August 2024

I am very pleased that our very own Chris Bertram has responded to Joseph Heath’s very entertaining and polemical “John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism,” a widely shared Substack post [HT: Dailynous]. Chris has made some important corrections to the public record, and the comments on his post are extending that.

As it happens, I just did a three-part series on Heath’s excellent book, The Machinery of Government: Public Administration and the Liberal State (OUP, 2020). [The first one is here; the second here; here.] And I may do a fourth in which I compare his take on cost-benefit analysis with Dave Schmidtz’s. Do read the first few paragraphs of my first post in the series, so you get a sense of my view of the significance of Heath (Toronto), whom I have never met in real life.

Before I get to my criticism of Heath — and I don’t need to remind regular readers I am no Marxist – Heath’s essay is a rare case of auto-biographical history of philosophy in which Heath gets something important right despite the polemical and boundary-policing efforts — note his repeated use of ‘bullshit.’ Usually, such retrospective first-person narratives are only instructive as polemics and boundary-policing (and a window into the anguished grievances of the author).

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There has been much attention online to a piece by Joseph Heath arguing that analytical Marxism disappeared because the analytical Marxists all turned into Rawlsian liberals. At a certain level of resolution (blurred, zoomed out) the argument has something going for it. But at that level, all it amounts to is the claim that this group of thinkers shifted their attention over time from critical investigation of the normative and positive claims made by Karl Marx to concerns about justice, and, particularly, distributive justice. Heath’s piece also contains some startling inaccuracies:

1. Heath claims that Cohen abandoned the Marxist view, summed up, according to Heath in the belief “that workers are entitled to the fruits of their labour, and so if they receive something less than this, they are being treated unjustly” and Heath associates this view with a commitment to the labour theory of value. But, as any scholar of Marx knows, Marx himself rejected the view that workers are entitled to the full fruits of their labour in the Critique of the Gotha Programme because of the need to make deductions, among others, for those unable to work. Moreover, Cohen rejected the labour theory of value and declared its relationship to the charge of exploitation to be one of irrelevance in his essay “The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation” (available in his History, Labour and Freedom).

2. Heath claims that Cohen, worried about the way that Marx’s theory of exploitation rests on similar premises to Nozick’s views (as he was), spent “spent the better part of a decade agonizing, and wrote two entire books trying to work out a response to Nozick, none of it particularly persuasive.” Well, by my count, Cohen wrote exactly one book responding to Nozick, namely Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality. Of course it is up to Heath what he finds persuasive, but, personally, I think the great achievement of that book is its focus on the principle of self-ownership and its rejection of that principle.

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OK guys, here’s the deal. Last night I had a decently long dream in which Vishnu appeared to me personally, blue but golden with godly light and so on, to explain to me that he was real, and that I should worship him but not necessarily his avatars, more just him, (though I objected that Rama and Krishna are more approachable). And further that he was indeed the Mahavishnu, i.e. supreme deity, like, the Trimurti is a heresy and he and Brahma and Shiva are not coequal in a tripartite god relationship. Also, I should brush up on my Sanskrit so I could read devotional texts. I vaguely agreed, I mean, he’s an incomprehensible being of supreme power. So far so good. But then I woke up.

And I went to tell my mom, ‘you will not believe the dream I had last night, this is so crazy, my dreams are wilding out, should I start worshipping Vishnu? Because this is crazy.’ And in the gauzy spiderweb in the bitter-smelling boxwood outside the window I saw the outline of a bird, as if one had flown darting onto it and then vanished, and that’s when I remembered my mother has been dead for years now. At that point I turned to her, because I always love to see her like this, and hugged her once until she fell through my arms, and then I woke up, in the smallest bedroom of my house, where I have been staying with my sister. There is a big tree out the window beside the bed here, and a loud window A/C unit there partially blocking the view, but you can see it, the blue of the morning sky almost just the same as the blue paint in the room, which is tiled with paintings and photographs. Bishop Johnathan Mayhew Wainwright is a little forbidding there at the bottom of the bed.
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(Originally drafted for a conference at Frankfurt in 2018 to mark the 40^th anniversary of Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. I’ve done a bit of editing of my conference script and added a few footnotes etc, but it isn’t necessarily produced to the scholarly standards one might require of a journal article.)

In Karl Marx’s Theory of History, G.A. Cohen attributed many of the ills of capitalism to the market mechanism. Later in his career he came to see the market as practically ineliminable. Insofar as he was right about the market in his earlier work, it may turn out that the alternatives to capitalism he championed at the end of his life will also generate the pathology he deplored: the systematic bias in favour of output over leisure and free time. The following explores some of these tensions.

Introduction

In the second half of his career, G.A. Cohen concentrated his discussion of capitalism on its wrongs and injustices. According to his diagnosis, the primary injustice in capitalism arose from the combination of private property and self-ownership, which enables capitalists – who own the means of production – to contract with workers – who own only themselves and their labour power, on terms massively to the capitalists’ advantage. The workers, who produce nearly all of the commodities that possess value in a capitalist society, see the things that they have produced appropriated and turned against them as tools of exploitation and domination by the capitalists. But the wrongness and injustice of capitalism, the theft of what rightfully belongs to workers, is only one part of what is to be deplored about capitalism. In chapter 11 of Karl Marx’s Theory of History, a chapter where he went beyond the expository and reconstructive work he undertook earlier in the book, Cohen articulated a different critique, this time focused not on injustice but on the ills to which capitalism gives rise. In that chapter he attacks capitalism for stunting human potential through a bias towards the maximization of output, a bias which condemns human beings to lives dominated by drudgery and toil. Relatedly, he attacks capitalism both for stimulating demand for consumption that adds little of real value to people’s lives and because for damaging of the natural environment through pollution. In developing this critique, Cohen also notes that the bias towards output he identifies is celebrated by Max Weber as exemplifying rationality itself, a celebration which Cohen thought ideological and mistaken.¹

Though both the wrongness and the badness of capitalism arise from the conjunction of private property and the market, it seems natural to emphasize the role of private property more in the production of injustice and to stress market relations more in the genesis of its badness. It is the fact of what the capitalists own that gives them decisive leverage over workers in the labour market, making exploitation within the workplace consequently possible; it is the market that compels everyone, capitalists and workers both on pain of extinction, to act in ways that end up being so destructive for human and planetary well-being.

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Harris’ nomination locks in another Boomer presidency. This single generation — those born in the nineteen years between 1946 and 1964 — is guaranteed another presidency. 36 consecutive years, not counting the Biden Interregnum (he’s technically too old).

Despite being a Boomer, you may have noticed that she’s the young, exciting candidate.

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According to The New York Times (23 August), The Justice Department “filed an antitrust lawsuit on Friday against the real estate software company RealPage, alleging its software enabled landlords to collude to raise rents across the United States.” I am not an expert in law or anti-trust, but there is another (systemic risk management) angle to this story that the NYT missed, and worth spelling out.

Here’s how the Times summarizes the case:

RealPage’s software, YieldStar, gathers confidential real estate information and is at the heart of the government’s concerns. Landlords, who pay to use the software, share information about rents and occupancy rates that is otherwise confidential. Based on that data, an algorithm generates suggestions for what landlords should charge renters, and those figures are often higher than they would be in a competitive market, according to allegations in the legal complaint. By Danielle Kaye, Lauren Hirsch and David McCabe

There’s more detail in a piece (here) the Times did earlier in the year (July 19, 2024) written by Danielle Kaye. And for a lot more background see this piece in Propublica (here, October 15, 2022). One wonders why the Times waited so long until there was government prosecution to report on this topic.

Before I get to my interest in this story, the coverage highlights two important political angles: (i) this may be a contributing cause to rent inflation because the software allows landlords, which are fairly large companies that use the software, to collude; (ii) there is an interesting issue how this case fits under existing anti-trust law because the collision is kind of indirect mediated, in part, tacitly through a third party. The company itself brags they have “purposely built” their platform “to be legally compliant.” I leave the first issue to economists and the second to lawyers.

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Gina’s post about David O’Brien’s chapter in The Art of Teaching Philosophy reminded me that I should tell you about the class our department (Philosophy) has for all beginning Teaching Assistants (beginning at Madison, whether or not they have already taught elsewhere). The focus is pretty relentlessly practical: providing them with strategies, techniques, and advice that will enable them to do better instruction in discussion sections. We do readings that we think will help them reflect on their teaching, but discussions of those readings are designed display the strategies and techniques we are trying to teach them. We also spend a fair amount of time trouble-shooting problems that they encounter over the course of the semester. And the instructor observes one section from each TA and gives feedback to them (fire-walled from any evaluation, to encourage honesty and authenticity).

Last week colleagues on the instructional resource team in our college asked me to give them a short document listing the 5 or 6 things I most wanted every TA to know and know how to do by the end of the semester and having written it, I thought it might be useful to post it here: feel free to direct your new, or not new, TAs to it (it should be useful whatever their discipline). Obviously it draws on and links to things I’ve posted here on CT over the years. And it is not supposed to be exhaustive: it’s just what I happened to prioritize when they asked me to give them something. Here goes:

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“To promote open inquiry and free, market-based technological progress, you need an open society, not one founded on the enemy principle. The understandable desire to escape criticism, misunderstanding, and the frustrations of ordinary politics does not entail the radical remaking of the global geoeconomic order to confound the New York Times and its allies. The cult of progress and the technocapital singularity are Hayek’s “religion of the engineers” with the valences reversed—so that markets and AI rather than the state become the objects of worship. Over the last few years, Silicon Valley thinking has gotten drunk on its own business model, in a feedback loop in which wild premises feed into wilder assertions and then back. It’s time to sober up.”

Some critics of Silicon Valley might find the piece not critical enough, but it is not written for them. The intuition behind it, correct or incorrect, is that a better Silicon Valley right is possible – and a piece explaining why in an uncompromising but not completely inimical way, written for a journal like American Affairs, is more likely to push a few people in this direction than a jeremiad. Two minor corrections. One error crept in through editing – the Dread Pirate Roberts’ efforts to hire hitmen were not what led to the Silk Road’s demise. The other was present from the beginning – “Balaji”’s surname is Srinivasan, not Srinavasan. And if you want more on the “technocapital singularity,” this piece for the Economist and this, right here on this Substack might be helpful. You’ll find little enough in the American Affairs piece, which mostly focuses on the politics of business models.

Enough – read the article!

This is a midsummer short and light hearted post, but I find that Summer is often the time when I am most reminded of my bodily existence, and of how naïve us philosophers are in forgetting (de facto, if not in principle) how much our thoughts and beliefs are embedded in our bodily experience. Indeed,often caused by our bodies. [click to continue…]

Henry James: girl, you are so cool and smart, and well-dressed, and beautiful. And I mean this in the least-sexual, but not sassy-gay-best-friend way, exactly, but more like just, your good friend who is also gay? And do you know, that guy is the worst. The worst. I feel like someone should leave you a ton of money but you’re not too sad he died, either? But then, like, never get involved with this guy. Him either. I don’t even now why you attract these people. Gorl, I’m serious, just look at him. I’m embarrassed to be a dude right now, except that I don’t even feel a kinship with these guys who are tbh wildly unlikeable. I don’t know how they keep getting in my novels when I’d rather just sit here with you on this sofa, which has olive green, cut-velvet chevrons, with pillows of pale chintz, and there are flowers gleaming out in the dusk, and collections on the wall of birds and books and shells–it’s pretty cute actually, but what I’m saying is that I’d rather hang out with you, you’re great. You’re fine! I’d rather hang out with Undine Spragg than these guys, actually, and she’s not even my person. People say she’s awful but I’m just like, get that bag! I’m not just for women’s rights, I’m here for women’s wrongs!

This devastatingly accurate portrait of Henry James speaking to his female characters is brought to you by Belle Waring. Now please enjoy this video by Chris Fleming. If you don’t watch at least three-quarters of the way through I will come to your home and personally draw a small circle on one of your interior door jambs with an industrial-strength sharpie. It will never come off. If you own your house, then you will have to paint and the colors won’t match even if you saved some of the original paint for this purpose (though, well-played). If you rent then too bad for you, I guess.

Why is this the wrong size? I don’t know and I can’t fix it either. I tried for minimum 38 seconds to do something but it didn’t work. I guess it’ll just jonk up the sidebar for a short time, sorry gang.

The value of individualism often comes up in attempts to make sense of the elusiveness of women’s empowerment. “Investing in women” has not uniformly yielded either the quick reduction in women’s poverty or the decrease in women’s adherence to sexist norms or deference to men policymakers had hoped it would. Of course, this is partly caused by the flawed equation of income with empowerment, which I have discussed at length elsewhere.

But it is often argued that women in the global South, and in South Asia in particular, do not have enough of a sense of themselves as individuals to want to form their “own” values or separate from the household (see, for example, the work of Veena Das and Naila Kabeer). I have always thought that there is something right about these claims.

At the same time, most of these claims about individualism are made in a course-grained way that is philosophically unsatisfying—and politically objectionable. The idea that South Asian women do not have their “own” values, in addition to serving as a justification for disrespect from political institutions, has always seemed to me to be downright implausible. After all, one has to know that one is separate from another person in order to make sacrifices for them, and many norms of femininity valorize self-sacrifice.

Soledad Artiz Prillaman’s wonderful book, The Patriarchal Political Order, is a gem for gender and development thinkers, because of the tools it provides for thinking beyond this course-grained individual/community opposition. The book is based on six years of qualitative and quantitative research across five districts in the Indian state of Madya Pradesh. (The dataset it is based on is itself a gem, but that’s for another time!)

Prillaman’s theory of women’s political agency is basically as follows: the fundamental unit of Indian political life is the household. The default setting for women is to participate in politics only by voting, and by expressing the same preferences through their votes that the senior men in their households do. This tendency can be understood is often an expression of self-interest within the status quo. Serving the interests of more powerful members of the household protects women’s access to goods that can be secured within the household, including protection from violence. It can also serve women’s interests outside of the household, insofar as women’s interests that can be secured by changes outside the household often align with those of their family members (women and men both, for example, might benefit from the presence of a new road nearby, or from a powerful family member getting a government contract).

Participation in microcredit self-help groups, according to Prillaman, causes women’s nonvoting political participation to increase. This happens because of the social connections women generate in these groups. Women talking to other women increases the salience of gender-based interests (like domestic violence) in their minds. It increased their skills at speaking in groups. And it decreased the costs of collective action, both by reducing startup costs (the self-help group is already there) and by spreading out potential punishments. And there are definitely punishments. Women in these groups experience backlash and violence, but they are less vulnerable collectively than they might otherwise be alone.

Okay, back to individualism. Prillaman’s analysis is particularly valuable, because it is fine-grained in a way that allows us to think more carefully about the values of individualism and community in women’s lives.

First, it specifies that what women gain is autonomy from the household where this is understood as a) the ability to conceive interests not shared with the household as capable of being politically pursued, and b) the ability to participate in political life independently from other members of the household. The rest of Prillaman’s analysis makes clear that autonomy from the household is not the same thing as what philosophers would call “personal autonomy.” Since Prillaman accepts that women’s default behavior is self-interested and reflective, she does not have to claim that their ability to have and reflect on desires, or even their ability to identify desires as their own, is impeded by the status quo. (Though she as not as consistent as a philosopher might like about the use of the term “autonomy.”)

Second, because she emphasizes that autonomy from the household can be expressed and developed through immersion in women’s groups, she offers a view that values something like autonomy while avoiding some of the troublesome implications of more mainstream views about women’s empowerment. As Kabeer has noted across her work, women in what she calls “corporate societies” may not value—and may have good reasons not to value—”striking out” on their own. This is often thought to be a strike against autonomy, and it probably is, but we need to get clearer about what form of autonomy it is a strike against.

Prillaman helps us see how joining a group can increase one’s autonomy; one develops an enhanced sense of what one wants and desires, and an enhanced ability to achieve these wants and desires, through involvement with supportive others.  It also makes clear why gender and development theorists shouldn’t jettison the value of autonomy, and adjacent values like political agency, altogether. Not every collectivity will equally be a place where women’s values are respected or cultivated, or one that makes action that realizes the more aspirational among these values likely to be effective.

… at least in the “Anglosphere”

One of the striking features of the racist riots in Britain has been the wide spread of ages among those (nearly all men) convicted so far[1]. This is unusual, since criminal violence of all kinds is most commonly associated with young men. And it’s a counter-example to what has become a standard talking point.

The belief that young men have shifted strongly to the right and far-right has become a background assumption for lots of political journalism. But there’s plenty of evidence that, in Britain and other English-speaking countries[2], both young men and young women are more likely to support left and centre-left parties. The recent UK election gives a striking example

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The age gradient here is stunning. That probably reflects the division over Brexit a disaster inflicted on the young, primarily by nostalgic retirees (the vast majority of this group voted for Tories/Reform in 2024). If you squint you can see a slightly larger gender gap among young voters than in older cohorts. But, as is true elsewhere, this reflects a leftward shift among young women, rather than a move to the right by men.
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