Kitchy and quasi-totalitarian ghastliness, USA (from 2008)
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Chris Bertram
Obviously people are shocked, and particularly shocked at the rejection of normal sensible politics by the rubes who have elected an oaf, a criminal and a rapist to the White House, again. But the trouble is that this kind of thing keeps happening, or nearly happening, and not just in the United States. And it turns out that the policies pursued by the MAGA extremists, by Le Pen, Meloni or Farage, aren’t really all that different from the ones followed by the normal sensible people, albeit that the rhetoric from the sensibles is less crude and laced with sweeteners about “compassion”.
The underlying problem is nationalism and the organization of the world into nation states, a form of organization that fosters and promotes nationalist sentiment and attachment and downplays transnational concern and solidarity, which is “all very well” but shouldn’t come “at our expense”. This has been the problem since well before 1914, but was particularly in evidence then as the greatest movement of international solidarity that had ever been built largely collapsed in favour of supporting “our boys” against theirs. It was there in the 1930s, not only in the rise of particularly agressive nationalisms but in the failure of normal sensible states to come to the assistance of those threatened by it, such as Jews fleeing across borders. All very well, but not at our expense. And it is, rather obviously, in evidence now as countries struggle with people moving and with climate change. All very well, but not at our expense.
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Donald Trump has made very public threats to persecute his political opponents should he be re-elected and statements by him and by other leading Republicans suggests that he might persecute others on the grounds of their religion or their membership of certain social groups. If this were happen (rather than simply being bluster) then it could turn out, very soon, that some US citizens will find themselves outside of their country, with a well-founded fear of persecution on grounds outlined in the 1951 Refugee Convention, and on the territory of a state signatory of the Convention. Some of those states will also be allies of the US through NATO and other treaties and will have extradition treaties with the US. In which case what might happen?
- Currently most of the relevant states try to prevent people likely to claim asylum from arriving on their territory (and their leaders denounce those who do arrive as “illegal immigrants”). Most of the states concerned currently have visa waiver programmes for US citizens and would probably be reluctant on economic and geopolitical grounds to shut those down, although it is possible they might in response to a similar tightening by a Trump administation. So one question is whether such states will try to make it more difficult for Americans to visit. If they don’t then US citizens will find it relatively easy to escape to those countries.
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At the Château of Azay-le-Rideau in the Loire.
Kids today probably don’t know about punched cards, but when I was at school we all had to play around with them a bit as we learnt about state-of-the-art computing …. But the technology derives from weaving, and from the Jacquard loom of 1804.
There has been much attention online to a piece by Joseph Heath arguing that analytical Marxism disappeared because the analytical Marxists all turned into Rawlsian liberals. At a certain level of resolution (blurred, zoomed out) the argument has something going for it. But at that level, all it amounts to is the claim that this group of thinkers shifted their attention over time from critical investigation of the normative and positive claims made by Karl Marx to concerns about justice, and, particularly, distributive justice. Heath’s piece also contains some startling inaccuracies:
- Heath claims that Cohen abandoned the Marxist view, summed up, according to Heath in the belief “that workers are entitled to the fruits of their labour, and so if they receive something less than this, they are being treated unjustly” and Heath associates this view with a commitment to the labour theory of value. But, as any scholar of Marx knows, Marx himself rejected the view that workers are entitled to the full fruits of their labour in the Critique of the Gotha Programme because of the need to make deductions, among others, for those unable to work. Moreover, Cohen rejected the labour theory of value and declared its relationship to the charge of exploitation to be one of irrelevance in his essay “The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation” (available in his History, Labour and Freedom).
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Heath claims that Cohen, worried about the way that Marx’s theory of exploitation rests on similar premises to Nozick’s views (as he was), spent “spent the better part of a decade agonizing, and wrote two entire books trying to work out a response to Nozick, none of it particularly persuasive.” Well, by my count, Cohen wrote exactly one book responding to Nozick, namely Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality. Of course it is up to Heath what he finds persuasive, but, personally, I think the great achievement of that book is its focus on the principle of self-ownership and its rejection of that principle.
(Originally drafted for a conference at Frankfurt in 2018 to mark the 40th anniversary of Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. I’ve done a bit of editing of my conference script and added a few footnotes etc, but it isn’t necessarily produced to the scholarly standards one might require of a journal article.)
In Karl Marx’s Theory of History, G.A. Cohen attributed many of the ills of capitalism to the market mechanism. Later in his career he came to see the market as practically ineliminable. Insofar as he was right about the market in his earlier work, it may turn out that the alternatives to capitalism he championed at the end of his life will also generate the pathology he deplored: the systematic bias in favour of output over leisure and free time. The following explores some of these tensions.
Introduction
In the second half of his career, G.A. Cohen concentrated his discussion of capitalism on its wrongs and injustices. According to his diagnosis, the primary injustice in capitalism arose from the combination of private property and self-ownership, which enables capitalists – who own the means of production – to contract with workers – who own only themselves and their labour power, on terms massively to the capitalists’ advantage. The workers, who produce nearly all of the commodities that possess value in a capitalist society, see the things that they have produced appropriated and turned against them as tools of exploitation and domination by the capitalists. But the wrongness and injustice of capitalism, the theft of what rightfully belongs to workers, is only one part of what is to be deplored about capitalism. In chapter 11 of Karl Marx’s Theory of History, a chapter where he went beyond the expository and reconstructive work he undertook earlier in the book, Cohen articulated a different critique, this time focused not on injustice but on the ills to which capitalism gives rise. In that chapter he attacks capitalism for stunting human potential through a bias towards the maximization of output, a bias which condemns human beings to lives dominated by drudgery and toil. Relatedly, he attacks capitalism both for stimulating demand for consumption that adds little of real value to people’s lives and because for damaging of the natural environment through pollution. In developing this critique, Cohen also notes that the bias towards output he identifies is celebrated by Max Weber as exemplifying rationality itself, a celebration which Cohen thought ideological and mistaken.1
Though both the wrongness and the badness of capitalism arise from the conjunction of private property and the market, it seems natural to emphasize the role of private property more in the production of injustice and to stress market relations more in the genesis of its badness. It is the fact of what the capitalists own that gives them decisive leverage over workers in the labour market, making exploitation within the workplace consequently possible; it is the market that compels everyone, capitalists and workers both on pain of extinction, to act in ways that end up being so destructive for human and planetary well-being.