A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with utopian thought and imagination, indeed, I think it’s a necessity for any Left politics (as Michael Harrington appreciated in his last book on socialism). It in no way precludes “realism,” incremental change, and so forth and so on any more than the Platonic Forms rule out degrees of embodiment, instantiation, or realization, such Forms by definition always being elusive and never exahusted by such realization. It is rather analogous to William Godwin’s definition of perfectibility:

“By perfectible, it is not meant that he [i.e., man] is capable of being brought to perfection. But the word seems sufficiently adapted to express the faculty of being continually made better and receiving perpetual improvement; and in this sense it is here to be understood. The term perfectible, thus explained, not only does not imply the capacity of being brought to perfection, but stands in expression to it. If we could arrive at perfection, there would be an end to our improvement. There is however one thing of great importance that it does imply: every perfection or excellence that human beings are competent to conceive, human beings, unless in cases that are palpably and unequivocally excluded by the structure of their frame, are competent to attain.”

Please see here: http://ratiojuris.blogspot.com/2009/11/utopian-thought-imagination.html

Since I responded maybe a bit late to the previous thread, I will repeat my observation here, somewhat refined:

While we rightly feel a lot of frustration about progress on many economic and policy issues, the left has had slow and incomplete, but growing success in the culture wars, in areas like marriage equality, despite being badly outgunned in terms of funding, media access, &c. In some sense this is unsurprising, as the left tends to be a lot more well-endowed with cultural capital than the right. Then how can we repeat or broaden this success?

As the left has waged an effective culture war against homophobia, it needs to wage a similar war for multiculturalism. The left’s success in the culture war not only deprives the right of a key means of distraction, it also gradually aligns people with a certain basic moral vision which can be the guide for later, more specific political programs. Even where the right has succeeded in culture war-related conflicts, for example in undermining reproductive rights, they hurt their own long-term viability by alienating people from their cause. Rather than seeing the path to success for the left, as many Americans seem to do, as being to deliver on economic issues for “regular Americans”, while thinking of cultural issues almost as a liability, only important to “cultural elites” (or to people directly affected by a particular issue), we should try to sell people on a more encompassing leftist cultural vision characterized by cosmopolitanism, of which greater economic equality and social welfare are a key part. (When I say vision, I don’t mean that as something omniscient and encompassing, but as a particular way that our values and morality are characterized, which starts out vague and takes on a more specific, precise character over time as details are worked out in practice.)

In the culture wars, the left has been most successful where it has been united, as it has against homophobia. It has the most trouble WRT issues like foreign policy and the persistence of the GWOT framing in American public discourse, where people are easily pitted against each other because of various fears. Islamophobia in particular is a major asset to the war party, and its pervasiveness is closely related to particular conflicts, especially (at least in the US) the Israel-Palestine conflict. Major American Jewish organizations (e.g. the ADL and Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations) along with informal networks of the like-minded in, e.g., media outlets like the NY Times, strongly color discussion of foreign policy in a way that favors the war party. The aforementioned organizations have continued to editorialize in favor of belligerence–in favor of war against Iraq and now sanctions on Iran. This kind of pro-war lobbying is not merely an inevitable structural feature of late capitalism, it has a particular historical cause that can be addressed. Making progress on the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at least by educating the public better and thus weakening the ability of these interests to shape the discussion, but ideally, eventually, by actually resolving the most serious issues in the conflict (that is, by bringing about a viable Palestinian state), would eliminate the motive for much of this pro-war lobbying. People don’t just do it because Raytheon pays them to, there are real feelings of insecurity that motivate the back-and-forth over whether Comedy Central should have censored South Park, while Apple much more quietly censored political cartoons from the i-pad; real feelings of insecurity motivate the lobbying for sanctions on Iran (which could become a pretext for violence in the future, as they did with Iraq). The distorting effect on American public discourse of people who are (or claim to be) skittish about the security of Israel is truly pervasive. Philip Weiss and others at Mondoweiss have done some excellent journalism on this. Luckily, though this is one particular area where the left has not been active or united enough, the terrain is quickly shifting in a way that makes progress on the issue a lot easier.

Xenophobia seems to be a major long-term cultural issue that the left will face, which will continue to hinder any broader agenda of fighting poverty or nuclear disarmament, even if the left ends up being relatively successful on issues of domestic economic policy in the medium-term, and thwarts the conservative tactic of distracting people with other kinds of culture wars. It will always be possible for the right to drum up fear of the Other in the form of foreigners and immigrants, more so if multiculturalism is not embraced as a positive ideology by the left.

So we need a more generally inquisitive posture by the left, taking an interest in issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rather than, as I think Americans are wont to do, seeing it as a kind of family quarrel within the Middle East, where people are all just violent and fanatically religious and are always going to have problems getting along (and where various types of US involvement are denied or ignored). A big problem for Democrats in the US is that they lack any compelling brand of foreign policy, other than just not being crazy warmongers like the Republicans. There needs to be a much better dialog between the left and center-left on foreign policy than there has been. That requires the left to get its own house in order in terms of specific knowledge about major international issues, and then, to develop a more compelling vision of a multicultural world in which the wealthy countries or great powers operate more as equals, which I think can really be attractive to people if it effectively appeals to their sense of fairness and their empathy. In the case of the US, this means educating people about the realities of American empire, not as a general concept but as a collection of specific relationships (we support Mubarrak in Egypt…) In general, in matters that concern the world outside of Europe, Australia, and the US, we need to give a lot more attention to specifics than what I usually see, and as with the general approach of waging a culture war, make that attentiveness our calling-card, our strength.

What can intellectuals do? For me, the two major shibboleths of intellectual thought in the West at the moment are

a: Eurocentrism and

b: neo-liberal economics. And these are, to put it mildly, not discrete entities.

As far as the first goes, I am quite convinced that if it had been common knowledge (e.g.) what Iraq was and is (the birthplace of modern civilisation) and what we did to it (in, for example, the 20th century) the Iraq war simply could not have happened. Works like Frank’s ReOrient and Hobson’s The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation are a beginning but it’s all a bit academic (pardon the pun) until these, and books like them, are widely read in the Universities and (more importantly) the schools. (or at least until that information is widely accepted).

Likewise: neo-liberalism. Again, it has started to be attacked, especially after the recent financial cataclysm. But until new approaches are actually taught in the Universities again it’s all a bit besides the point. Otherwise the whole ‘infrastructure’ of Western economic thought (private good, public bad, markets are ‘good’, trade unions are ‘bad’, capitalism ‘creates wealth’, a ‘rising tide lifts all ships’) which are is taken for granted in our Universities our schools and (not least) our media will remain in place and we will be guaranteed further economic catastrophes in the future. Genuine progress (for example, repeal of the UK’s vicious anti-union laws) won’t happen until the whole structure of intellectual life has changed.

The next stage after that, and I must admit I have no idea how to go about this, is to plan and implement some kind of reform of our media, to make it more democratically accountable. As one previous poster pointed out: the media, is, increasingly, the problem. It controls our minds and our political options in a historically unprecedented way, and as long as it remains in the hands of the Right, real progress will be slow and piecemeal.

Pr Q said:

My main point in this new post is to reject the idea that there is a necessary inconsistency between incremental progress and the vision of a better society and a better world…
The liberal and social democratic reforms of the New Deal and its counterparts in other developed countries were incremental changes. But they weren’t presented as mere technocratic adjustments to social and economic mechanisms.

This is more or less another way of repeating the old distinction between tactical moves and strategic goals. One could also visualise this, pace economic graphs, as a strategic shift of the whole function (to the Left) rather than tactical sliding movements along the function.

Tactical politics uses policy as a weapon in the tactical battle for partisan advantage in the current electoral cycle. Strategic politics requires policy to be used as tool for fundamental institutional reforms leading to social transformation.

Its interesting to view the post-Vietnam War Right’s political trajectory in this light. I suggest Left-wing transformationists study the Right’s playbook and learn from it.

They began with inspirational leaders (Reagan, Thatcher & Pope John Paul). I guess Obama is a start. Who welded together a movement fusion of social conservatives and economic liberals.

The economic liberals dangled the carrots to elites. They rallied them through privatisation and contracting out which changed the balance of power in the state. They also used mass participation in the stock market and later the property market to diffuse bourgeois interests and habits throughout the populus.

The social conservatives fashioned the sticks for thee populus. The man in the street is more concerned with enemies, either within (crime and drugs) or without (communism, terrorism and illegal immigrants). He is, after all, the one who will have to fight them for turf.

I dont know if the Left can fashion a broad-based movement. The so-called “rainbow coalition” is a non-starter. Average working families regard such groups as, at best, harmless oddities. At worst they tend to be reviled as deviants, parasites or vermin.

The link between economic statists and ecological conservatives might have more legs. Public services are reasonable popular. And so is Nature. But it obviously needs strong leadership, a strategic political coalition and some kind of positive theoretical program that Leftists enjoyed with Marxian socialism and then Keynsian social welfarism.

So you have your work cut out for you.

If it was my call I would focus on Emerging Fundamental Technologies since they will make most social reform schemes look out-of-date. Just as steam technology made feudal social arrangements look like quaint heirlooms.

Its only a question of time…

Just to reinforce the point above, it would do no harm to both look at the successes of the modernist Left and failures of the post-modern Left-liberalism. (Contrasting these with the failures of the modernist Right and the successes of the anti-post-modernist Right.)

The modernist Left enjoyed its greatest successes when various supporters adopted a fairly uniform economic viewpoint. Initially it was Marxian socialism which rallied the workers to the Left up until WWI. This then morphed into Keynsian social welfarism which rallied citizens to the Left after WWII.

There was also some kind of broad consensus about ethics, which was an egalitarian form of utilitarianism. I am not a big fan of Charters of Rights, on philosophical grounds. But they are useful politically, as a lode star for the troops on the march. The Atlantic Charter served this function, with its Four Freedoms slogan.

But the Vietnam War and the concurrent cultural revolution shattered the Old Left coalition consensus. Its general world view has splintered into various specialised ideological fragments, clumsily stitched together by the New Left into a “rainbow coalition”.

The world view, if it can be called as such, of these groups is a more or less warmed-up form of post-modern Left-liberalism. With a focus on cultural, rather than economic, issues.

The New Left policy strategy did enlarge the welfare state to deal with the new-found problems of single mothers and urban blight, which generated “overload”. The New Left political strategy was as divisive, and managed to alienate the general populus, which was expressed as “backlash”.

Post-modern liberalism also did much to shred the Left’s intellectual credibility between the years 1965-1995. Unkind souls like me got endless malicious pleasure poking fun at post-modern cultural theorists grotesque ideological contortions. Made worse by the clumsy attempts of political correctors to cover up the mess.

A friendly word of advice: get the economics right. And ground that in an ethic that gets broad democratic consent. Don’t try and smuggle an ideological agenda in through the back door of spurious “rights charters” or long marches through tax-payer funded institutions.

It was rather my point that “Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information technology and Cognitive science” have been emerging technologies for quite a while now, without as yet fundamentally transforming anything – in the sense that people still die of preventable diseases in poor countries and suffer manifold forms of political oppression – and frankly my concern would be that, as currently configured socially and politically, these things are rather more likely to be used to create something that veers between a totalitarian surveillance-state and a genetic caste system, than to actually liberate anyone currently in need of liberation.

And BTW, what technological innovations did the Enlightenment bring about? Even if you roll Adam Smith in under the label, I wasn’t aware that Boulton and Watt needed to read him to perfect the steam-engine.

I would like to echo and support what was said by Kaveh in #3 and Hidari in #5, particularly in their points about trying to come to grips with xenophobia and a narrow Euro-centrism. Kaveh explained this well in his paragraph beginning “So we need a generally more inquisitive posture by the left…” and ending “make that attentiveness our calling-card, our strength”.

And Hidari’s observation about Iraq I think carries a lot of weight: “As far as [Eurocentrism] goes, I am quite convinced that if it had been common knowledge (e.g.) what Iraq was and is (the birthplace of modern civilisation) and what we did to it (in, for example, the 20th century) the Iraq war simply could not have happened….”

Of course to talk about cultural broadening via educational institutions and so on; and personal change in the eradication of xenophobia and the promotion of inquisitiveness about the world (including the Middle East) is to talk about aims and not specific means, but I think a good first step would be to get clear on the crucial importance of this part of what the left should be focusing on.

Well, not to initiate an argument or make any strong assertion, but I am not a fan of incremental change as a model for praxis. The alternative may not necessarily be revolution in terms of storming the Basyille or Winter Palace but, to use an analogy from economics, the abandonment of equilibrium models. Minsky cycles, Taleb’s black swans, macrodynamic disequlibrium, tipping points, chaos theory, or punctuated equlibrium may be more useful as models for understanding politics. Kuhn and Lakatos have something to tell us. Does Kuhn provide a model for scientific revolutions?

It just strikes me as more than a coincidence that we have equilibrium economics and incremental liberal politics as our guiding paradigms, and that these may be normative or utopian in themselves, the way we want the world to work rather than the way it actually works. And of course, the dangers of the comforting illusion of incrememtal liberalism were demonstrated in the 1st half of the 20th century.

Jack Strocchi: “BTW, the Internet, and the satellite system which facilitates it, were largely the creation of the Cold War military. Something to ponder the next time Lefties go through ritual denunciations of “McCarthyism”. ”

Just for sheer intellectual vacuity (not to mention flooding the comments), perhaps Jack should take a vacation from commenting. Just until he can figure out the difference between his posterior lower excretory orifice and terrestrial cavities.

18:Read me more carefully. Leaving revolution aside, a disequlibrium macrodynamics model of politics, for just one alternative, would not have just two or four dependent variables.

We usually consider the parties and their platforms as dynamic, but interest groups and factions (pro-choice, finance, xenophobes) fairly fixed or changing linearly. The political role of finance in current American politics may be a discontinuous change, and not yet understood.

For another, doesn’t Kuhn say that paradigms are inertial unto collapse, and radical change (innovation, scientific revolution) unpredictable and uncontrollable?

What I am saying is that our ruling ideas from the ruling class still feel to me, on a profound or unconscious level, to be based on half-baked 19th century evolutionary metaphors.

But mostly I am flailing incoherently.

Here’s my by-now-ritualized comment that, while visions and hope are necessary, the left is currently at lot better at them than we are at actually changing things, incrementally or otherwise. While we can always do better at hope and vision, what we most desperately need is a better tactically and strategic sense of how to change things given our current political system and political culture. To put this in terms that hearken back to a time when the left did change things: what is the 2010 equivalent of the sit-down strike?

To the “incrementalism” discussion I’ll add the following (from a comment at another blog last year):

In Sour Grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality (1983) Jon Elster notes a few conspicuous problems with Burkean “incrementalism” and its philosophical ally, (Popperian) “piecemeal social engineering” by way of methodological lessons gleaned from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America:

i) One must look at the consequences that emerge when the institution in question is widely used rather than marginal. [Note: Here and throughout I have omitted Elster’s examples.]

ii) Any given institution will have many consequences, some of them opposed in their tendency. It is imperative, therefore, to look at their net effect.

iii) One should not evaluate a given institution or constitution according to its efficiency at each moment of time, but rather look at the long-term consequences.

iv) One should not confuse the transitional effect of introducing an institution with the steady-state effect of having it.

As he explains in a note, “Moreover, it will not do to argue with Edmund Burke or Popper that trial-and-error or piecemeal social engineering can be a substitute for well-founded predictions, since these methods fail to respect the [above] principles. By requiring initial and local viability of institutional reform, the incremental method neglects the fact that institutions which are viable in the large and in the long term may not be so in the small and short term. This is, in fact, the main objection that Tocqueville makes to Burke’s evaluation of the French Revolution.”

I agree with Robert E. Goodin who argues, in Political Theory and Public Policy (1982), that “the lack of a proper theoretical basis for policy studies is probably due less to methodological error than to the perverse and pervasive doctrine of incrementalism,” an ideological benefactor of Burkean blessings. “That doctrine is an undeniable success, in purely descriptive terms. Most policymaking surely does proceed incrementally, if only because the power relations and organizational routines underlying it themselves vary slightly from one period to the next.” For the full argument, see Ch. 2, “Anticipating Outcomes: Overcoming the Errors of Incrementalism,” pp. 19-38.

Incrementalists need to concentrate on decreasing the rate of speed of their losing ground.

@26, 27 – see, now that could give the impression that what you really want is violent unrest. And if you do, why not just say so? Why not say “What the West needs is more dead capitalists”? If you don’t mean it, don’t imply it. if you do mean it, face the consequences.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with utopian thought and imagination

Well, there ís nothing wrong with imagination. With utopian thought, on the other hand, almost éverything is wrong.

Utopian thought basically determines how things should be – not in which direction they would be better – no, how they should end up being. From there, it tries to ‘make’ people conform with that vision; no further imagination allowed, no nimble footwork to creatively cope with how the things happen to be: elimination of design faults, mostly in the direction of a romatically simple past in which people were still ‘true’ to what the Utopian thinks is essential to their being.

All of this is in strong contrast to the imaginative creation of new directions that will allow each individual’s creativity to be maximized. Utopianism is pessimistic, it assumes we have to ‘force’ things into a certain direction – or else!; being progressive is optimistic, it relies on spontaneity, and the trust that, when people are properly educated and sustained, they will get progressively to a better situation. I’m not the first to say this: utopianism is reverse conservatism.

If you try to think about civilization ever progressing beyond what seemed to be achieved in the West by the mid-20th century, you’re obviously a crazy utopian verging upon totalitarianism, because everyone knows that all important things have already been achieved and we just need to tweak things here and there.

Ok, and your plan for expropriating them all without some of them ending up dead is what, exactly? You think they’ll let you take their money without a fight?

Absolutely. They already pay taxes, have them pay more.

Ben Alpers @ 23: The following is entirely exploratory:

(1) Given that “[the] vision [thing]” and “hope” were made famous respectively by Bush Sr and Obama, no doubt there is a need to come up with something with a little more heft when it comes to indicating and outlining a coherent set of ideals. And the fact that there isn’t such a phrase in the left lexicon at the moment indicates perhaps that the shared ideals have little substance to them, or that they aren’t shared.

(2) “The equivalent of the sit-in” reminds me of this: In those days, there was a sense of a shared set of ideals (thinking for instance of Martin Luther King “I have dream…”), and given the widely-shared character of that, things like sit-ins were effective because they drew attention to a lot of people deep down inside knew to be right and just. We don’t have that.

(3) Where this sense of justice and right is most blatantly lacking is in the foreign sphere, where for example Gazans should be allowed to import their daily requirements, building materials and so on, without being forced to use tunnels. Let them be. Let them thrive. And so on in many countries and regions wherever US military force is behind the propping up of unjust systems. And use the freed-up resources for the alleviation of poverty. Somehow this “let them be” idea has to be made powerful in the way that the King leadership was powerful. Therein, I think, lies a bigger part of the problem than you are suggesting.

Not entirely sure why JoB seems to think that anarchists were all wrong when he or she is concerned with “the imaginative creation of new directions that will allow each individual’s creativity to be maximized”. That appears to me to be an anarchist ideal. But whatever: I think that there is a broad commonality between that and something like, say, Yglesias’ post linked to above — where he talks about how conservatives want people to work, and are outraged that people have more time for retirement, more time for (by implication non-job-related) school, more time for non-work culture creation of all kinds.

After recommending Bakunin in the last thread, I’ll recommend Bob Black in this one. Yeah, he’s not exactly respectable in any way, including by the standards of respectability of anarchism. But The Abolition of Work really does help to get at what I think is an important problem from a lot of directions. If distribution was not done in a way designed to force people to work or starve, we already have enough to support everyone, and really people want to work for various reasons — social status, extra benefits, needing to have something to do — ever when not coerced by necessity. At that point, we really don’t want more work, because that part of economic activity that involves making and consuming physical things can’t be sustained by the planet if it’s ramped up indefinitely. The Third World is going to need more physical resources (hopefully, with infrastructure built with low-ecological-damage technology), of course.

Incrementally, that involves a number of classical social-democratic things. A shorter workweek. Universal health care, so people can leave their job without dying. Progressive taxation used for income support. Rebuilding the planetary infrastructure so we can support everyone in less desperate circumstances but with a smaller footprint.

But that ideal also involves a number of “cultural” things that are sometimes ignored by parts of the left. There are a number of structures that the right uses to keep people in line that are not economic. For instance, America is a massive prison state not because of debtor’s prisons, but because of drug crimes. The right also attempts to suppress sexuality in various ways, especially through anti-gay laws. Some version of this ideal allows all of that to be brought in without the tiresome insistence that economy is everything.

It also involves dropping the whole Marxist thing about valorization of the proletariat, and labor as the source of value, and so on. Which shouldn’t be hard as none of that was true in any case.

JoB, ‘

It would be a prudent if not wise act on your part to at least acquaint yourself with the relevant literature on utopian thought (such as I referenced in the aforementioned post at Ratio Juris) before making extravagant and incorrect characterizations on the order of “it tries to ‘make’ people conform with that [utopian] vision.” What utopian thought and imagination are should not be reduced to what some have done with the products of such thought and imagination. Or perhaps you’re one of those likely to hold Marx liable for the Stalinist gulags, Rousseau responsible for the Chinese Cultural Revolution…and Nietzsche for Nazism (and no, I don’t judge Burke by Curzon or the two Mills by those who invoked ‘oriental despotism’ to oppose political progress on the subcontinent of India), in which case my comment falls on deaf ears.

Capitalism is not perfect but nobody is getting killed, nobody suffers violence or serious hardship and the large majority will always favour it over any alternative. And I know all this because I am a comfortably off, middle-aged white man living in North America or Europe who spends his spare time spouting off on the internet.

JoB,
JoB,

Re: “Clearly Utopia is what should be. Whatever is at odds with that is to be eliminated. Voilà! I’m so sure there are Utopians that fail to derive the logical conclusions from what they think, but that does not make the entailments any less unavoidable.”

Again, your failure to read (or understand) the relevant material is appalling and, now, inexcusable. Cf., for example, the following:

‘Utopian thought attempts to specify and justify the principles of a comprehensively good political order. Typically, the goodness of that order rests on the desirability of the way of life enjoyed by the individuals within it; less frequently, its merits rely on organic features that cannot be reduced to individuals. Whatever their basis, the principles of the political good share certain general features:
· First, utopian principles are in their intention universally valid, temporally and geographically.
· Second, the idea of the good order arises out of our experience but does not mirror it in any simple way and is not circumscribed by it. Imagination may combine elements of experience into a new totality that has never existed; reason, seeking to reconcile the contradictions of experience, may transmute its elements.
· Third, utopias exist in speech; they are “cities of words.” This does not mean that they cannot exist but only that they need not ever. This “counterfactuality” of utopia in no way impedes its evaluative function.
· Fourth, utopian principles may come to be realized in history, and it may be possible to point to real forces pushing in that direction. But our approval of a utopia is not logically linked to the claim that history is bringing us closer to it or that we can identify an existing basis for the transformative actions that would bring it into being. Conversely, history cannot by itself validate principles. The movement of history (if it is a meaningful totality in any sense at all) may be from the most desirable to the less; the proverbial dustbin may contain much of enduring worth.
· Fifth, although not confined to actual existence, the practical intention of utopia requires that it be constrained by possibility. Utopia is realistic in that it assumes human and material preconditions that are neither logically nor empirically impossible, even though their simultaneous co-presence may be both unlikely and largely beyond human control to effect.
· Sixth, although utopia is a guide for action, it is not in any simple sense a program of action. In nearly all cases, important human or material preconditions for good politics will be lacking. Political practice consists in striving for the best results achievable in particular circumstances. The relation between the ideal and the best achievable is not deductive. [….]
Thus, the incompleteness of utopia, far from constituting a criticism of it, is inherent in precisely the features that give it evaluative force. As has been recognized at least since Aristotle, the gap between utopian principles and specific strategic/tactical programs can be bridged only through an inquiry different in kind and content from that leading to the principles themselves. If so, the demand that utopian thought contain within itself the conditions of its actualization leads to a sterile hybrid that is neither an adequate basis for rational evaluation nor an accurate analysis of existing conditions.’—William A. Galston

So, the relevant pelluicid point is that this is not simply a question about deductive, logical “entailment” nor is it rightly characterized as a matter of deontic or modal logic (i.e., about what ‘should be’), hence a statement like “I’m so sure [sic] there are Utopians that fail to derive the logical conclusions from what they think, but that does not make the entailments any less unavoidable,” betray an utter lack of basic comprehension of the nature of utopian thought and imagination.

So ends my attempt at persuasion.

Best wishes,
Patrick

“While we can always do better at hope and vision, what we most desperately need is a better tactically and strategic sense of how to change things given our current political system and political culture. To put this in terms that hearken back to a time when the left did change things: what is the 2010 equivalent of the sit-down strike?”

The primary contested from the left.

In the U.S., that is. I don’t have the knowledge to say anything useful about elsewhere, and I don’t see any point in pretending that I do. But in the U.S., the electoral system is a double-edged sword. It suppresses any third party, and hitches the left to the just-left-of-center, whether they want to be attached or not. But the same non-democratic characteristics that let it be unduly influenced by any economic interest also let it be unduly influenced by a group of activists. The center is unable to break the tie to the left from its direction.

Look at what the right has done with the GOP, for example. The Tea Partiers never win anything, but they can never be ignored or driven out. The situation on the left is different, since we have an actual legislative agenda. Hollow out the current Democratic Party internal power structures, push our stuff through with a electoral minority, and then — just as with health care — once it’s actually implemented, the Overton Window will shift. The right only gets one chance to stop things, unless something goes very wrong. Once we e.g. start converting to carbon-neutral technology, and people see that there’s no economic catastrophe, what’s the right going to do later on? Tell people to rip in all out and rebuild the coal plants?

Unfortunately, Obama. But next cycle people will hopefully see through that.

@48 The leftist, libertarian, and liberal positions overlap here, as they do with acceptance of homosexuality. WRT drug issues, they overlap completely. WRT LGBT issues, has the progress of (distinctly non-libertarian) anti-discrimination and anti-bullying laws significantly lagged very far behind the progress of marriage equality?

To put this in terms that hearken back to a time when the left did change things: what is the 2010 equivalent of the sit-down strike?

Folks. That is a damn good question. And jdw’s lonely response to it, no fault to jdw, doesn’t seem to even scratch the surface of what can be explored there.

Not that I can do any better, but it would be lovely to hear some of you all take a crack at it.

I think it’s relevant to this thread. Incremental reform happened, throughout the 20th century, because a group of people acted drastically — thereby garnering sufficiently broad sympathy in our population to force incremental change, generally as a response from those in power. The response was usually issued either to head off more drastic change, or out of genuine sympathy and desire to see justice served, or a paradoxical mixture of both.

47:
“Tell people to rip in all out and rebuild the coal plants?”
Interestingly enough, and not to take anything away from your point, but didn’t Regan do exactly that with the solar panels Carter has installed on the White House?

Patrick, your utopia is clearly more flexible than most but I admire your enthusiasm – I kinda dig your Third. I do not doubt that there is an important place for this in actually improving life (it is one of the good things about Obama that he is willing to and can shift the discourse in the right direction, even if most people would call it ‘bla-bla-bla’).

But the thing is that I have heard too many socialists talk about the perfectability of man (this is the best attempt at translation from Dutch I can muster) when it’s just the case that they want everybody else to think and behave exactly as they do. In no way I want to offend any good reasons you have to defend Utopianism but it is not uncommon for people to convince themselves they mean well when they are on paths to disaster.

@35: expropriation is paying more taxes? I will charitably presume that you are being funny. If you intend to tax the rich as a sustainable level, you have to presume they will remain rich enough to continue to pay the taxes indefinitely [and not mobilise opinion against them, as happened so successfully in the 1980s]. if you intend, on the other hand, to use taxation as a force for real expropriation, why do you suppose they would stand for it peaceably?

People here have continued, as Engels does above, to insinuate that what they really want is a situation of increasingly violent confrontation out of which can emerge, butterfly-like, a better world. Thus every essentially peaceful gain of the post-1945 social-democratic movements is cast aside in favour of a vision of a world where the forces of the left will magically prove stronger than those of the right when confrontation erupts. Yet, unless there’s a secret plan I’m not party to, the American left isn’t the political force in that country stockpiling guns and ammunition – and neither is the left anywhere else.

I say, again, if you really mean that violence is the solution, have the courage to say it out loud, and accept the consequences.

if you intend, on the other hand, to use taxation as a force for real expropriation, why do you suppose they would stand for it peaceably?

Because they stood for it peaceably before. The assumption of violence is a he-who-dealt-it-smelled-it sort of thing.

Again @23 Ben Alpers, @51 Salient, and @37 jdw, I think the strategy Richard Puchalsky pointed out @47, the primary from the left, is a great one.

The general strategy Salient described, or the cry of “let them be”, these are great for confronting a very overt system of oppression, like an apartheid system–it even works against very powerful entrenched interests, how much more so with something like the clusterf**k that just happened in Arizona, where they are already starting to get slammed with boycotts.

It’s much harder for such tactics to be effective against violence that is sufficiently normalized, like the American prison state system. For that, and for issues like climate change and sustainability, primarying from the left, as Richard Puchalsky described it, is the way to go, at least in the US.

But for primarying from the left to work, you need a sizable far left-left coalition to rally around any given issue, which is where public outreach and honing and developing our “brand” comes into play.

56:I say, again, if you really mean that violence is the solution, have the courage to say it out loud, and accept the consequences.

Some things are not discussed in mixed company. Some things are actionable under law.

I honestly, sincerely, and passionately believe that without Republicans, a just America could help the world get to a very good place. Most remaining problems could be addressed effectively. Simple as that.

With Republicans, the human race will possibly go extinct.

Alex, you’re the only one going on and on — again — about violent confrontation, bullets, billy-clubs, dead capitalists, etc, etc. I’ve made precisely two comments on this thread (#22 and #43) neither of which is it remotely reasonable to read as advocating the view that ‘violence is the solution’, far less that ‘what the West needs is more dead capitalists’. I do try to write as clearly as possible but I am afraid I can’t be held responsible for people who use others’ comments as a kind Rorschach inkblot for their own obsessions.

JoB: The, er, ‘imaginative creation of new directions that will allow each individual’s creativity to be maximized’ is what should be. Whatever is at odds with that is to be eliminated. ELIMINATED!

What would be best? Is it possible to get there? How feasible is it to get there? Can it be done by steps which are each improvements, in case we can’t get all the way there? Etc.
…
OK then, what would be second best? etc.

(And what kind of thing one is enviaging as ‘best’ might be all kinds of things, specified in all sorts of ways.)

I don’t see why generalisations about incrementalism should be thought to have any force at all. Some things can be achieved in steps, some can’t. And some things can only be achieved in a single step, but it is an acceptable one.

In fact ‘incrementalism’ seems in many cases to mean making a changes in one step – it’s just that the changes are very small, and uncoordinated. Deliberately restricting oneself to unambitious plans without giving proper consideration to long term possibilities and contingency plans seems a poor way of going about things to me – unless there is no more ambitious goal to aim for at all. And that’s not incrementalism, it’s quietism.

Cid@56- maybe so but it’ss not very common for those advocating small steps to have the fanaticism to propose a step that leads directly to disaster.

Tim@67- that was an awful piece of writing I did and I deserve to be slapped for it, but that doesn’t make your remark right; Utopian thinking is pretty definitive in how such a society and people in it should be – my (admittedly opaque) formulation is so open it is difficult to be at odds with it. In fact, the opaqueness of my formulation is a result of it needing to be open enough not to open the prospect of quick elimination.

ajay@#16 said:

There is awful lot that is wrong with this.

We’ll see about that.

ajay said:

1) Yes, the internet was largely descended from a US military project. ARPANET,
2) …it’s true that satellite broadband is useful for more remote areas.

Not off to a good start when you concede my main point and subsidiary point from the get-go. How do you thing Google Earth and sat nav got their leg-up? On the strength of those concessions I’d say “there is an awful lot” right “with this”

ajay said:

4) You seem completely confused about what McCarthyism was.

No, you are “completely confused about” what my views on “McCarthyism” are. I did not say I was a fan of McCarthy or the spurious persecution of Left-wingers. I’m just fed up with lop-sided interpretations of history. Many Left-liberal intellectuals insinuate that “McCarthyism” was the be-all and end-all of the Cold War effort, using the failures and follies of the former to discredit or ignore the successes of the latter. Particularly the spectacular achievements of the National Defence Education Act.

BTW McCarthy did have half a point, the Venona Project proved that communist spies did penetrate the highest reaches of the US government and give away state secrets. That was no excuse to pick on Left-wing playwrights though.

More generally its a fact that paranoia can often spur peoples to useful efforts, false positives and all that. The Cold War arms race drove the Space Race to put long range rockets and spy satellites up into orbit. Lots of other useful tech innovations were hastened by this effort, integrated circuits, material science, the internet. I am suggesting that this irony is “something to ponder next time Leftish intellectuals go through the ritual of denouncing McCarthyism” and, by implication, Cold War paranoia.

ajay said:

5) Suggesting that the Renaissance is an example of the Left fostering technological innovation is frankly silly.

No, your cultural-political history is as shoddy as your interpretation of technological history. The “Left” is a relative, not absolute, designator. The Renaissance was broadly a Left-wing period when the newly empowered lower-status challenged established higher-status groups. City states challenged the Roman Church. Republicans challenged monarchs. Secular humanists challenged religious fundamentalists. Merchants challenged landed estates. Artists sought parity with established professions.

And of course a key aspect of the Renaissance was the Renaissance man and his patron who indeed “fostered technological innovation”. Anyone marvelling at Il Duomo’s load-bearing capacities (!), Massacio’s pictorial perspective or Leonardo’s military inventions can see that for themselves.

ajay said:

6) Describing China as “the world’s largest and oldest civilisation of nerds” is also silly, and racist to boot.

It might be “racist” to characterize China as a “the world’s largest oldest civilization of nerds”, but its true nonetheless. You can sort through this seemingly endless list of ancient Chinese inventions to see for your self.

ajay said:

Given your ignorance of technology and history, I would suggest that you take a long hard look at your views on economics and politics, as these may well also be non-load-bearing.

“Given you own ignorance of technology and history” I would suggest that you take your own advice and and “take a long hard look at your” own views before going off half-cocked at the “load-bearing” capabilities of mine.

And finding out that the Soviet Union was attempting spying at the highest levels of U.S. government had nothing to do with Joe McCarthy — he didn’t find who it was, after all, and the U.S. wartime and post-war intelligence agencies assumed the same thing, and occasionally uncovered them. Likewise, the Soviets knew that the U.S. was attempting to turn officials at the highest Soviet levels. But unless they found them out, that went on. It’s not like McCarthy was introducing some fascinating, revolutionarily new idea. Really? The Soviets were trying to have agents within the U.S. government? Gosh! you don’t say!

Incrementalism: couldn’t that mean developing a community on a small scale, as a practical experiment–let’s say a seven square mile area in a city in the United States with sufficient complexity–through which one could demonstrate the effectiveness and truth of one’s comprehensive vision? Incrementalism and comprehensive vision go hand in hand. The vision should respect the context that is given; the vision would aim to reduce the cost of living for the individual–yes, we are a Green Community–while demonstrably enhancing the quality of life for the members of the community, and empower them. The vision would rely on the market forces to gauge and score the effectiveness of the endeavor. The vision ought to be transferable to other contexts (cities, countries, communities) and generate in each context a unique and genuine expression of community and tradition,drawing–naturally–on the traditions and history and environment of the context, as we find it.

The experimental community would serve as an inspiration to the surrounding context and the larger world, even if the communities’ vision were not necessarily deeply comprehended. While this community, as a first experiment, would quickly differentiate itself from the surrounding urban context the experimental community itself would be pluralistic and multi-cultural. The poverty, the sameness of existence in many cities and communities might make the notion of a “standard of living” quantifiable and meaningful in a sort of perverse way, but it surely shows us that the poverty of the poor is only such relative to the context. If the minimum wage worker could, after punching her clock, beam Star Trek like some distance to a vibrant community some distant in both time and space where the standard of living is considerably lower, would that not be great. Sure would. But let’s not engage in such foreign thoughts. Interestingly, in my community in Florida, the further one lives away from the Urban core the less expensive housing becomes. And what about those retirees that move too Mexico or Costa Rica to live better on their money. But we all know this. So is it all a problem of transportation? Only in part.

Our experimental community will be truly pluralistic and multi-cultural. It must be. Are we speaking about Cubans, Chinese, and others living side by side. That too; but more. We are not only thinking spatially, but also temporal. The contemporaneity of the non-comtemporaneous–to borrow a phrase from of the art historian Wilhem Pinder–is what our vision aims for. Why should the Amish be the only ones to be shielded from “progress” and the assault of modernity. Our progressive vision is of the different sort. We are not anti m0dern; we just put modernity in its’ place and turn away from that limiting metaphor of the leading edge of a river called history–perpendicular, I suppose, to gain some perspective on a boundless ocean.

Our experimental community, than, wholeheartedly espouses the deeper meaning of the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution, and we extent its’ meaning. We align our community’s interest with those of the Amish, with a particularly skeptical eye at two of the rationalizing and homogenizing expressions of modernity: the large corporation and the state, from the national to the local level. They are “to big to fail”. Naturally, as we start building our community we’ll have to modify building codes and zoning ordinances, always respecting the environment in which we are building–a minimum floor-area-ratio of 1000 square feet for a free standing residence just want do.We will need the greatest degree of freedom as we responsibly tackle housing, transportation, education(including child care), work and health care, keeping in mind that we have all of history, and some, to draw from. We will create a community of cultures, a city, in which the Amish would feel at home and other, even stranger and more wonderous, creatures. And like so many orphans, they shall find a home, be respected and flourish in our community; and everyone shall be near the center, if they wish to be.

What kind of progessive are we–we, who are committed to conservation, the empowerment, and the cultivation of differences and perspectives. We are community organizers and builders, as is our President. We are incrementalists in that we believe in demonstration projects and experimentation. We built from the ground up. We let the context tell us what it wants to be. We are like John Quiggin, inviting others into the conversation.

72- ah, you were talking about the imminent Apocalypse! Yes, if you invert Utopia to Apocalypse you get more or less the same—DRASTIC MEASURES ARE OUR ONLY WAY FORWARD!

Well, this is an actual, measurable, empirical world. Occasionally there are real problems which are not the result of apocalyptic thinking or ideologies, but due to real world conditions.

For example, perhaps if global warming were to continue and worsen severely, such that existing social and economic systems simply did not appear to measurably alter social conditions so as to survive successfully. Nations may be at risk not only of water shortages but deep and sustained suffering or even famine due to drought, or emerging diseases not dealt with before.

This is not fantasy apocalypticism, it’s at least a hypothetical example of threats to societies so severe that middling and incrementalist responses — as always, depending upon how terms like ‘incrementalist’ or ‘gradual’ or ‘rapid’ are employed — may be argued logically and/or empirically as being inadequate.

Should we expect a lecture from cautious ideologues on how any rapid or large scale changes would threaten us with rich people shooting us? Or a response to real world conditions based upon rational arguments and available empirical evidence?

It’s an interesting thing about hope… For some individuals, merely hearing a description of desirable goals is enough to put them in a very hopeful mood. For these people, the most important achievement is to simply get everyone to agree that the goals would be desirable/worthy. They basically assume that if/when ‘everyone’ can agree on the worthiness of the goals, they are as good as already achieved.

And yes, that is precisely how Karl Marx saw things: get rid of the bad guys, and everyone lives happily ever after. Put the good guys (who are good because they were the victims of the bad guys) in charge, and they cannot help but make all the right decisions, because…well, they are the good guys.

For the ‘realists’ out there, hope is something that only makes a rare appearance when some significant obstacle to goal-achievement has been removed. That is the kind of hope that I think left-leaning political parties could offer the electorate, if only they were smart enough to discredit with ridicule and reasoned argument the Number One Economic Myth that the Republicans have been pushing for many decades.

I am speaking of course of the utterly false claim that tax-cuts—when they are given to rich people—provide an economic stimulus to the economy In truth, exactly the opposite is true. Income tax cuts, when they are given to rich people, are always contractionary in their direct effects on the economy. Income tax increases, when they are imposed on rich people, are always expansionary, not contractionary. The ‘jobless recovery’ that resulted from Bush’s huge tax cuts for wealthy people provides a good example of this fundamental economic reality.

If, however, the tax rates of rich people are increased, at least some of the tax money then collected by the government would otherwise have been saved by the rich taxpayers, had they not been required to use the money for taxes. When this happens, money that would have been removed from the economy by rich people is spent by the government, instead. Result: increase in AD = direct and powerful economic stimulus.

The WORST thing that could happen to the economy if the government were to raise taxes during a Recession: no net increase in Aggregate Demand. That’s what would happen if the government were to raise revenue by taxing people who would have spent ALL of the money they handed over to the government. The economy wouldn’t contract, but neither would it expand. That [expansion] only happens when the government taxes rich people.

I argue that a nation of educated skeptics can be led to embrace hopeful goals, not by reciting lists of desirable outcomes, but by removing obstacles to the achievement of those outcomes. One giant step in that direction would be taken if ‘left-leaning’ economists would begin to inform the educated class re: the false claims of Republican Economic Mythology.

Yet another obstacle would be removed if the wealthiest members of society were to realize that even if they were taxed at steeply graduated/progressive rates, it would still impose no real sacrifice on the wealthy, in terms of lost purchasing power. In real terms, they would discover that their smaller disposable incomes are buying them just as much as their much larger [nominal] incomes bought for them previously.

The basis for new hope is there; will the educated leftists of the world recognize the opportunity that lies before them?

Cid- “perhaps if” but not yet so not good enough; by the way, if perhaps the thing were known to be irreversibly leading to global flooding people would not die of flooding as before the flooding they would have been shot by others that ‘defended’ their rights to live in high places. Luckily it seems that there’s hope still, so people don’t go in for the apocalyptic vision just yet.

84:There were not only a lot of different flavors of Marxist, bit Marx himself had varying positions say pre- and post- Commune.

get rid of the bad guys

“Change the mode of thinking of the very few dedicated capitalists at the top when the means of production have become fully socialized.”

But we are all victims and tools of the Capitalism. Ain’t no good guys, ain’t no bad guys.
That’s the nice Marxism.

But much of the time I am channeling Saint-Just.

85: However much our malefactors of great wealth cry out for the guillotine, were things to play out in a fashion similar to the events of two centuries ago, they would all be long gone by the time we got to the point of setting up a guillotine on the Mall. There would only be front men, fall guys and bit players left to take the rap. We’ld get Dubya and Yoo, but Murdoch and Blankfein would get away clean.

Some quick points:

On utopianism. as Jacques Barzun has pointed out, virtually all the liberal ideas that have worked out – to approximate the list from memory: unemployment insurance, government aid for children, the elderly, and disabled, equal rights for women, regulation of business for the common good, income guarantees, environmental protection – had their origins in utopian thought, long before social democrats or new dealers got a hold of them. You need vision as well as theory, and that is what utopianism provides.

On the drug war. I’m no libertarian, but I have to agree with Sebastian on this one. The liberals may agree philosophically with the libertarians, but it is the libertarians who have been willing to make a fight of it. Milton Friedman, George Schultz, The Economist, The Cato Institute, the Libertarian Party: all have made full-throated calls for drug legalization. What comparable liberal or leftist figure or institution has done this? The Nation? Ralph Nader? Noam Chomsky? Michael Moore? Paul Krugman? The Green Party? None that I know of.

Chris:

And yes, that is precisely how Karl Marx saw things: get rid of the bad guys, and everyone lives happily ever after. Put the good guys (who are good because they were the victims of the bad guys) in charge, and they cannot help but make all the right decisions, because…well, they are the good guys.

I suspect a straw Marx, but I don’t know as much about Marx’s actual views as some people here. Anyone?

One does not need to be an expert on Marx to be able to recognize that he did not have the kind of answers that would have saved his vision down the road as an attractive economic alternative. If such answers had been provided by Marx, then they would have undoubtedly been employed during the last few decades of Communism’s reign in Russia.

What is clear to me is that Marx was a good guy, a guy with the right kind of sentiments (admirable) and he was right about how necessary it was for the working class to develop a class consciousness, ’cause the wealthy had already done so, and they had done it at the expense of the working class.

IMO, the basic flaw of Marxism was its obsessive focus on (1) power and (2) property. Marx was basically a romantic who saw the world as a morality play. In society you had the good guys, who were good because they were victims of the really bad guys, those greedy capitalists. Marx simply predicted that eventually the goods guys would get fed up with their plight and would rise up and overthrow their oppressors.

What to do then was not completely figured out by Marx, for he was relying on the good intentions of the good guys to lead to the right decisions re: the economy. Property was taken away from the wealthy because it was seen as the key means by which the wealthy were able to exploit the poor and desperate.

In reality, it really doesn’t matter who owns the property, so long as it is being employed to serve the needs of society, generally. Markets do a lot of that without much direction, so it is and always has been a good idea to use them. The Chinese know this quite well.

I don’t really have a problem with the “bad guys” running the show, so long as they are responsive to the moral pressure of the loyal opposition, and/or the alternative is civil war. The wealthy generally need to fear something, but I don’t think violent attacks are necessary. Loudly expressed criticism should be sufficient to bend them to the public’s will. Especially if you can get large numbers of bodies out in the streets.

This all assumes that left-leaning intellectuals wake up to the opportunities they have to stir up a large and enthusiastic following. The single biggest lesson that Democrats need to learn is that the Swing Voters can only be won over through identity politics, which is something the Republicans have realized since forever. This means that they need to hear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

Perhaps more on this later…

Current 04.28.10 at 2:18 am

“It’s interesting that the folks here think that the left are losing ground, also conservatives generally think the the right are losing ground and libertarians think that they are losing ground. I’ve read recent discussions online from all three groups.

I guess it’s because each group has such a different idea about what “losing ground” entails.”

Maybe the truth is that we all are.

Alice,

I think maybe we are all “losing ground”. I’ve being considering this recently and I think there are two main reasons: Crony Capitalism and status-quo biases within government and electorates.

Nobody with any honesty or sense really supports Crony Capitalism (certainly dishonest politicians, businessmen and pundits support it). But, it has become a much stronger force in recent years. It is often that force that rightists, leftists and libertarians have been losing too.

Secondly, often the status-quo is unacceptable to us all. Take welfare dependence for example. I live in Ireland where the welfare is very generous, I know many people who have no intention of ever getting a job if they can possibly avoid it, even if though they could work. Now, the rightist solution to this is often some program of moral indoctrination or campaign of persuasion to convince the feckless proles to do their duty for their country. The leftist solution is training, and also often some sort of campaign of persuasion for the unemployed to become “empowered” or something. The libertarian solution is for the state to get out of that activity and leave it to insurance companies, cooperatives, charities and other local organizations. None of us are getting what we want because each of our positions is politically unacceptable. So, what we are getting is a welfare system that all of us agree is unsound.

Fannie and Freddie provide an example of both. Anyone from left or right who had studied them considered them dubious. The left would say that they should be fully nationalised, the right and libertarians that they should be fully privatised. Neither were politically acceptable. And, the course of keeping their existing structure where the public hold liabilities and profits are private was useful to rent seekers within government and within Fannie and Freddie.

If such answers had been provided by Marx, then they would have undoubtedly been employed during the last few decades of Communism’s reign in Russia.

Unless some guy named Joe was more interested in becoming a dictator than in actually promoting the interests of the working class. Or are you counting him as after the end of “Communism’s reign”?

The potential for revolutions to be hijacked by power-seekers who don’t share the revolution’s original goals is not new, but because of that tendency it seems a bit unfair to blame Marx for what was sold under the label “Marxism”. It’s not like he was around to prosecute a trademark infringement suit, even if that had been possible, or even to yell “That’s not how I said to do it!”.

Revolution hijacking is, of course, something to think long and hard about before starting any *future* revolution.

In reality, it really doesn’t matter who owns the property, so long as it is being employed to serve the needs of society, generally. Markets do a lot of that without much direction

No, they don’t. Markets do a lot of employing property to serve the needs of *people with money* generally. People and people with money are two different categories (although obviously one is a subset of the other), and different people have different amounts of money and therefore markets are differently responsive to them.

Furthermore, some of the needs of society do not identifiably belong to a particular person and no particular person can effectively buy them (or would want to try). Environmental issues, for example.

And, of course, unwatched markets will create any form of fraud which is profitable, whether it’s dog sausages sold as pork, snake oil, or CDOs full of NINJA loans. (Actually, fraud isn’t necessarily quite the right word — sometimes the people selling it are believers too — but the point is that the buyers have failed to realize that the product or service they’re buying isn’t as beneficial to them as they think it is.)

It’s true that ownership as such is only a formality, and the use to which property is put and who receives the benefits of that use are more important, but markets have serious and important limitations that must be remedied by some sort of nonmarket institution. (And, in any case, control and usufruct are two of the chief traditional aspects of ownership. A sufficiently strong public servitude, such as a highway, can make someone’s “ownership” of the underlying land little more than a formality.)

Well, I have to differ both with the “Marx as morality play” and “Marx is not answerable for Stalin positions”. Marx saw the classes as in irreconcilable conflict because their interests were in conflict, and he did see human beings as basically self-interested, though he was less uncompromising on that than many economists. Once economic production had developed to the point that only communal ownership of the means of production made sense, there would be a revolution to achieve that, after which class conflict would end because the economic interests of society as a whole would be unified. The proletariat being “good guys” doesn’t come into it. After the revolution, they would be pursuing their self-interest as all parties had been before, but their self-interest would not differ from that of mankind as a whole.

However, it is also untrue to say that Marx could tell Stalin “That isn’t how I said to do it.” Marx didn’t substantially say how to do it. This is because Marx, as he loudly and correctly insisted, and as much as contemporaries seem unaware of this, was adamantly not a utopian. Utopians create a vision of how they would like society to be and then try to figure out how to bring such a thing about. It is a Hegelian project in the precise sense Marx objected to – it works from the ideal to the real. Marx did his famous dialectical inversion of Hegel, which was also an inversion of the utopians. He began with rigorous economic analysis of Capitalist and pre-Capitalist forms of society, showed (he believed) that they will eventually collapse of their internal contradictions and conflicts, and that Communism would be the logical solution to these. To sketch out in any detail how Communism would work would violate his premise, which is that the underlying economic realities shape human ideologies, not the reverse. To assume that we today could understand how a communist society would work without having experienced the conditions of such a society would violate Marx’s premise.

As far as Stalin goes, there is no sense distinguishing in theory between Lenin and Stalin, since Lenin created the system Stalin used, and Lenin did everything, or almost everything, Stalin did, just not on the same scale. Also, if, as a Marxist, you believe that history is shaped by the interplay of impersonal historical forces and not by human intention or personality (and in the contemporary intelligentsia, this view is hardly limited to Marxists) , you cannot say Stalin ruined the Soviet experiment. The USSR was part of history too, and a Marxist account of its development should have as its protagonist impersonal historical – chiefly economic – forces.

Probably the biggest difference between Lenin and Marx is that Marx was a populist and Lenin was not. When Marx said “the proletariat”, he actually meant those people, not someone else speaking on their behalf. Lenin was elitist and concluded that the common people were too stupid, ignorant, and reactionary to actually be allowed to take power. Rather an intellectual elite representing their interest – “the vanguard” – would rule until that distant “someday” when the consciousness of the common man was properly prepared. Said elite took power, with a heavy concentration on “consciousness preparation” in the population. We all know the outcome.

In my view, Marx’s rejection of idealism in the Hegelian sense and of utopianism was a fatal flaw, and the left has hurt itself mightily following his lead in this.

Marx saw… human beings as basically self-interested

Fwiw this isn’t true either.

#98: Also, if, as a Marxist, you believe that history is shaped by the interplay of impersonal historical forces and not by human intention or personality (and in the contemporary intelligentsia, this view is hardly limited to Marxists) , you cannot say Stalin ruined the Soviet experiment.

Hmm, this is an interesting point. If Marx was that kind of radical anti-Great-Man-ist, then if Stalin mattered at all, the very fact that Stalin mattered refutes Marx, and if Stalin didn’t matter, then the corruption of the revolution was somehow inevitable and not a result of Stalin’s hijacking. (Also, given the rest of your post about Lenin, it’s possible that this whole analysis should substitute Lenin for Stalin. But either way, the point is the same: if the man in charge matters, Marx was wrong about men in charge not mattering, and if he doesn’t, then the revolution was doomed to both happen *and* betray the actual workers on the way to inventing totalitarianism.)

Actually, I think you can go further — if Marx is that much of an anti-Great-Man-ist, then *Marx* can’t matter either, by his own theory. So he isn’t responsible for anything because nobody is. We’re just bits of driftwood with delusions of controlling the tides.

Martin, if you really think that anti-Stalinist Marxists defend the kind of ‘one bad apple’ theory of Stalinism you appear to believe they do then may I politely suggest that you should read a bit more widely?

his “rigorous economic analysis” is wrong, not true. That being so, his vision of class conflict and more or less inevitable historical development is also wrong.

Why? What exactly do you take to be his claims about economics, class or historical development? What makes you think they are ‘wrong’? Have you actually read any Marx, or more recent Marxist economics, history or sociology?

The use values, coat, linen, &c., i.e., the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements – matter and labour. If we take away the useful labour expended upon them, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by Nature without the help of man. The latter can work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter. Nay more, in this work of changing the form he is constantly helped by natural forces. We see, then, that labour is not the only source of material wealth, of use values produced by labour. As William Petty puts it, labour is its father and the earth its mother.

Capital, Chapter 1

Uh huh. And in those quotes, there is no suggestion that the bodies of commodities are furnished by nature in globally limited amounts, that in fact the commodities of food, water, and even the composition of air can run short without anything that human labor can really do about it. Labor is valuable under certain circumstances, of course, but Marx’ theory truncates the most basic source of value, or considers it only in the most casual way as a sort of bromide. Christianity also has quotes that say that we hold the Earth in trust etc. but that doesn’t mean that I’m really to sign up for it.

Once someone is ready to consider the biosphere as the real, ultimate source of value, not merely as a sort of constant, ever-ready ever-expandable platform to work on with perhaps a bit of maintenance, the idea of singling out labor as having a special significance just doesn’t seem merited. Many things produce value in the same sense as labor does. And once that’s admitted, huge chunks of analytical Marx just fall away.

engels, I said I hadn’t read any recent Marxist economics. You wouldn’t be doing that thing that e.g. global warming denialists do where you can’t just say that you’ve read the IPCC report, it’s not good enough unless you’ve also read whatever their latest non-peer-reviewed white paper is, would you?

I mean, if there was any evidence of success of Marxist economics — if the remaining supposedly Marxist countries were not either dictatorships or state-capitalist in all but name — then maybe I’d feel like I had to read the more recent things. But given that it’s an analysis that failed the left, failed in the world, and failed in understandable ways according to contemporary consensus economics (yeah, I know, not a science), I don’t really feel I need to do my historical dotting and i’s and crossing of t’s. I don’t really need to read up on Phlogiston Theory either, despite it being pretty close to the observed truth in some ways.

Martin,
In my view, Marx’s rejection of idealism in the Hegelian sense and of utopianism was a fatal flaw, and the left has hurt itself mightily following his lead in this.

I don’t understand your objection. Society evolves, similar to the biosphere, by mutations and adaptations. Individuals can help produce a mutation (like Bolshevism), but obviously they can’t foresee or force the outcome.

Engels, I did not say anti-Stalinist Marxists categorically subscribe to a “one bad apple” theory. I was responding to a comment by Chris, wherein he said:

“Unless some guy named Joe was more interested in becoming a dictator than in actually promoting the interests of the working class. Or are you counting him as after the end of “Communism’s reign”?
The potential for revolutions to be hijacked by power-seekers who don’t share the revolution’s original goals is not new, but because of that tendency it seems a bit unfair to blame Marx for what was sold under the label “Marxism”.”

This sentiment is not unusual. One hears “Stalin ruined the Soviet experiment” even now, and I heard it a lot when I was a kid, even from public school teachers., But I did not state or imply that anti-Stalinist Marxists generally make this argument, and taking a response to a specific individual as a categorical assertion so that you will have a basis for being snide about it is basic intellectual dishonesty.

And Marx did not believe people were basically self-interested? Really? Why is there class conflict then? If the bourgeoisie were shown the superiority of Marxist organization, would they simply embrace it, according to Marx? Just add Capital to the curriculum of Harvard Business School, problem solved? If they are not basically self-interested, why not? Marx does acknowledge the possibility of exceptions, as I granted by saying he is not uncompromising on this point, but seriously I cannot believe you are disputing this. Or is it that the bourgeoisie are basically self-interested, but the proletariat are a different species, naturally virtuous? If that is the case, I owe James an apology: Marxism is precisely the sort of juvenile Morality Play he suggested it was. I’ve never read Marx saying anything so silly though. Do you have a quote?

For Marx relations between _classes_ in any _class society_ are antagonistic. It doesn’t follow that ‘people are basically self-interested’. That’s a Friedmanism.

There’s no assumption that people are basically virtuous _or_ self-interested. Marx did think that humans are essentially creative, productive beings. But ‘human nature’ is strongly conditioned by the society in which you live.

The elite as a class is pursuing its interests, but what exactly motivates people like George Soros and Bill Gates is not in the scope of his analysis. That’s Zizek’s territory.

Henri, zo you’re not Zizek?

Aha, but that’s just what Zizek would say!

(that was a response to Henri : Individuals can help produce a mutation (like Bolshevism), but obviously they can’t foresee or force the outcome.)

Marx set out to develop a theory of value, and of history based on it, that was materialist in a specific sense. That sense was the dialectical inversion of Hegel: seeing material conditions as driving consciousness, rather than the other way around. Now I don’t want to suggest that Marx believed this in so absolute a sense as to defy common sense, but he believed it fundamentally and in his thinking tried to minimize the role of human intention, imagination, will, or hope. Rather, he tried to understand society scientifically, that is to say, so much as possible as a machine, as something that operates as it does because of its nature and the forces acting upon it, but not as a result of human intention. Hegel saw in history the manifestation and development of ideas (in a broad sense), whereas Marx saw in the history of ideas the manifestation and development of economic conflicts, which he further theorized.

The problem with that economic theory is the problem of the whole method. The attempt to abstract out consciousness as a causal factor fails. He cannot understand the causal mechanisms of the economy or history without regarding the human mind as a decisive causal factor – that is, without being to some degree a Hegelian idealist – for the following reasons:

Without recognizing the role of subjectivity in determining value, there is no coherent theory of value possible. The reason is because if exchange is considered to express an equivalence of value – whether generated by labor or not – all trade would be a negative-sum game because of transaction costs. Trade is clearly not a negative-sum game. Trading A for B can only make sense for two parties, if value(A) > value(B) for one party, and the reverse for the other. But this can only be so if value(A) and value(B) are different for the two parties, i.e., are subjective.
A consequence of denying subjectivity is that Marx has no adequate theory of demand. He is the ultimate supply-sider, thinking value is a straightforward result of production, and treating demand as reflecting need in some simple way. In fact, a great deal of the effort of modern Capitalism is in generating demand – the entirety of the advertising industry, for one thing, and the most significant aspects of Keynesian economics for another. Demand is human subjectivity imposing itself on the economy and it does so with a voice suitable to Zeus.
The attempt to abstract out consciousness as a causal factor also fails as an account of historical causation, and this problem is hardly limited to Marx. Let’s consider a recent event of which we have rich historical data and which changed the subsequent course of US history: The Vietnam War. What caused the US to escalate from the use of military advisors, such as it routinely imposes on various countries, to major direct combat? The proximate cause was the Tonkin hoax. That is, a small group of people in the Johnson administraton – probably with Johnson’s knowledge, though I don’t know whether that is proven – decided to misrepresent a minor incident so as to mislead the public that North Vietnam had launched an unprovoked attack on US ships.
Now, let’s take a little detour to talk about causation. It is always possible to push a chain of causation back further, but this does not necessarily mean that you are achieving greater understanding of a phenomenon. In a trivial sense, everything that happens in our universe is an effect of the Big Bang. All other causes chain back as effects to that one. If our answer to “why did Vietnam happen?” is “because of the Big Bang”, we clearly have not said anything meaningful, though there is a sense in which it is not exactly false. The reason is that the fact of the Big Bang is consistent with many other outcomes than the Vietnam War. So the mere fact that a causal account is more general and more remote in the causal chain does not mean that it provides a “better” or “deeper” explanation.
There is obviously a context within which the Johnson administration made its decision, and if that context had been different in certain ways, it seems unlikely they would have made such a decision. The context includes the Cold War, the decolonization of the Third World, Johnson’s electoral situation, and such. But is the context necessary and sufficient to account for the war? Suppose the Cold War and the rest has been the way they were, but McNamara balked and Tonkin did not occur. How without Tonkin or something like it does Johnson escalate in Vietnam? He had just trounced Goldwater by painting him as a war monger, and by specifically accusing him of wanting to escalate in Vietnam. How could he turn around and launch a huge war for which the public had no appetite? The context is not sufficient; Tonkin or something like it is necessary to make the transition.
If Tonkin is necessary, is it sufficient? Yes, it is. Suppose the context were dramatically different. Suppose, for example, the Russian Revolution had turned out differently, so that there was no Soviet Union in a hostile posture vis a vis the United States. But Johnson or whoever decided, for whatever reason, to pick a fight with Vietnam by faking an attack by them on the US. Does the US go to War? In this very different world, of course, one would have to make many stipulations to even get a sense what the overall situation would be, but within a very wide range of possibilities the answer is yes. The alternative would be to suppose the US would simply withstand such an attack, perhaps with diplomatic reprisals. It is possible to imagine such a US, but it is a much different beast than the one we know. There are a wide variety of fictional histories one could construct in which the US emerges just as prone to reprisal as it is, or more so, and with comparable capacity. In those situations, however different from the sixties otherwise, the War is on. After all, the US government has done similar things with similar results in very different situations, whether we’re remembering the Alamo or blubbering about Kuwaiti babies in incubators. Falsely accusing the other side is a widely-applicable tactic. With Tonkin or a reasonable substitute, you have a Vietnam War; without it, you do not, regardless of broader factors.

This doesn’t mean that examinations of the Vietnam War should not look at the context and the reasons Johnson did what he did. And, yes, the broader forces do constitute “reasons”. Johnson was not acting capriciously. I’m not denying that it is possible and legitimate to push the causal chain back further, but had a few neurons fired differently in McNamara’s head, the whole thing could easily have gone otherwise. History is highly contingent, among other things on human decisions. This is not a revival of Great Man theory. I’m not suggesting Johnson and McNamara are “great” in any sense, but they did, indeed, force the outcome.

Our intuitive sense of how physical processes work depends crucially on scale. There are major phenomena and minor ones, and the major drown out the minor in causal significance. We can admit of many variations or fluctuations, but they become overwhelmed by something like the law of large numbers. Within this paradigm, one can believe that individual human decisions do not matter much because they will average out statistically. Therefore, one has to look at large-scale tendencies, such as what classes do. Within certain parameters, physical phenomena do work like this, but not always. Sometimes causes can have effects out of all proportion to their own magnitude. And the things that make this happen – e.g., positive-feedback loops and scale-free network structures – are commonplace in human society and culture. An account of the dynamics of human civilization would have to use non-linear dynamics.

For someone who wants to develop general theories of history, this is very bad news. Though we have some theoretical understanding of non-linear dynamics, tracing causal factors is more difficult. To the extent they are in the mind, understanding them requires a much more thorough understanding of the mind than we have. For someone who wants to make claims about the likely future course of history it is also bad news. For those who want to change the world, though, it is good news. You need not make changes on the scale of the whole to eventually change the whole. You just need changes that are self-reinforcing.

Kaveh, I had a similar notion. In my scheme, each taxpayer would ante up a minor amount, say $10. They would choose how to allocate that money to artists. If they didn’t bother, that money would go to NEA type “elitist” music projects- symphonies, experimental music, and whatnot – as I do think those are worth supporting. If they strongly object, they can put out a record of fart sounds or whatever, and allocate their money to themselves. They can be jerks, but they have to be somewhat public about it, as their fart sounds record would have to be publicly available.

John said:

“At any rate, criticizing Marx in terms of neo-classical marginalist conceptions virtually guarantees misreadings, since Marx was involved in the approach of classical political economy oriented toward analyzing the sources of productive surpluses, all the while criticizing that approach in the work of his predecessors, and regarded marginalist approaches, oriented toward a simplistic account of nominal price formation in terms of equilibriating supply-and-demand, (which only began to be mathematicized in the last decade of his life, though the basic ideas were already found in a number of economic writings long since), as “vulgar political economy”.”

It is not legitimate to reject criticisms of Marx on the basis that they reflect ideas Marx himself “regarded as vulgar”. If it is possible that Marx is wrong, it is possible that he is wrong in rejecting those ideas. Mr. Behe, of “intelligent design” fame, addresses Darwin’s arguments, rejects them, believes he has transcended them, and is engaged in an intellectual project to which Darwinians are unsympathetic. It is, nonetheless, perfectly legitimate to criticize Behe in Darwinian terms. A convinced Behian (to coin a term) might say that attempting to understand Behe in terms of Darwinian notions virtually guarantees misreadings because Behe rejects such notions and builds an alternative causal model, and, indeed, Behe looks incoherent to most Darwinians. This does not mean Darwinians have to grant Behe, well, anything, for the sake of understanding him, and it is perfectly legitimate for them to attack him from their paradigm, rather than from within his.

I am also using ideas that post-date Marx. Transaction costs were theorized by Coase in the 1930’s, so it is not fair to expect Marx to have responded to the concept. But it is fair to bring it up in terms of evaluating whether Marx’s ideas are valid, just as arguments against Behe deploy a lot of biological knowledge that Darwin did not have, and, perhaps, that Behe does not have either.

So, yes, I agree with your rendition of what Marx means, pretty much. That doesn’t mean I have to stipulate to any part of it as valid. Nor does stating his position constitute an argument for it. Criticism from a marginalist or classical economic perspective is not rendered moot simply from the fact that Marx rejected such ideas.

I’m starting where Marx did (in Capital). With the fact of exchange. This is a common human activity we have all experienced. You seem to think that the notion that articles
of different kinds can be exchanged constitutes some conundrum and that positing an equality of value (of some kind) solves it. I hold that the fact of exchange shows that there is no such equality, just differing subjective views. Now, Marx is reaching for an objective, not a subjective, definition of value, but that what’s he’s setting out to prove, so it cannot be stipulated as part of the argument that it exists. I agree that Marx is using equalities of value throughout his argument. In my view, this is a crack throughout his thinking. I could be wrong, but simply stating Marx’s view does not constitute an argument that I am.

Subjective value need not be stipulated. It is part of what we experience when we make an exchange. We have all decided to buy or trade for things, to prioritize, etc. Subjective estimates of value are part of the data. Marx wants to argue that there are objective values behind these. That needs to be established, and the notion that exchange requires an equivalence of value is the premise he uses to go there. But, as I said, if that were true, trade would be negative sum because there are transaction costs. No, it is not a Marxist concept, but I need not be constrained by that. It is a real phenomenon. Possibly, there are counters to that argument that I have not considered but 1) Marx considered and rejected classical and marginalist conceptions is not one 2) Marx used this conception of value equivalence broadly in his work is not one, 3) Marx was attempting to develop a general theory of the creation of economic value in society is not one, and I do not even have to stipulate that such an understanding is possible.

You also said this:

“use-value and exchange-value are the two “contradictory” moments, held together in opposing tension: i.e. they are not atomic, separate items.”

I assume this is addressed to my point that the constraint on labor-power that it must be useful labor or it “does not count” as labor means that labor is not, in fact, the sole source of exchange-value. It doesn’t matter whether one considers them “separate” or “contradictory values held in tension”. Marx is trying to isolate labor as the sole source of exchange value, and to say that the quantity of (average socially-necessary) labor determines the magnitude of value. This caveat kills his argument. It’s not even a purely theoretical concern. One of the problems Communist economies have consistently had in practice is that they would produce things people did not want and fail to produce things they did, despite having the theoretical capacity. How to determine what is a useful application of labor is a very non-trivial question with huge consequences, and the answer that Capitalism provides is response to demand. I’m not seeing an alternative answer here. I’m seeing the question waved off.

As for the question of agency, I refer you to what Henri said in this very thread:

“Talking about individuals and their motivations is meaningless. You personal “self-interest” is superficial, product of your socio-economic environment.”

I don’t see how that statement does not constitute a diminution of the attribution of agency in favor of impersonal environmental factors.

I look forward to that post when you are ready to actually make it. In terms of this post and its two predecessors, it seemed to me you were asking for concrete proposals. Some general goals and ways to get there. I gave it a shot (in #88), but few people here seem to be interested in having that discussion.

“Certainly the libertarians taking up the issue is important, but also an awareness of the racism involved in the War on Drugs has given the issue urgency for the left.”

I hate to beat a dead horse, but it is my nature (and/or the result of my socio-economic upbringing), but what “urgency” are you talking about? It might be fair to say that the subject of the War on Drugs occasionally shows up on the left (as measured by websites, tracts, magazines, or political actors). But to say that the left has shown any urgency to the matter seems ridiculous to me. The urgency is almost exclusively libertarian in origin and action. Where is the Radley Balko of the left? To echo Bento, who is the left-leaning thinker with the in-group stature of Milton Freedman or even George Shultz? What leftist magazine with the in-group stature of Cato spends comparable time/print on it?

And frankly I think the left overlooking the issue is deeply mysterious. As far as I can tell, War on Drugs is one of the most pernicious ways in which the government directly hurts the lower classes. It contributes greatly to the hyper-incarceration of black people. It subjects even innocent people in lower class neighborhoods to constant police pressure. Enforcement is extremely uneven (an upper class white murderer still faces prison time, but an upper class drug user faces none of the problems of a lower class drug user). Yet it seems at most an afterthought in most leftist analyses of practical steps that could be taken to make things better and more just for the lower class in the US.

That’s the kind of nonsense you get from elevating individual agency.
where ‘elevating’ something means going crazy with it?

@137 Maybe “given urgency” should have been just “kept it an important issue”, but it was at least important. As for who has spent more time/words on the issue, I would guess that’s mainly a matter of very different political consequence for leftists vs libertarians to be supporting drug legalization. It’s an issue that plays to the strengths of the libertarians, but for the left, the opposite. It’s one of a few issues on which libertarians can clearly distinguish themselves from the right, plus economic theory offered some good, new arguments for it. Whereas with the left, drug culture has been used as part of stereotypes to demonize them. (And libertarians are supposed to represent interests of the wealthy/upper middle classes, and rich people using drugs is okay, while poor people using drugs is “dangerous”.) So while there has been a pro-legalization consensus on the left, it’s been seen as impractical to be too vocal about it–it wasn’t an issue where the left felt it could make much progress, compared to, say, a national healthcare plan, or ending certain wars.

And all that leaves aside efforts to defend the status of medical marijuana, or legalize altogether, on the state level, I don’t know who’s been more active there, but I think there has been a lot going on.

imagining that matters of property-entitlement have the same character as those of personal freedom

Well, many libertarians would say that that “the bit that deals with what people may and may not be prevented from doing with their bodies” is precisely a matter of property-entitlement, namely the entitlement that each person has over their own body. After all, self-ownership is a very plausible necessary (even if not sufficient) condition for personal freedom – how can you rightly be called free if, as Chris Bertram put it in an earlier thread, “sometimes or in some respects others (beside yourself) have the right to control your person and powers for the common benefit, where their having that right is not a consequence of you having voluntarily transferred it to them”?

It’s very much more difficult to distinguish between matters of property-entitlement and matters of personal freedom than you seem to suggest it is.

(Also, I don’t think Sebastian is himself drawing on consequentialist considerations at all. He’s pointing out the oddness of the fact that liberals, who are – or at least say they are – exercised by such concerns, don’t appear to care very much about an obvious way in which they could be better realized.)

Quite right on Sebastian’s consistency though. Insufficient care in reading.

Yes, to be clear, I’m not trying to delve into the deep philosophical differences between libertarian and liberal thought in raising the issue. Unless one of the deep philosophical differences explains it I guess.

I’m merely pointing out that the Drug War as it plays out in the US, is one of the very strong direct influences on making the day to day life of much of the inner city very miserable (including making police interactions with lower class innocent people much more charged than they have to be, and much more frequent). It is also much more amenable to direct policy change than many of the more indirect influences (like the hundreds of indirect ways of maybe kinda sorta messing with inequality) that liberals and leftists in the US seem to spend vast amounts of time and political energy on. Further it has been a big factor in the militarization of the routine police force and the communities that they ‘serve’ (see especially Los Angeles)–a development that has also fallen almost exclusively on the lower classes in the US. So it seems ripe for people who are concerned about class justice issues. Yet it is mostly ignored–the only time I really see it on the left is as sort of a side note when the speaker wants to attack the prison population in the US with a shout out to the powder/rock disparity. But the nasty effects of the drug war go far beyond the actual imprisonment of lower class and/or racial minorities. It is the routine citizen/police interactions. It is in the hyper-militarization of the police force. It is in the ease of corruption in planting a random bit of dope to threaten someone with. It is in intrusive pat-downs that aren’t for weapons. It is in the harassing investigation that can be justified by the statement “I thought I smelled pot”, whether true or not. It is in the hugely corrosive effect on the 4th amendment, justifying routine use of no-knock warrants, routine searches for small baggies, routine stops for ‘loitering’, and routine use of spying on people in ‘certain’ neighborhoods.

The way this plays out is frankly teeming with interactions which seem (to an outsider) to invite the kind of class justice analysis that leftists employ in other contexts. But they pretty much don’t.

And it seems weird to me as a matter of tactics, because the injustices propagated by the Drug War are much more concrete and much more easily fixable. Explaining small differences in the GINI index is one thing. Explaining that the Drug War has made it much more likely that completely innocent poor people will have the police sweep in paramilitary style, late at night, shoot their dog, terrorize their grandmother, and fail to pay for the broken door if they don’t actually kill some random housemember who wakes up from a deep sleep and shouts “what the hell is going on” in a way that the police find threatening, is a totally different thing.

Unless all of them do that – why don’t they? Why would the consequences described occur? I’m not disagreeing that they would, it’s just that without at least implicit appeal to individual motivations and interests of the members, this may as well be a non-explanatory description of cloud formations or something. The notion of class interests has no traction unless these are also the interests of at least some of the individuals involved.

That’s quite apart from the empirical fact that there is actually some elbow room for members to depart from the constraints placed on them should they wish to. Also, plenty of members of the elite do what they do quite consciously, meet to discuss strategy, make decisions with real consequences. The system is not perfectly rigid nor its operation entirely outside the conscious control of at least some of its participants.

But Warren Buffet’s behavior here is an individual interest. it’s debatable whether it serves his class as a whole, and, even if so, that is not why he is doing it . Motivations are things that exist in human (and other animal) brains. If a class motivation is not held the members of that class, where does it reside? Marx assumes materialism, so it has be to physically manifest somewhere. Now one can, and I do think Marx is doing this though I am stating it in more contemporary language, treat a class interest as an emergent phenomenon of human minds acting in social and economic relations to one another. Fair enough. But I don’t see how you get there without self-interested individuals. If the individuals are not, on average, pursuing their own interests, I don’t see how the class interest emerges. To be clear, I’m not saying self-interest is a necessary condition of any emergent properties of social groups, but I do see it as a necessary condition of intrinsic class conflict with an economic basis. Why would altruistic individuals be selfish in groups? Yes, there are mob effects where inhibitions can be lowered and conformity enforced in a short-term high intensity situation, but that is not what we are talking about here. I suppose one could invoke tribalism, where people are often altruistic in group, but not out, so the class interests are basically tribal. But I don’t think tribalism is inconsistent with the notion of basically self-interested individuals.

@151, the way I see it, “interest” here is just an abstract concept; personification of the internal logic of the phenomenon. It doesn’t reside anywhere. Individuals, otoh, are human beings; they are self-interested, and altruistic, and who knows what else.

‘Marx assumes materialism, so it has be to physically manifest somewhere.’

Oh really?

http://marxmyths.org/cyril-smith/article.htm

First Tonkin. You know, John, I anticipated that maneuver, but you apparently didn’t spot it. Once you move into the realm of counterfactuals, it is always possible to stipulate that things could have been different in various ways not germane to the argument. Had Tonkin happened at another location, we would not call it “Tonkin”. Had it happened a week later, it would not, strictly speaking, be the same event. That’s why I said “Tonkin or something like it” more than once and “Tonkin or a reasonable substitute”. I felt a little silly saying it – surely it was obvious that I was not arguing that Vietnam would not have happened unless the Tonkin incident occurred in every detail exactly as it had? What I said is that the decisive factor in the escalation was the agency of the Johnson administration and your assertion that absent Tonkin they would have found some other way to assert that agency hardly contradicts it.

“It was not Marx, but rather Adam Smith who made that invidious distinction between productive and unproductive labor.”

I never said this was original to Marx, which does not matter, nor that it was invidious. In fact, I think the distinction is perfectly obvious and correct. Given that distinction, however, and even granting for the sake of argument the existence of something called “exchange value”, Marx cannot say that exchange value of a commodity is solely a function of the magnitude of labor power socially necessary, on average, to produce it. It is, at a minimum, a function of that and the utility of the item necessary to make the labor “count as labor”. And if utility is not binary, and it is not, then labor can be attenuated by utility in any number of degrees.

This is why I said Marx has no adequate theory of demand. I didn’t say he didn’t address demand. But he has set aside the question of how it is determined what is and is not socially useful labor and simply stipulated that labor that is not useful does not count. What labor is useful is not a trivial question, and the classical answer basically is that it is labor that satisfies demand.

And what is the notion of a EREI theory of value supposed to prove? Yes, one can base estimations of value on objective criteria. This can produce estimations of value that are sortable and that permit for equivalences. And one can make economic decisions based on these valuations.

Suppose I decide to value commodities by their “greenness”. I don’t mean the ecological sense; I mean the color. The following is my empirical definition of “greenness”: the ratio of the excitation of the green cones of the eye to the average of the other two color cones produced by the average of the light waves emitted or reflected by an object. Not perfect, but good enough for this purpose. On this basis, I can objectively rank items in “value” by how green they are. It is possible for two items to rank exactly the same. Sortability and equivalence. Is this an “objective” measure of value simply because it is based on an objective criterion? If someone decides to place greater value on a red object, are they “wrong”? Within my value system, they are, of course, but are they objectively wrong? Even if I base my value system on objective criteria, the selection of that value system over others is still a subjective judgement. What I have done is to define value as greenness, and what you did was define value as high EREI. The fact that we can each adopt either of these definitions supports the contention that the “value” of which we speak has no objective meaning. The fact that you can devise a coherent value system based on objective criteria means nothing,

I’ll get to the rest later.

Your polemic against Coase is irrelevant. I just brought up transaction costs, not the whole theory of the firm. In the simple model of exchange that we are discussing, the theory of the firm does not apply.

I’m not offering a coherent account of social structure because I’m not presenting an alternative theory of society in this discussion. I don’t need to propose an alternative theory to criticize Marx’s theory.

The capitalist and the worker both want to eat because they both want to live, rather than die. This is still a subjective preference. It is not objectively true that it is better that you live than that you die; the cosmos doesn’t give a damn. Subjective estimations of value are consistent with notions like coercion and with necessity in the sense of this example, but they are none the less subjective for that.

Yeah, that’s true – people like Buffett think they are on a mission and they cannot be understood psychologically as having individual interests, because they see themselves as something bigger than anything individual. That being said, we’re not necessarily all like him.

‘If the LTV is not essential, then it is not the case that the surplus-value is necessarily value generated by labor, correct? I mean, setting aside the LTV, there’s no basis for that assertion, right? And if that is not true, then how can it necessarily be the case that the Capitalist is exploiting labor in the specific sense Marx argued – by appropriating the value of their labor? Are you saying that the notion that Capitalists necessarily extract value created by workers is not a core Marxist contention? If it is, what, supports it in the absence of the LTV?’

As a previous poster on a previous comments thread pointed out, the full title of Capital is most instructive: Capital a critique of political economy. Marx was, as Engels pointed out at Marx’s funeral, neither an economist, a sociologist or a philosopher. He was a revolutionary. The basic point is not whether or not Marx ‘believed’ in the LTV. He probably did. But that’s really not the point. Marx wanted to show the hidden assumptions behind ‘orthodox’ economics, which he saw, not as a natural science, but as an ideology. At the time he was writing the basic assumption of orthodox economics was the LTV. Later on, of course, the assumptions changed. But pace the fantasies of Hayek, there’s no evidence that in the face of this new approach, Marx would simply have thrown up his hands and gone ‘I was wrong! It’s a fair cop. And I’d have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for those pesky marginalists.’ After all, Engels didn’t ‘change his mind’ in the face of the same evidence.

Instead, had Marx lived, all the evidence is he would have adopted the same critical approach to marginalism. So it is important whether or not the LTV is ‘true’. But it’s probably not quite as crucial as some anti-Marxists think.

“Nevertheless, the fact that we can easily perceive this behavior as “individual interest” is a good illustration of how our consciousness is shaped by the socioeconomic reality (and not vise-versa).”

You are assuming the question–that there is no individual interest. If there is in fact an individual interest, than the fact that we perceive “individual interest” is a good illustration of how we are perceptive. And of course there is the strong likelihood that there are both individual interests and class interests. And that there are public, private, and individual interests in a person.

I really don’t see why it has to be an all or nothing proposition. Yes there are probably things that you could usefully label ‘class interests’ or ‘class behavior’. And often, in those areas, you will find that people act differently than they would prefer in their individual behavior. Or that often they aren’t fully aware of the difference.

But that kind of insight does not demand that we agree ALL such interests or behaviors are class behaviors. It is kind of like the nature/nurture debate, which is ridiculous in absolutist terms. The answer is “a very strong dose of both”.

Hidari, are saying Marx has no positive content, but is simply tearing down the ideas of others? Why, then, is he building an argument, rather than primarily presenting the arguments of others and showing where they are wrong? The important question isn’t whether Marx believed the LTV is true; it is whether it is true. Whether Marx would have, or Engels did, believe that marginalism undermines their ideas doesn’t matter. Marx does not get to be the arbiter of whether critiques of his ideas hold water.

It may be possible to construct a model of the political economy that doesn’t use Marx’s premises, but comes to conclusions in the same neighborhood within certain parameters. Rather like Newtonian and Einsteinian physics are very different fundamental views, but reach similar conclusions within certain parameters. This could be a worthwhile project, perhaps, but it is different from actually-existing Marxism, so far as I know.

Saying that the exchange of commodities is motivated by a constructed system of relationships simply pushes the question back further. What motivates the construction of the system of relationships? Evidently, it is that the relationships make possible the existence of productive surpluses, which enable people to have surplus-value. What motivates people to seek to capture surplus-value? Self-interest? Subjectivity? How can you deduce from the fact that a productive surplus can potentially exist the fact that they are something towards which human collective behavior will be directed? You can deduce this by postulating self-interest (or other motivations, but they will be motivations that exists in human skulls) and looking at what actually motivates people to engage in actions, but it is not there in the structure, because the structure does not provide a reason for the behavior, ultimately by people, of generating surpluses.

Subjectivity? As a human being, I do things because I choose to do them. It is possible that I choose to do them because external forces, obvious or not, are influencing me. But those external forces still have to be mediated by my mind before they influence my action, and it is difficult to see how such a transformation from external influence to neural conjunction that motivates action can be perfect, so that the same influence always produces the same conjunction in various people. So to some degree people’s actions are always motivated by things that are inside their heads, or by their internal neural structures in its current state, if you want to use that language.

A response to that is going to require more time than I have right now. And I think this thread is closing soon. so I guess that’s it.