Posts by author:
Chris Bertram
There has been much attention online to a piece by Joseph Heath arguing that analytical Marxism disappeared because the analytical Marxists all turned into Rawlsian liberals. At a certain level of resolution (blurred, zoomed out) the argument has something going for it. But at that level, all it amounts to is the claim that this group of thinkers shifted their attention over time from critical investigation of the normative and positive claims made by Karl Marx to concerns about justice, and, particularly, distributive justice. Heath’s piece also contains some startling inaccuracies:
- Heath claims that Cohen abandoned the Marxist view, summed up, according to Heath in the belief “that workers are entitled to the fruits of their labour, and so if they receive something less than this, they are being treated unjustly” and Heath associates this view with a commitment to the labour theory of value. But, as any scholar of Marx knows, Marx himself rejected the view that workers are entitled to the full fruits of their labour in the Critique of the Gotha Programme because of the need to make deductions, among others, for those unable to work. Moreover, Cohen rejected the labour theory of value and declared its relationship to the charge of exploitation to be one of irrelevance in his essay “The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation” (available in his History, Labour and Freedom).
-
Heath claims that Cohen, worried about the way that Marx’s theory of exploitation rests on similar premises to Nozick’s views (as he was), spent “spent the better part of a decade agonizing, and wrote two entire books trying to work out a response to Nozick, none of it particularly persuasive.” Well, by my count, Cohen wrote exactly one book responding to Nozick, namely Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality. Of course it is up to Heath what he finds persuasive, but, personally, I think the great achievement of that book is its focus on the principle of self-ownership and its rejection of that principle.
(Originally drafted for a conference at Frankfurt in 2018 to mark the 40th anniversary of Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. I’ve done a bit of editing of my conference script and added a few footnotes etc, but it isn’t necessarily produced to the scholarly standards one might require of a journal article.)
In Karl Marx’s Theory of History, G.A. Cohen attributed many of the ills of capitalism to the market mechanism. Later in his career he came to see the market as practically ineliminable. Insofar as he was right about the market in his earlier work, it may turn out that the alternatives to capitalism he championed at the end of his life will also generate the pathology he deplored: the systematic bias in favour of output over leisure and free time. The following explores some of these tensions.
Introduction
In the second half of his career, G.A. Cohen concentrated his discussion of capitalism on its wrongs and injustices. According to his diagnosis, the primary injustice in capitalism arose from the combination of private property and self-ownership, which enables capitalists – who own the means of production – to contract with workers – who own only themselves and their labour power, on terms massively to the capitalists’ advantage. The workers, who produce nearly all of the commodities that possess value in a capitalist society, see the things that they have produced appropriated and turned against them as tools of exploitation and domination by the capitalists. But the wrongness and injustice of capitalism, the theft of what rightfully belongs to workers, is only one part of what is to be deplored about capitalism. In chapter 11 of Karl Marx’s Theory of History, a chapter where he went beyond the expository and reconstructive work he undertook earlier in the book, Cohen articulated a different critique, this time focused not on injustice but on the ills to which capitalism gives rise. In that chapter he attacks capitalism for stunting human potential through a bias towards the maximization of output, a bias which condemns human beings to lives dominated by drudgery and toil. Relatedly, he attacks capitalism both for stimulating demand for consumption that adds little of real value to people’s lives and because for damaging of the natural environment through pollution. In developing this critique, Cohen also notes that the bias towards output he identifies is celebrated by Max Weber as exemplifying rationality itself, a celebration which Cohen thought ideological and mistaken.1
Though both the wrongness and the badness of capitalism arise from the conjunction of private property and the market, it seems natural to emphasize the role of private property more in the production of injustice and to stress market relations more in the genesis of its badness. It is the fact of what the capitalists own that gives them decisive leverage over workers in the labour market, making exploitation within the workplace consequently possible; it is the market that compels everyone, capitalists and workers both on pain of extinction, to act in ways that end up being so destructive for human and planetary well-being.
I spent yesterday evening watching Agnieszka Holland’s remarkable film “Green Border” which has just been released to streaming in the UK after spending about 30 seconds in cinemas. The episode that provides the film’s context is the 2021 decision of Alexander Lukashenko, dictator of Belarus and Putin’s puppet, to make use of refugees as a weapon against “the West” by opening up a route for them from Turkey and then shipping them to the border with Poland and, hence, the European Union, where they might hope to claim asylum. The refugees themselves are blameless in all this, and we first see the main family on the flight, Syrians, full of optimism and hoping, that unlike in Turkey they will be able to get their children into school. But what happens is that they are driven to the border by the Belarussians and pushed over into inhospitable forest in winter and then, when discovered by the Poles, brutally pushed back across, through and sometimes over the razor wire that marks the frontier. Stranded in this zone, more and more of them succumb to cold, hunger, injury and disease.
The focus of the film is distributed among various characters: a Polish border guard and his heavily pregnant partner (which mirrors the condition of several refugees); a Polish psychologist and widow to Covid, who lives near the border and responds to cries she hears late at night; the Syrian family and the English-speaking Afghan woman who attaches herself to them and whose brother worked with Polish forces in Afghanistan; and the activists, riven by disagreements.
[click to continue…]
Often on a Friday evening, we order a curry from our local “Indian” takeaway. They deliver, but it is easier and quicker for me to walk round and collect, and, anyway, I enjoy chatting to the guy behind the counter. He’s a Man United fan, I’m Liverpool, so we have some banter with a bit of an edge to it. Well, we started on the football, and he noted the lack of summer signings by my team, but we quickly got on to the news: “It’s been a horrible week”. And it certainly has, with race riots and anti-Muslim pogroms in various British cities, egged on by right-wing pundits and politicians “just asking questions” in the context of inflammatory disinformation and with Elon Musk making ignorant predictions of civil war while retweeting Islamophobes.
My interlocutor, born and bred in the UK, told me that it was the first time he had felt uncomfortable and anxious in this country and that many “ethnics” as he referred to people like himself, had chosen to work from home on Wednesday rather than risk being caught on the street. But he told me he’d left work early, just to be safe (thereby telling me that he works two jobs). But he told me, also, that he was encouraged and felt better, thanks to the massive counter-demonstrations in Bristol, Brighton, Newcastle, Walthamstow that night, which told him that the far right are a minority and that most people oppose them and which seem to have stemmed the violence, for now. On the other hand, he said, it was one thing to live in a diverse and left-leaning city like Bristol and quite another to be in Hartlepool or Sunderland where the “ethnics” are isolated and heavily outnumbered by their white compatriots and, consequently, feel more scared and vulnerable. (We then went on to discuss the overthrow of the Bangladesh government, of which he approved.)
The reason I’m bringing this up is because of the failures of imagination on the part of the the new Labour government, who are certainly the secondary target of far-right violence. Making the round of the studios yesterday, the Paymaster General, Nick Thomas-Symonds, urged people not to join counter-demonstrations, because the police were under strain and should be left to do their job. (It was a message that actually differed from that of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police who thanked the counter-demonstrators.) The government wants to put the far-right violence down by co-ordinated riot policing and then swift judgements and tough sentences: “the full force of the law” as every official spokesperson robotically repeats. Well, I’ve no objection to to the fascists and their criminal hangers on getting it good and hard. But that state response doesn’t answer to the need my friend has for him and his family to feel good about their fellow citizens and that’s actually the role that mass counter-protests against the fascists can play: we, a mixed, diverse crowd are the people and they, the violent racists, do not speak to to concerns of “ordinary people” as they claim. The police and the courts are no substitute for popular mobilisation in defeating the racists and assuring members of minorities that they too are a part of us. Labour leaders, managerial and authoritarian by temperament, just can’t see that. They’ll talk about “integration strategies”, for which meagre funding may be available, but the best integration comes from people feeling safe and confident in one another.
One reaction I heard to the Olympic opening ceremony was that continental Europe has been rubbish at popular music for the past century. Given that Céline Dion had just nailed Edith Piaf’s Hymne d’amour the timing of this opinion wasn’t great, but still, I found myself semi-agreeing on first reaction. Admittedly, the so-called anglosphere has had some advantages over that period, by being able to mix, remix and cross-fertilize African traditions through the blues with Irish, Scottish, English and Welsh folk music filtered through Appalachia and back, all of which gives us blues, jazz, gospel, soul, folk, country, rock and roll and the rest, insofar as those and their subgenres and fusions really count as stylistically distinct from one another rather than being marketing categories. Still, there’s some potent raw material there, fortuitously coupled with the technology for its production, reproductions and diffusion at just the right time. But still, where are those counter-examples?
One difficulty is purity. What would make something “authentically” European in a world where everyone is listening to everybody else and where the importation of styles from anglo-America has been going on continuously? Well, I’m not going to worry about that, just so long as the European part of any fusion brings something distinctive. Then, rummaging around my musical memory there’s the problem that, born in 1958, my knowledge of what the kids have been listening to recently is patchy, at best, and only alleviated somewhat by knowing what my own kids were listening to in the mid-90s and since.
But here are some thoughts, born of partial ignorance but I’m hoping that commenters will remedy that.
[click to continue…]
