachers as mayor of Chicago.
But the most recent assault on Chicago teachers is a low blow, even for Rahm.
On labor day, no less, Rahm and Co. engineered a stunt that resulted in 3 CPS schools allegedly voting to waive the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) contract. Rahm (and the virulently anti-union big Chicago media empires like the Tribune) have lauded this as a huge step forward for "school reform". Glowing endorsements of these "courageous" teachers have surfaced all over the business-friendly media landscape in Chicago. What's going on here?
Let me fill you in on the background: The CTU is 30,000 strong, and has a contract with CPS in place which includes a clause that enables particular schools to waive aspects of the contract if the members vote to do so. Rahm ran for mayor pledging to extend the school day in Chicago without paying the teachers a dime for their increased work day. Of course, when workers are unionized into a 30,000 strong union, you can't just push them around the way that charter school administrators push around their non-union personnel. Unions are organs of workplace democracy that give workers a voice and the power to force bosses to listen. So, naturally, Rahm understood that he wouldn't be able to persuade the teachers to increase their work day substantially without paying them for the extra work they'd be doing. He understood that he'd have to ram it down their throats; negotiation, he must have thought, would be a waste of time. Of course, the teachers still have a potent weapon to resist his onslaught: the ability to shut down the entire CPS system with a 30,000-strong teachers strike. So, in the uncompromising, strong-armed manner for which he is infamous, Rahm used his Washington-insider connections to push through a bill in Springfield that legally restricts the right of teachers to go on strike. This doesn't, strictly speaking, mean that the teachers won't still strike; many public sector strikes are technically illegal. But it gives Rahm and his corporate allies yet another weapon in their union-busting arsenal. Succinctly put: Rahm wants to force the teachers to work longer hours for less pay, and, naturally, the teachers want, god forbid, to be compensated for the work that they do. Of course, teachers already do a large amount of uncompensated labor (e.g. grading, lesson-planning, etc.) and many contribute large amounts of their own money in order to purchase necessary school supplies for their students. They're already sacrificing a great deal. If there was a shred of justice in this system, the CPS teachers would first get fully compensated for the unpaid work they're already doing, and only then would a conversation about extending the school day take place.
It is in this context that we must understand Rahm's recent stunt. What happened was that Rahm and his allies engineered a "vote" among teachers at 3 CPS schools to extend the workday and thereby waive the CTU contract. From Rahm's perspective, this is tantamount to "courageous" teachers willingly accepting a lengthening of their workday for the sake of the "greater good". In his ideal world, all of the CTU would simply roll over and work longer hours. This would, of course, fix all of the social ills of our society, and puppy dogs and ice cream would float down from the sky.
Now, aspects of Rahm's position appear to have merit if you know nothing about the political context, or the concrete details of the "votes" (which I'll get to in a moment). And, predictably, this event has been given a context-free, tendentious portrayal in the business-friendly Chicago media. But, situated in the context of a general assault on working class living standards, and a particularly focused and dogged attack on public school teachers, it's clear enough that this is little more than a bid to undermine the CTU's ability to resist the coming onslaught from above. Despite all of the soaring rhetoric about "reform", this move has little to do with improving education as such.
But what about the details of the votes? Every day, more and more damning facts have come to light. First off, CPS had to bribe the teachers in order to get the votes they needed. They offered teachers increased compensation, and in some cases I'm told that teachers were offered iPads and other electronic goodies for their classrooms. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars per school in increased compensation. Of course, this is only 3 out of 600 schools in the system. If CPS has the money to increase compensation no a system-wide scale, why are they crying poor and demanding that teachers accept longer hours for zero pay in the first place? Second, there is also evidence that teachers and other staff were under intense pressure from above to vote the way that they did. In addition, there is reason to think that protocol (as outlined in the legally binding CTU contract) may not have been properly followed, throwing into question the legal basis of the whole stunt.
Still, set that aside. Suppose these 3 schools really did have bottom-up, teacher-driven elections, and suppose that they did vote to extend their workday for increased compensation packages. What would this show?
It's unclear. This only 3 out of 600 schools. That's 0.5% of the CPS system. Since when does a 0.5% vote tally on anything signal a major news event? And if the teachers did willingly accept longer hours for increased pay, doesn't that cast doubt on the whole "work longer, get paid the same" argument put forward by Rahm and his minions? As I said above, if CPS extended the increased compensation on a system-wide scale, they'd already be on their way to giving the teachers what they've asked for in terms of raises and increased pay for increased work hours.
But these facts, inconvenient though they may be for Rahm, aren't going to slow down the assault on teachers. Only increased struggle can stop the onslaught. Sooner or later, Rahm will provoke a showdown in a bid to crush them once and for all. What our side needs to do is prepare patiently for this by building community support, building solidarity among the working class, and educating potential allies about the power politics playing out here. Rahm's aim, itself part of a national (global, in fact) political/economic trend, is to crush the bargaining power of public sector unions in order to push through cuts and austerity. Rahm is merely doing what the Scott Walkers and the Georgios Papandreous of the world have been doing for months. Through Tax Increment Financing schemes (basically huge slushfunds controlled by the mayor that are funded by skimming revenues from property taxes), he's continuing to funnel money to unaccountable corporate firms who need "inducements" and "incentives" to do business in Chicago. But Rahm and the city machine can't be bothered to give the teachers the pay they deserve or treat educators with respect. The priorities are clear.
Should the school day be lengthened in Chicago? Perhaps. It's not the silver bullet that Rahm makes it out to be, and it won't fix the structural social and economic problems that produce educational inequalities in the first place. But maybe it would do a bit of good and add some marginal benefits to the education system in Chicago. I'm not in a position to say one way or the other. But this much is clear: whether not the day should be lengthened should be decision that educators make themselves, democratically, in consultation with community groups and parents. It should not be decreed from on high by political cheerleaders for the privatization and corporatization of education. And should teachers be asked to work longer hours, they absolutely must be compensated for doing so. Moreover, as I say, teacher should get paid for all of the extra labor that they already perform before they are asked to do more uncompensated work. One has only to recall that many Democrats, Obama included, defended the bonuses raked in by bank bailout recipients to see the duplicity at work here. These robber barons, we were told, "earned" every dollar of compensation they received. Without such high pay, the old argument goes, these "exceptionally talented" simply wouldn't work in finance and the company would not be able to compete. The astronomical bonuses were necessary to motivate the "talented rich" to do the great things they do (e.g. like wrecking the global economy for a generation). But, you know, when it comes to rank and file educators, they're overpaid at $40,000/yr and should be worked much harder for less money, and so on...
One final thing. If I hear another oblivious liberal from somewhere outside of Chicago tell me that it "must be cool to have Obama's right hand man as mayor" I think I may have to puke on their shoes. First off, Rahm is a right-winger, even by the tepid standards of the Democratic Party. Second, his old "boss" is just as bad as he is. Here's an excerpt from Obama's Labor Day speech:
"When union workers agree to pay freezes and pay cuts, they're not doing it just to keep their jobs, they're doing it so that their fellow workers, their fellow Americans can keep their jobs."Translation: workers must accept living standard cuts because otherwise "we" (by which he means the government and the ruling class) will be "forced" to lay them off. It's not as if there are any other options here... like taxing the rich, ending the wars, and rebuilding US infrastructure with a major public works plan. Yes, Obama and the ruling class are literally "forced" to either push down living standards or fire workers and drive up unemployment even further."When teachers agree to reforms on how schools are run, at the same time they're digging into their pockets for supplies for those kids, they do so because they believe every child can learn. They do it because they know something that those seek to divide us don't understand. We are all in this together. That's why those crowds came out to support you in Madison and Columbus. We are one nation. We are one people. We will rise and we will fall together."
And how about all of this "we're all in this together" rhetoric? It's funny, it only surfaces when the ruling classes need something from the rest of us. When they're banking, I don't remember them calling me up talking about how we're all in it together as far as the profits are concerned. And I don't recall hearing this "we rise and fall together" line when Obama was extending the Bush tax cuts at the same time that he slashed spending on health care, education and public transportation. If we're "all in this together", why doesn't he shield workers from all cuts by raising the marginal tax rate and ending the costly imperial ventures abroad? Because Obama is for Wall Street, not the jobless. He represents the ruling class, not the people.
Take note here. When it comes to cuts and sacrifices, suddenly "we're" all in it together. Suddenly gaping inequalities, racial hierarchies and oppression all disappear and, for the purposes of distributing sacrifices and burdens amongst the masses, we're one big happy family helping each other out. But when it comes to record profit margins, there is no "we" to speak of. When it's a matter of big private profits, Obama prefers to stick to the Reaganite refrain that the rich deserve their wealth because, well, "they've earned it". He makes sound as if the rest of us, working ever longer hours for stagnant wages to make this society run, are the ones getting a free ride. It's a simple formula: prosperity for the few, austerity for the many. And Democrat and Republican alike endorse it through and through.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
From the Archives: Detroit and Bourgeois Coldness
Nobody could plausibly argue that capitalism is a system operates according to principles of justice. The call to rectify historical injustices (e.g. slavery and its afterlives) registers as little more than noise to an economic mechanism that only speaks the language of profit. Capitalism is an inhuman system in which the demands of capital accumulation act as the steering mechanisms for investment, employment and production. Resources are haphazardly shuffled around in the pursuit of profitable investment opportunities. Human needs as such are not registered by the system's internal logic. Accordingly, where there are no short-term profits to be made, there is no investment or employment. As G.A. Cohen puts it, "The same system that overworks people in the interests of profit, also deprives them entirely of work when its not profitable to employ them."
Enter Detroit. For many, Detroit is synonymous with urban decay, business failure, high unemployment, economic misery, and crumbling infrastructure. Large parts of Detroit are in such bad shape that they appear as though they've been bombed out. Think Europe post-WWII. As TNR notes, "Unemployment in Detroit stands at a staggering 28 percent. And, in key measures of economic vitality in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan regions, Detroit finishes dead last." If you haven't ever been, it's instructive to move about in the city using Google maps street view. What seems like it should be a dense urban area on a map looks like a remote rural area with high grass growing out of broken roads and sidewalks. It's chilling. Moreover, as we've recently learned, 25% of the population of Detroit left the city in the last 10 years. The population is now roughly 700,000 (identical to its 1910 levels, before the auto industry really took off), down from its peak in the 1950s at nearly 2,000,000. Of course, population loss is but one of the many problems facing Detroit and, indeed, it is more a symptom than a cause.
What is the problem? The basic problems are the decline of manufacturing due to capital flight and rapid suburbanization over the last 50 years, but especially after the early 1970s. Why did this happen? Who is to blame?
Global capitalism went into deep crisis in the early 1970s. The long post-WWII boom during which living standards grew modestly for many had come to an end. As David Harvey has pointed out in various places, from a ruling class perspective the crisis of the 1970s was caused in part by the "excessive" power of organized labor. Labor was "too powerful" and was able to bargain too effectively. In other words, labor's power was getting in the way of profitability insofar as trade unions were able to win decent contracts with relatively high wages, good benefits, pensions, and all the rest of it. The power of labor and social movements meant that the state was, relatively speaking, under pressure from below to meet some degree of human needs it had ignored in the past. Moreover, the relative power of the nation state in the global system meant that it was not easy to move capital around globally.
The big problem for the ruling classes in this situation was that they were being taxed too heavily and made to negotiate with labor on terms that were far too close (for the liking of the ruling class) to equality. Mind you it was never anything like "dual power" between labor and capital --capital was always firmly on top-- but even this modestly equitable arrangement was not to the liking of capital once a global recession set in and profits were down across the board. Something had to give.
One strategy was to loosen up immigration controls. Xenophobic immigration barriers were lifted in the US in the 60s in order to try to undercut the bargaining power of organized labor and drive down wages. It didn't work. Thus, the ruling class pushed for the "liberation" of the financial institutions so that they could more easily move capital all over the globe. This enabled off-shoring and outsourcing so that capital could get access to the global "reserve army" of labor. This enabled it to avoid having to face head-on the social power of labor in the advanced capitalist nations. This was later coupled with another strategy: direct assaults on organized labor (e.g. Thatcher vs. the Miners, Reagan vs. PATCO), many of which were very successful in breaking the back of the labor movement for years to come.
These processes lead to the sharp decline of US manufacturing in the 70s. Millions of jobs were lost as the ruling class closed factories, downsized and moved their capital elsewhere. Former industrial centers were reduced to rubble. Those who could afford to move elsewhere in search of work did so, but many were barred from moving.
Suburbanization (which is bound up with this process of de-industrialization) is also a key to understanding this cluster of mutually re-inforcing processes that caused US cities to crumble in the 70s and 80s. Suburbanization, from the very beginning, was always a process shot through with racism and class contradictions. Roughly speaking, suburbanization and all its attendant spin-offs (cars, refrigerators, interstate highways, etc.) underwrote a large degree of the post-war economic growth from 1945-1973. This meant depopulating urban areas (where there were relatively few places to absorb large amounts of surplus capital) and reconfiguring large swaths of people in low-density built environments requiring heavy-car use, all populated by large single-family homes. Suburbanization also dispersed large sections of concentrated working-class populations in dense urban areas, shuffling them to a consumer-dominated social landscape in which public space and the potential for organized revolt were both in short supply.
But, of course, black people were shut out of this new social environment entirely. Federal law as well as extra-legal coercive enforcement mechanisms ensured that this new suburban space would be closed off to all black people, regardless of ability to pay. Federal law also consolidated and reinforced racist attitudes and norms by staking the value of white homeowners' property on there being near-zero levels of black people living in proximity to them (Federal law used a home appraisal system when subsidizing mortgages in which an "A" or "B" rating could only be given in the event the area surrounding the house was less than 2% black... more than that was automatic cause for a low rating). In the context of widespread struggles against racism in the 60s and early 70s, many racist whites decided to flee to the all-white suburbs. To be sure, "white flight" was also a result of the devastating effects of de-industrialization. But there could have been no "black flight" since black people were barred by racist laws, white violence as well as various economic barriers from leaving declining cities for the suburbs. The cumulative effect of punishing poverty, racial oppression, and police brutality ultimately resulted in a series of urban rebellions in the 1960s that shook the urban power structure to the core. Whereas this discontent produced concessions from elites in the 60s, as time went on the strategy from above shifted to one of indifference and abandonment of black populations enraged over the horrible conditions in which they were forced to live. Today, the ruling class only concerns itself with poor urban black populations to the extent that it can criminalize millions of people and shuffle them into the (increasingly profitable) prison-industrial complex.
This is the context in which we must understand Detroit.
What should be clear is that few if any of the causes of misery are peculiar or "internal" to Detroit. And for this reason, the solutions to Detroit's woes cannot be wholly internal; they must come from without. They must, in other words, be part of a much larger mobilization to curb the global economic forces that have sapped the city's ability to flourish. Broken cities don't rebuild themselves, nor do jobs materialize out of thin air. These things require large-scale investments of capital. What Detroit really needs is a Marshall Plan.
As TNR has put it:"Institutions developed at the height of Detroit’s postwar prosperity remain--and provide the city with advantages that similarly depressed industrial cities cannot claim. It has educational institutions in or near the city (the University of Michigan, Wayne State) and medical institutions (in part, a legacy of all those union health care plans) that are innovative powerhouses and that currently generate private-sector activity in biomedicine, information technology, and health care management. And there is already a smattering of examples of old industrial outposts that have reacquired relevance. An old GM plant in Wixom has been retrofitted to produce advanced batteries. There’s a new automotive-design lab based in Ann Arbor."
This is just to say that the public infrastructure and productive forces in Detroit, dilapidated though they are, are nonetheless developed to a relatively high degree given the city's past. The biggest problem is that this productive capacity lies misused or unused entirely.
So, what Detroit needs is a massive influx of public funds. Some will say: but how could we afford this? I think this is a short-sighted objection. We can afford to drop bombs, kill people and destroy infrastructure in the Middle East and elsewhere, but somehow we're supposed to believe that we can't rebuild things and help people here at home? This isn't even to speak of the fact that our society still produces enough of a surplus to fund both the imperialist adventures and a far more ambitious domestic spending agenda (that's just to say how large the surplus is, not that we shouldn't want to end the wars). The surplus exists, but it's use is presently dictated by the constraints of profitability. A just society, in contrast, would mobilize the surplus to assuage suffering and cultivate human flourishing.
Perhaps the biggest problem facing Detroit is indifference. This has both racist as well as capitalist overtones (to the extent that we can disentangle the two). The racist dimension lies in a tendency for whites to gawk at black misery in such a way that poor blacks become dangerous, dark "others". This was, of course, true even during the "golden years" of Detroit when the auto industry was booming. But this deep indifference has increased with the rapid decline of the city. This tendency undermines bonds of solidarity between whites and black people, since many whites tend to see black misery as "their problem" and not a social problem of wide significance to all. The result is that black people aren't seen as fellow comrades, fellow citizens whose plight is of interest to everyone. So when a city as heavily black (over 81%) as Detroit is in deep trouble many whites see it as a problem that doesn't concern them. This was true in post-Katrina New Orleans as well as in many other cases. There is a profound lack of solidarity here: the suffering of the black population of Detroit is not internalized and identified with enough by whites. What's needed is a Left politics grounded in uncompromising solidarity.
The capitalist dimension is similarly dehumanizing. Capitalist investment is blind to human needs as such. It only aims to maximize profit. So human suffering that cannot be exploited profitably simply doesn't register. The system doesn't take note of it- and capital is not invested to assuage it. As far as the "Free Market" is concerned, Detroit is invisible. It doesn't matter how talented or deserving residents are- capital investment is not an ethically sound process in which the deserving get their just deserts. It is thoroughly impersonal, and has no regard for human development. This is reification at work- the tendency to see ensembles of social relations and even human beings as mere exchangeable objects to be exploited when its profitable or cast aside when its not. This is what Adorno called "bourgeois coldness". Clearly it is to blame if we're to understand why the people of Detroit have been allowed to undergo such steady decline and misery for the past 40 years.
Democracy and Economic Planning
I'm currently halfway through Pat Devine's incredible book Democracy and Economic Planning. It should be required reading for everyone on the Left. It is rigorous, clear, well-written and refreshingly radical. The goal of the book is to determine what sort of economic structure is required for a genuinely self-governing society. His argument, contra defenders of market socialism, is that democratic planning (which combines elements of centralization as well as de-centralization, local as well as national-level coordination) is what's needed. He insists on genuine participatory political democracy at the society-wide level, as well as serious industrial democracy at the level of the workplace. He also offers arguments to help navigate the potential tensions between society-wide goals and the goals of particular self-managed, worker-run firms. Devine sharply criticizes the statist Stalinist regimes that constituted so-called "really existing socialism", while at the same time offering a withering Marxist critique of capitalism. He also offers a detailed analysis of attempts at worker self-management in Hungary and Yugoslavia, showing what we can learn from their mistakes. I'm surprised that the book has not received more attention; but in an era in which the spell of neoliberalism is being shattered to pieces, the arguments in the book are more poignant than ever. There is a democratic alternative to the boom and bust cycles, deep crises, exploitation, war, environmental degradation and oppression characteristic of a global system dominated by capitalism. Read Devine's book to get a sense of the basic contours of what the socialist Left is fighting for. It's not a detailed blueprint for a new society, but it is an excellent example of spelling out concretely how it might be possible to institutionalize the basic aim that animates socialist, i.e. a self-governing society in which the means of production is under the democratic control of the people.
Two-Day Nationwide General Strike in Chile Against Austerity
Here. The protests are the biggest since the Pinochet dictatorship fell. This is also the first two-day general strike since Pinochet as well. I dunno, though, maybe the Wisconsin Democratic Party should get in touch and ask them to call it off and try a top-down, year-long process of recall instead.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
On "Efficiency"
(Neo-classical) economists love to talk about efficiency. Markets, we're told, are nothing if not efficient. Businesses that succeed, supposedly do so because they're efficient. Talk to an economist, and you'll hear a lot about "efficient allocations" of resources, and "maximizing efficiency", and so on. What does all this talk mean? Why is it billed as such an important criterion for evaluating social institutions and public policy?
It's worth noting that economists themselves haven't always taken "efficiency" to be the most important goal of policy. As Andrew Levine notes: "For economists who came of age during the Great Depression and their students, unemployment was the major theoretical and practical concern. Nowadays, efficiency has taken its place." Levine is correct. It hardly needs to be said that full employment has long since ceased to be even a rhetorical goal of public policy. But if the old demand for full employment was concrete and easy to endorse, the new lingo of "efficiency" is abstract and unconnected with the needs and interests of working people. Again, as Levine puts it, "it is hard, at least for strangers to the economics profession, to understand why economists today focus so doggedly on a structural property of economic systems that represents real world concerns in only the most indirect and attenuated fashion."
So what is that economists mean by "efficiency"? For all their talk about being a rigorous science, conventional economists are actually quite unclear about what their favored criterion means. As Levine points out, "sometimes it is used loosely as a synonym for productivity...sometimes it invokes a cluster of non-technical ideas- delivering the goods, avoiding waste (of time, effort and resources), running smoothly, and so on." But in more technical contexts, it means "Pareto optimum". In the reigning jargon, an allocation of "resources" is "efficient" if it is "Pareto optimum", that is, "if any change would make someone worse off (holding technologies, preferences and the (initial) distribution of resources constant)." Or, put another way, a "Pareto optimum" or "Pareto efficient" allocation is one in which no individual can be made better off by redistributing resources without making another worse off.
Now, I want to draw your attention to two things at this point. First off, take note of the fact that the ordinary, non-technical uses of "efficiency" do not necessarily coincide with the technical definition embodied in the idea of "Pareto efficiency". That is, there is a substantial gap between our ordinary understanding of the word "efficiency" and the way that the term is used in technical contexts in neo-classical economics.
Second, note that "Pareto efficiency" isn't necessarily always a good thing. As Levine points out, "the most vile situations can be Pareto-optimal if a change would make someone worse off". That is, Pareto-efficiency is compatible with any degree of equality or inequality. Thus, an extremely unequal distribution could be Pareto-efficient just in case it is not possible to make one person better off without making another person worse off. Pareto efficiency also fulfills a subtle ideological role in justifying capitalism, often being invoked as a theoretical tool for justifying the dogma of "trickle down". It can be used to argue against re-distributive taxation on grounds that huge increases in the wealth of the rich (and thus huge increases in overall economic inequality) either increase or have no effect on the welfare of the worst off.
It's also worth pointing out that the way mainstream economists interpret "better off/worse off" is problematic. They're supposed to be measuring human well-being, but they use problematic surrogates such as possession of money or the satisfaction of "revealed preferences". And individual's "preferences", according to economists, are "revealed" in market transactions. It is assumed that these preferences are fixed and to be taken as given. But in reality, individual "preferences" are shaped by and formed within social conditions. Moreover, they are open to rational criticism and democratic debate; surely no critical approach to understanding society can take preferences as mere givens. So, the economist's metric for measuring how "well off" a person is is deeply flawed. Contrast it with the Marxist/Aristotelian view of human well-being, where a person is well-off to the extent that she is able to develop and exercise her talents and natural powers (e.g. creative faculties, physical capabilities, capacity to form meaningful relationships, intellectual powers, etc.). The juxtaposition makes clear that mainstream economists work within a framework for understanding human welfare that is thoroughly pro-capitalist, in that it contorts the definition of human well-being to fit the structural needs of the capitalist economy. It has the ideological effect of leaving us unable to articulate grievances or unmet needs, because it defines our needs and welfare in terms friendly to market society.
So much for Pareto efficiency. But what about the "ordinary" conception of efficiency? Why shouldn't that be the fundamental measuring stick by which we evaluate economic and political institutions?
Because "efficiency" in the ordinary sense is of merely instrumental value. It has no intrinsic value. Doing some task efficiently is good, but only insofar as the task is itself a good one. So, if the goal of some institution is to treat human illness, then doing so efficiently would appear to be a good thing. Efficiency, in this case, would be instrumentally valuable for achieving the goal of treating human illness. But the metric of efficiency doesn't tell us whether or not treating human illness is a good or bad thing. This is made clear by way of another example. Suppose the goal of some institution, imagine a colonial military venture, was to oppress some group of people. We can, of course, imagine the goal of oppression being carried out more or less efficiently. And we wouldn't want to say that efficiency is a good thing in this case, because the goal that is being efficiently achieved is abhorrent. So what we come to see is that the metric of efficiency tells us nothing of the worthiness of the goals of some process or institution. But the overall goal or end that some process aims at is crucial, indeed far more important than whether it is efficient. Because if the goal is unworthy, it doesn't matter whether its efficient.
So the fetishism of efficiency has the effect of obscuring the goals of certain social processes or institutions. Within the idiom of efficiency, in fact, we can't even have a discussion about what the goals are; they are taken as given. Thus, if you think that the function or goal of the health care system should be to treat sickness and ill health, you'll quickly find that there is no space for you to express such a position within a narrow debate about whether the present for-profit health care system is "efficient" or not. The same could be said of public transportation. It is sometimes said that public transit is not "efficient" because it doesn't run the way that a for-profit firm runs (e.g. fare prices are set lower than their market value, services are allocated more according to need than effective demand, etc.). But that judgment typically smuggles in and ascribes irrational goals/functions to public transit systems. The basic function or goal of public transit should be to create a maximally accessible system that helps everyone get where they need to go in a safe, comprehensive way. But if that's so, it hardly makes sense to complain that it doesn't produce profits. That's not the point of it! So, to ask whether it is efficient or not would really be to ask whether or not it fulfilled its function well. But more often than not, talk about "efficiency" smuggles in tacit goals and preferred functions. Thus, public transit can be attacked as "inefficient", where the thing it doesn't do efficiently is accumulate surpluses.
So where does this leave us? Efficiency, in the ordinary sense, clearly matters. For whatever it is that we're doing, it would be irrational for us to want it to be done inefficiently. Even if we're aiming to lay about on the couch and veg out, there are more or less efficient ways of doing it (e.g. it wouldn't make sense to do sixteen jumping jacks every 10 minutes in order to achieve the goal of laying on couch). But efficiency is not, as we've seen, intrinsically valuable. It is only valuable insofar as what we're doing is valuable. So what really matters is the choice of goals or ends. And that holds both for individual goals (e.g. how to live one's life, what sorts of relationships to cultivate, what career path to choose, etc.) as well as collective/social goals (e.g. what should the basic goal of social institutions be? what kind of life do we want to live together? what forms of association do we want to enter into with one another?, etc.). All of this drops out of discussions about mere efficiency. In order to know what goals are worthy of our assent, we need robust democratic debate between free and equal citizens. But, as economists will quickly point out, such a radical democratic vision is not compatible with structuring social life around market forces. Economists take this to be a problem with democracy; but socialists see things precisely the other way around. That is, socialists see that as a reason to reject the fetishism of the market as the central organizing structure of society.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Infiltrating Hollywood: The Spook Who Sat By the Door.
Excellent documentary on the making of the epic 1973 film The Spook Who Sat By the Door. Trailer here. Showing now at the Siskel Theatre in Chicago.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
On the Insanity of Mainstream Economics
Quoted from David McNally's excellent Global Slump (which I'll be posting about soon):
- "The central problem of depression-prevention has been solved" announced Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas, in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association. Meanwhile, the originator of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, Eugene Fama, haughtily dismissed those who predicted a financial crisis, telling an interviewer "The word 'bubble' drives me nuts" -just as one of the greatest financial bubbles in history was exploding.
- One defining feature of every capitalist boom is the absurd outbreak of triumphalism that accompanies it. We live in a "new economy", pundits proclaim, a perpetual motion machine of ever-expanding economic activity. Recessions are a thing of the past... Just as such voices were heard repeatedly prior to the meltdown of 2008, so they bleated out their convictions on the eve of the Great Crash of 1929. Capitalism had "mitigated" its "childhood diseases", opined economist Alvin Hansen at the time. Not to be outdone, the month of the Great Crash, October 1929, economics luminary Irving Fisher declared, "I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher than it is today within a few months." Fisher was ever so slightly off the mark: it would be over twenty-five years before stock market prices reached those heights.
- Mainstream economics has no inherent capacity to make sense of full-fledged breakdowns in equilibrium. Radical political economy, on the other hand, expects economic crises. But this is because it does not expect markets to be inherently stable, efficient and rational. However, mainstream economics and its quantitative analysis ("quants") refuse to acknowledge the possibility of phenomena that violate the predictions their equilibrium generate. Indeed, after the stock market crash of 1987, two quants offered a proof that it was statistically impossible -i.e. that what had happened could not have happened!
- In 1998, for instance, world markets were rocked b the collapse of Long Term Capital Management (LCTM), a multi-billion dollar hedge fund that was run by two Nobel Prize winners, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton. Using Scholes's celebrated formula for derivatives pricing, LCTM made a massive bet that blew up in August 1998 when the firm lost a staggering $1.9 billion in a single month.
Private Property and Freedom
In the previous post, I poked holes in the attempt by many on the Right to ground politics on an allegedly fundamental right to private property. Now, it hardly needs to be said that what moves ordinary people in political argument is not lectures about natural rights. Far more moving is talk of freedom, liberation, emancipation. And for good reason. Liberation is, after all, a far more worthy and valuable goal than the abstract, troubled notion of a "natural right" to property.
Unsurprisingly, Right-wing defenders of private property in the means of production have tended to try to clothe their arguments in the language of freedom. More often than not, it is simply assumed that there is a one-to-one identity between private property rights and freedom. As I've argued elsewhere, once we reflect on this assumption it quickly becomes clear that it is false. But let's spend a moment spelling out why.
What is freedom? Right-wingers can't respond to this question by saying "freedom is not having one's right to property infringed upon", for this is circular. We already know that Right-wingers think there is a fundamental right to private property. What we want to know is why we should believe them that there's an intrinsic link between the institution of private property and freedom. So, the answer to our question can't be that freedom is private property and private property is freedom, for that begs the question.
Suppose, then, that a Right-winger tries the following argument: Private property rights equip an owner of some thing with freedom to do as she pleases with that thing without interference from others. To violate the right, then, is to curtail freedom. That's the connection between property rights and freedom.
So far so good. But this argument is hopelessly incomplete. First of all, the argument lacks the appropriate scope to help us know what a free society would look like. It only focuses on one particular owner of some good and tells us that interference with her ability to dispose of that good as she pleases would limit her freedom. It surely does. But societies are much bigger, much more complex affairs than this example lets on. When one individual owns a thing, that presupposes the non-ownership of all other individuals in the society. Ownership, then, isn't a relation between individual persons and objects. It is a social relation: it relates owners to non-owners in specific ways, detailing what each party may and may not do. So, every claim to ownership entails a claim to non-ownership, a claim to exclusion, on the part of others. But, non-ownership, insofar as it excludes non-owners from the use of certain goods, is freedom-limiting. If I lack food or shelter, private property law will coercively prevent me from camping out on a rich person's land and eating fruit from trees growing on it. If I want to find shelter and food on the land of the wealthy, I am coercively prevented from doing so by the regime of private property. That is a very real limit on my freedom: I am coercively prevented from doing that thing that I'd like to do by external force. Families that are being forcibly removed from their homes during the economic crisis hardly need to be told that this coercive process severely limits their freedom to live without interference.
So what does the Right say about such cases? They say that the restriction on the freedom of the non-owner is right and just. The state should intervene on the behalf of the owner. But why? Because, they'll likely say, the "owner has rights". But why?
Here they can tell a story (like the ones refuted in the previous post) about why we supposedly have such rights. Or they can tell a story about why the owner supposedly deserves her land because she worked for it, etc. But what they can't say is that we have such rights because they promote freedom, since the very case we're considering is one in which the freedom of a non-owner is denied! It's vacuous to say that "freedom is curtailed for the sake of freedom" -for what is it that decides that the freedom of the owner should trump that of the non-owner?
Let's change gears for a moment. Suppose you wanted to create a society with maximum overall freedom in it. Ownership, as we've seen, is a social relationship that regulates owners and non-owners. So there's a question of whether different ways of organizing these social relationships make for more or less freedom. Which of the following arrangements, for example, generate more overall freedom?
- A society in which 2% of the population owns 98% of the property.
- A society in which the ownership of property is more or less equally distributed.
But how is it putatively "natural" property rights are supposedly so fundamental and important that we can't even violate them to promote greater individual freedom? My response would be that they aren't so fundamental or important. In fact I don't even think there's any reason to think that there are such things as "natural" property rights at all. Property is a social institution governing the use of certain things. It can be configured in all kinds of different ways--depending on the kind of society we're talking about. It seems to me insane to claim that human beings by nature come packaged with "rights" to particular, specific institutional arrangements that fit cleanly with the functional demands of a modern capitalist economy. For most of human history such a thing would have made no sense.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Is there a right to private property?
The idea of a "right to private property" is often lumped in with other allegedly fundamental rights (e.g. right to free speech, due process, etc.). But do human beings, by nature, have such a right? What is the basis of the often-invoked right to property? Everyone knows that in existing capitalist societies (take the US for example) there is an intricate system of property law. Although ownership is often thought of as a relationship between an owner and some owned good, ownership is actually a relationship between owners and non-owners. Ownership specifies what the owner (and everyone who's not the owner) can and can't do with some owned thing (e.g. I can use my pencil for writing but I can't use it to stab you, you may not use my pencil without my consent, etc.) Ownership, then, is about social relations. The concept of ownership would not make sense on a planet inhabited by one lone human being. But if social justice is, in part, about what kind of social relationships we want to stand with respect to each other, shouldn't the basic structure of ownership be up for grabs in a discussion of social justice? Isn't it obvious that political struggles for justice should seek to reconfigure the ownership relations?
Not according to many on the Right. They often claim that the powers of property owners are sacrosanct and should trump all other concerns. At least two different strategies of argument are typically pursued here. I'm separating them out for the sake of clarity, but it should be noted that Right-wingers tend to run them together and confuse the two.
The first may be called "consequentialist" or, if you like, utilitarian. It argues that private property rights must be kept at arms length from the political will of the demos. Why? Because private property rights, in the context of a large-scale capitalist economy, tend to produce the greatest overall output, making everyone better off than they would otherwise be. Reconfiguring private property rights in the means of production, say, would threaten the ability of the system to "deliver the goods" and, consequently, would tend to decrease overall utility. According to this utilitarian-style argument, firm private property rights are not, strictly speaking, natural or sacrosanct (because if an empirical argument showing that they lead to sub-optimal economic consequences came along, it would invalidate them). But, since proponents of this argument do think that emphasizing private property rights tends to produce the greatest overall economic pie, they think such rights are here to stay. This argument is distinctive because it doesn't claim that property rights are self-evident or natural. They are only valuable, this argument implies, insofar as they produce certain good consequences at the marco-level. Far-Right thinkers such as Von Mises and Hayek, as well as big international institutions like the IMF, have made arguments of this kind in defense of "stable" property rights. Say what you like about this argument, at least it is clear and falsifiable.
The second argumentative strategy takes it cue from natural law. It argues that there should be firm private property rights not because of the macroeconomic consequences that such rights produce, but because human beings naturally possess such rights. Traditionally, natural law was based on theology. Such and such rights are supposed to accord with God's law. Of course, religious rationale for legal institutions has tended to lose its authority since the onset of modernity and for good reasons. First, even if there is a God, and even if "he" did build a natural moral law into the furniture of the universe, there's still a difficult question: how do we know the precise, specific content of this law? It's not as if we can simply look at nature and see specific institutional proposals like "a right to private property" written into the landscape. So the question remains: how do we know that the specific content of natural law includes an individual right to appropriate all sorts of things (from natural resources, to personal items, to telecommunications grids, to large-scale means of production) and claim them as our private property? Why isn't there, as Hillel Steiner has argued, a natural right of access to the means of production? And how could a natural law theorist even dispute Steiner's argument without offering reasons in favor of her preferred list of rights, thereby invalidating the whole natural law enterprise? If the natural law theorist begins to respond to critics of her list with reasons in defense of her position, she puts the whole enterprise in jeopardy since the list of natural rights (in traditional versions of the view) is supposed to rest on God's natural law, not reasoned argument.
So, it doesn't take much reflection to see that the "natural right to private property" rests on thin air. Rather than being handed down from God, a more plausible story is that the typical list of allegedly "natural rights" are just institutions preferred by dominant groups at a particular time who then go on to claim that their preferences are the natural, timeless will of God. It's brilliant, really: you get to put whatever you like on the schedule of natural rights, and then no one can really question them because, according to your story, they are simply the dictates of God's natural law. To invoke such natural rights in an argument against the Left is simply to invoke Hocus Pocus. And it won't do to set the theology aside and claim that such a natural right is simply "self evident", for it clearly is not.
Of course, there are secular defenses of the right to private property that aren't based on utilitarian reasoning. One route, taken by Hegel, is to argue that private property rights are crucial to moral development. This is a highly idiosyncratic argument, and it's not often that those on the Right invoke it, so we can set it aside. Another secular route would be to lean on the idea of "self ownership". Self-ownership says that we own our own person in the same way that we own external objects in the world. We may therefore do whatever we like with our own body, and, accordingly with our own labor. When we labor to produce something, we mix what we own (our body) with what we don't own (some external object). Through this mixing we can be said to come to have a legitimate claim to own the external thing we labored to produce. Thus, when someone does something with my property without my consent, they're actually injuring my personal integrity (since my property, on this model, is supposedly an extension of my individual ownership in my own person). In this way, self-ownership could serve as a foundation for the idea of a fundamental right to property.
Self-ownership has a certain appeal at first because it seems to explain the (plausible) thought that we should enjoy a control over our own person that should never be violated by another. In the context of abortion rights, in particular, self-ownership looks like a plausible premise (e.g. I own my body, so the government shouldn't tell me what I can and can't do with it). But, upon reflection, it actually turns out that self-ownership is not the best explanation of this thought, and it actually entails a host of quite implausible consequences as well. For example, self-ownership equates our ownership of our person with our ownership of things. It therefore reifies our person, and equates it with exchangeable objects in a way that is implausible. Human beings enjoy a status distinct from mere objects and commodities, and self-ownership simply doesn't capture this status. Moreover, self-ownership implies that I may justifiably sell myself into slavery. Robert Nozick famously bites the bullet here and accepts that this conclusion follows from his so-called "libertarian" position. Thus, a slave society, in his opinion, could be a just society (even if everyone except one person was a slave). Many think that alone is a reductio ad absurdum. And then there are big problems with the labor-mixing story. How exactly is this supposed to work? If I come upon an unowned clearing in the woods and want to claim it for myself by building a fence around it, what do I thereby come to own? The whole field, or just the area right underneath the fence where I mixed my labor? Or suppose that I dump a can of tomato juice into a lake and it disperses widely... do I then come to own the whole lake or only those parts where the tomato molecules have dispersed? Or suppose I fly a helicopter around spraying water droplets... You get the picture. This notion of labor-mixing is a half-baked idea at best.
But let's grant the idea of self-ownership for a moment and see how well it actually justifies private property rights in capitalist societies. Suppose I'm a capitalist, how is it supposed to turn out that my self-ownership and personal integrity is violated when I am taxed? It's highly unclear. First off, it's not as if I mixed my labor with anything that I own. I'm after all, not a producer. I don't labor to produce the commodities that my company sells on the market. Yet, in capitalist societies, I of course have exclusive ownership rights over all the products my employees produce. In what way does self-ownership help us justify this right of ownership over the surplus value produced by my employees? Again, it's highly unclear. Sure, I own my person (we've granted that). But how is my personal integrity supposed to be violated by paying taxes on the profits my company earns as the result of others labor? If anything, self-ownership suggests that I, qua capitalist, am doing something unsavory by appropriating the surplus value produced by the labor of my employees. If anything, the fuzzy idea of self-ownership provides a quasi-argument not dissimilar to the Marxist charge of exploitation. As many so-called "left-libertarians" have argued, a political theory founded on self-ownership seems to end up being far more critical of capitalism, and far more left-wing, than hard-right "libertarians" like Nozick and Hayek have realized.
But, of course, so-called "libertarian" arguments that rely upon self-ownership don't use such real-world examples. The arguments they use to support their favored policies always begin with some individual who is alone in the universe. They frequently use the example of Robinson Crusoe, which is laughable. This individual, they argue, begins in a world where nothing is owned, mixes her labor with a raw natural substrate, and thereby comes to legitimately own it. How, they then ask, can it be just to intervene violently to force her to give up this thing she owns? Doesn't this violate her person in an intrusive way? Maybe it does. But we have to be clear that we're not talking about reality. We're talking about an almost sci-fi scenario that is contrary to fact. We're also talking about a scenario that is internally contradictory: an isolated individual allegedly in a "state of nature" who, despite her isolation, still brought with her all of the fruits of social life (e.g. language, culture, the concept of "ownership", etc. etc.). Such contrary to fact scenarios prove nothing about complex modern societies in which everything is produced through dense networks of social labor. No individual, completely on her own, could even produce a pencil if she tried. Too much socially produced knowledge, technology, and raw material extraction are required for one individual to accomplish alone. So the so-called "libertarian" argument is a non-starter.
So where does this leave the "right to private property"? I think it makes it look rather implausible indeed. I haven't said anything to impugn the utilitarian, economistic argument, but I think you can see that it is wildly implausible. Natural law is a non-starter, for it rests on spooky metaphysical ideas which, even if they were plausible, hardly justify something so specific and modern as a "right to private property". And the idea of self-ownership, apart from being ill-founded itself, doesn't even do the work of justifying property rights that it purports to do.
So there is no sacrosanct, natural right to private property. It is wrong for me to come into your apartment and fool with your toothbrush. But that would be wrong in a socialist society as well. And we don't need some fancy natural right to property to say why. Moreover, private property in the means of production is a much different affair from possessing certain kinds of personal property (e.g. your toothbrush). And owning credit-default swaps and collarteralized debt obligations is not the same thing as enjoying exclusive control of the sandwich you just spent the last hour making yourself for lunch. Rather than help us make sense of these cases, the idea of a "right to private property" obscures things. I think the Left should be confident in denying that there is such a right at all. It is basically non-sense. What the Left is after is a society free of domination of all forms, an egalitarian social order in which oppression and relations of exploitation are a thing of the past. Subordinating all politics to the protection of allegedly natural property rights stops us from even approximating that goal. Harping on the idea of this right is nothing more than an apologia for a system whose legitimacy is losing ground by the day.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Why the Afghanistan War Won't End Soon
Let's hope Richard Falk is eventually proven wrong (although, for the time being, his analysis strikes me as correct). That is, let's hope a powerful, organized anti-war movement emerges that is capable of undermining the legitimacy of this costly and inhumane venture.
One of the ideas floating around out there is that the punishing wave of austerity being pushed through by Obama and the Democrats has a "silver lining" in that it includes cuts to defense spending. First off, it's not difficult, even in ruling class circles, to make the case for reducing "defense spending" when the budget is as bloated as ours is at present. Finance capitalists are so hell-bent on deficit reduction that it is reasonable, even within a ruling class perspective, to think that defense spending can be trimmed down a bit.
Second, we have to keep in mind that Washington is committed to financing the continued occupation of Afghanistan. Even if cost-cutting moves are made, they pale in comparison to the cost of that conflict alone.
Finally, as Doug Henwood points out, "in 2000, we spent 3.7% of GDP on the military. The Pentagon didn’t have to hold bake sales. We’re now spending 5.4%. Merely going back to 2000 would save 1.7% of GDP, or $255 billion. If over the next decade we spent 3.7% of GDP instead of 5.4%, we’d save $3.6 trillion." Now, you'll have noted that this sort of reduction is not even discussed as an option among the two corporate parties. It's taken for granted that the military-industrial complex must more or less remain intact as it is. Both parties are committed to maintaining the US's Cold War military buildup indefinitely. Both parties are committed to the subjugation of the peoples of the world to the interests of domestic elites in the US. Nothing will change as long as progressives believe that they can challenge imperialism by voting Democrat.
And, in reality, even a 1.7% decrease in defense spending (as a fraction of GDP) is modest. The US government outspend nations that could conceivably pose a military threat by more than 3 to 1. Left-liberals should be suspicious of cheap attempts to quell their discontent by pointing to a few minor cuts to a bloated Pentagon budget. A genuinely progressive diagnosis yields the following demands: end the wars, tax the rich, no austerity.
Lenin and the Early Bolsheviks on Democracy
The project for socialism set out in The State and Revolution and "Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?" (both written in August/September 1917) was, by any standards, extraordinary. It was a project that sought to eliminate the relations of power, of domination and subordination, that had always characterized society. Socialism was identified with self-government. All the powers hitherto arrogated to the state were to be reclaimed by the people in arms. The armed assemblies of the popular masses were to debate and decide upon public business (the legislative function); and they executed punishments and provided for their own defense (the coercive functions of the police and army). There were to be no more special powers and the complex checks and balances that had characterized the liberal constitutions and made parliaments into the ineffectual "talking shops" were to be swept away. They were now irrelevant and harmful, for their whole point and purpose had been to construct so many bulwarks and obstacles to the power of the people. They comprised the web of mediations through which popular power was purposely emasculated. Now, according to the Bolshevik programme, the power of the people was to be direct, immediate and unrestricted. It was meant to be a clarion call to the people of the whole world to recover their potency as makers of their own politics and as participants in a transformed democracy.-From Neil Hardings essay "The Marxist-Leninist Detour" in Dunn (ed.) Democracy: The Unfinished Journey. (Cambridge UP: 1992).
This ideal of a completely self-governing society free from all forms of domination is more relevant today than ever. That this was a vision Lenin shared is clear to anyone who has read State and Revolution. It is often claimed that there is no room for democracy in Marxist thought, but I can't think of a more radically and uncompromisingly democratic political vision in human history. No constraints on the power of the people are countenanced: not the allegedly sacred "natural right to property", not the needs or interests of dominant groups (whether their dominance is based on gender, race, etc.), not the toxic forces of militarism /nationalism. It is a thoroughly internationalist vision in which the ultimate goal is the complete and full liberation of all human beings.
Of course, it's a complex and important question for socialists why the promise of early years of the Soviet experiment was ultimately extinguished by counter-revolution from within. Internationally and internally isolated, devastated by civil war and famine, the promise of the early days of the revolution was lost. The ideas of workers control and radical democracy fell by the wayside. Soon enough, workers were being disciplined and exploited. It is in this context that Stalin rises to power, who has the distinction of having murdered more Marxists and revolutionaries than the Tsar ever did. The top-down authoritarianism that marked the rest of the years that the Soviet empire existed was anything but socialist. But this oppressive, ossified bureaucratization doesn't tarnish the early vision that united the oppressed and exploited of Russia in rising up against the ravages of capitalism and war. That basic emancipatory vision is more valid today than ever.
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