Communism and individual rights

In his retrospective of communism, Fred Halliday writes:

… underpinning these three ideas – “state”, “progress”, “revolution” – lay a key component of this legacy: the lack of an independently articulated ethical dimension. True, there was a supposedly ethical dimension – whatever made for progress, crudely defined as winning power for a party leadership, and gaining power for a, mythified, working class – was defended. However, the greatest failure of socialism over its 200 years, especially in its Bolshevik form, was the lack of an ethical dimension in regard to the rights of individuals and citizens in general, indeed in regard to all who were not part of the revolutionary elite, and the lack of any articulated and justifiable criteria applicable to the uses, legitimate and illegitimate, of violence and state coercion. That many of those who continue to uphold revolutionary-socialist ideals, and the potential of Marxist theory, today appear not to have noticed this, that they indeed reject, when not scorn, the concept of “rights”, is an index of how little they have learned, or have noticed the sufferings of others.

Halliday is simply wrong here. If he were making an empirical case, if he were to say that historical communist governments lacked an independently articulated ethical dimension, that these historical governments crudely defined an ethical dimension only of winning power for a party leadership, etc. — and if you cherry-pick the empirical data — he might have a point. But at the theoretical level, about the ideas underpinning "state", "progress" and "revolution", he's just wrong.

Before we can actually refute Halliday's position, we have to understand it: a difficult task. What precisely does he mean by the "lack of an independently articulated ethical dimension"? What is an "ethical dimension"? Why does it need to be "independently" articulated? And what does Halliday believe an ethical dimension be independent of?

Halliday clarifies his position, referring to "the lack of an ethical dimension in regard to the rights of individuals and citizens in general, indeed in regard to all who were not part of the revolutionary elite, and the lack of any articulated and justifiable criteria applicable to the uses, legitimate and illegitimate, of violence and state coercion." It is seems clear here that Halliday is speaking primarily about a legal system and the underlying philosophy of law: the law is is nothing more or less than explicitly articulated criteria applicable to the uses of governmental coercion.

All well and good: there's much to legitimately criticize in formal and philosophical communist legal systems. But it would be simple nonsense to imply that these flaws stemmed from a lack of theoretical concern for the well-being of individuals, an ethic limited to "winning power for a party leadership, and gaining power for a mythified working class." And the idea of winning power for a party leadership as an instrument of achieving human well-being goes only as far back as Lenin. Indeed there is little talk at all about revolution (and how to achieve it) in the earliest days of Utopian socialism, to which Halliday presumably refers to by socialism's 200 year history. Halliday must (if we are to interpret him charitably) mean by "rights" something not really directly related to human well-being and how to achieve it.

Chris Bertram interprets Halliday as claiming that communism promotes a (bad) Consequentialist ethic in unstated contrast to a (presumably good) Deontic ethic. But deontic ethics are at best a shortcut to consequentialism under limited, imperfect information and at worst a delusion.

Betram notes that Western, capitalist, ethics are just as philosophically consequentialist as communist ethics, theoretical or historical. (Which is not to say that those thoroughly indoctrinated into and accepting of Western judgments of consequence would agree with theoretical or historical communist judgments.) John Stuart Mill, for example, makes an entirely consequentialist argument for freedom of speech in On Liberty: we ought to have freedom of speech because such freedom will help us get at the truth*, and merely speaking an incorrect or reprehensible idea causes only trivial damage. A strictly deontic argument for freedom of speech would hold that freedom of speech is good regardless of the consequences; even if someone could call up Cthulhu by uttering magic words, we should not prevent him lest we abridge his freedom of speech.

*We don't have to make any argument at all for the value of truth: no one wants to be deluded or lied to.

On this interpretation, Halliday criticizes communism for failing to buy into the delusion that there are such things as deontic individual rights. This argument has no more power than the Christian argument that we should believe a God exists — even if no God actually exists — so that the fear of punishment in the afterlife will keep us moral.

Evan Kane for the EHSC

[Evan Kane, presumably a spokesperson for the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago, posted the following comment. I've reproduced his comment in full, unedited edited only for emphasis; my own inline commentary appears indented and italicized.]

Our Sunday speakers are chosen by a committee of nine people. In July, at one of the committee member’s request, Sunsara was provisionally invited to speak on a topic of morality without gods on November 1. The formal invitation was withheld until the committee was provided with a written description of her talk.

I don't buy this. I personally saw an EHSC flyer advertising Sunsara's participation. A provisional invitation should have a deadline well in advance of the planned event, for the convenience of both the speaker and the hosts.

Update: The October Flyer mentions only Sunsara's workshop on “The Liberation of Women and the Emancipation of All Humanity” which she did in fact give. Even so, a responsible organization should have taken steps to nail down its speakers earlier than two weeks before the planned event.

The formal description was finally received on October 13. Some of the committee felt that the description provided was far outside the topic that was originally proposed. Sunsara was contacted about adjusting her talk to fit what the committee originally thought they were getting. She understandably refused to adjust her talk. The committee decided by a vote of 9 to 2 to cancel Sunsara as a speaker and the cancellation, with apologies, was emailed on October 19.

Sunsara presents evidence that her talk was rejected not because it was far outside the topic but rather because prominent members disagreed with her moral evaluation of globalization.

(As a side note, I disagreed with the decision to cancel but in a democratic organization the vote doesn’t always go the way you want it to. I even started a petition to reinvite Sunsara but only about 20% of the society signed)

From October 19 onward Ms. Taylor and her people demanded she be given the November 1 platform. Attempt after attempt was made to find a solution that, although not ideal for either side, was palatable for both. The society bent over backwards to appease this woman*. [emphasis added] She was given an October 31 platform that was well attended and a member of the society offered her home for Sunsara’s “speech in exile” on November 1. The only thing we would not agree to was having her speak on November 1. All we asked is that she not disrupt the Sunday platform. She did not budge an inch; there was no effort at compromise from her or her people.

In general, people are not obligated to compromise with those who act unethically.

*Thanks to Comrade PhysioProf for pointing out the sexist douchebaggery of this phrase.

One plain clothes police officer from the Skokie police department was at the society the morning of November 1 because some members felt threatened by the fact that Sunsara would not commit to not disrupting the Sunday program. We had no idea what a Sunsara Taylor inspired protest would entail so the decision was made to err on the side of member safety.

When Sunsara and her camera man showed up on Sunday they were asked not to enter the building, they ignored this request but no action was taken by the society and they entered privet property.

It's simply nonsense for a member of an ethical humanist organization to stand on his legal rights. A public forum is a public forum: ethical humanists, at least my sort of ethical humanists, do not justify arbitrary discrimination by appeal to legal rights.

After entering the building and our auditorium, Sunsara started to give her speech and her camera man started taping. They were asked to stop and let us continue our event in our building repeatedly. They refused and it is then that we asked the single plain clothes officer for support.

Sunsara claims that at the Sunday meeting, she did not give her speech, but rather "challenged the very wrong decision to cancel her speaking engagement and pointed out how this is contributing to a chilling atmosphere in society as a whole" [Newsflash from Chicago] Furthermore, Sunsara had already arranged to give her speech at an alternate location; it makes no sense for her to attempt to give her speech from the floor.

Sunsara's press release also claims that, "At no point during her brief statement was Sunsara asked to stop speaking or to leave the premises. And at no point was anyone who was there to support her, including the photographer, asked to leave."

When the cameraman acted aggressively toward the police officer he called for backup on his radio. Uniformed officers responded to that call. It took five police offers using mace to subdue him. One police officer was injured.

This is nonsense. What does "acted aggressively" mean? We have seen far too many instances of ridiculously unjustified police brutality to draw any sort of conclusions from such a vague, subjective description. Furthermore, why the passive voice in "One police officer was injured"? Who injured him? How? Did the cameraman aggressively use his jaw to skin the poor officer's knuckles?

Sunsara also claims that, "It is telling that the only person singled out by the police, at the request of the president of the Society, was the man documenting what Sunsara was saying."

[I wouldn't buy this jumble of post hoc rationalizations for a quarter; it stinks on ice. I wasn't there, I don't know the facts first-hand, but my personal opinion is that Mr. Kane is probably lying through his teeth.]

What was communism?

What was communism?:

Communism failed and was, given its internal weaknesses as well as the vitality of its opponents, bound to do so. However, it should not be forgotten that this attempt to escape the conventional path of capitalist development was for a time remarkably successful, not least in the ideological and military challenge it posed to the west but was in the end forced to capitulate, and to do so almost without a semblance of resistance. ... Communism was not just a utopian project: it was a dramatic response to the inequalities and conflicts generated by capitalist modernity. The continuation of many of these same inequalities and conflicts today suggests that further challenges, of an as yet indeterminate nature, will result.

I'll try to post a deeper analysis later.

[via Brad DeLong]

A taxonomy of the left

First, let me be clear that when I say a group "wants to" do something, I'm speaking to some extent metaphorically. Some groups explicitly want to do certain things, other groups have the effect of doing something. I use "want to" in both cases. For example, the bourgeois revolution in England was overtly couched in religious language (the established church vs. freedom of worship), and the religious motivations were substantive. But the overall effect was that those supporting the established church supported the feudal aristocracy; those supporting freedom of worship supported the nascent capitalist class.

Second, I will attempt here to be exclusively descriptive; I will analyze the merits of various positions in further posts.

Third, my goal here is taxonomy, not lexicography. I'm not concerned with what various groups call themselves, or describing the rage of political positions held by those who call themselves "progressives", "socialists", "communists", "anarchists" or whatnot.

We can divide people's and groups' political stance into left and right by their attitude towards class privilege. The left, to varying degrees, wants to increase the privilege of working class and decrease the privilege of the capitalist class. The right, to varying degrees, wants to maintain or increase the privilege of the capitalist class at the expense of the working class.

(This analysis is complicated somewhat because some on both the right and left are for or against the capitalist class not because of any deep economic or moral position but because the capitalist class happens to be the ruling class.)

Progressives (a.k.a. reformists or liberals) want to increase workers' privilege within the current social, political legal and economic system. The preferred strategy of reformists is to use state power, the power of the government, to raise the cost of labor power (the minimum wage, improved working conditions, universal health care etc.) or reduce its use-value (the eight-hour day, mandatory vacations, etc.). Commodity relations will then push the price of labor power to its increased cost; the increased cost is mostly consumed, directly or indirectly, by working people.

Revolutionaries (on the left) want to increase workers' privilege by making fundamental changes to the current political system. Instead of using political power to extract specific concessions from the capitalist class, revolutionaries want to demolish the political privilege of the capitalist class and establish the political privilege of the working class. In other words, revolutionaries want to replace the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" with the "dictatorship of the proletariat" - or - put the means of production in the hands of the workers.

Revolutionary groups differ primarily by what sort of changes they want to make.

Revolutionary communists want a direct and substantial role of a more-or-less well-defined government in politics and economics. Communists want to create a new state in Lenin's use of the term, i.e. an instrument of class oppression, the oppression of the capitalists at the hands of the workers. It must be noted that the capitalist class naturally sees the erosion of its privilege as oppression; the communist says, "Indeed. We don't have a problem with that."

Revolutionary socialists want a much narrower and indirect role of a well-defined government. They want to see economic and political power, especially administrative power, be broadly dispersed. Socialists also favor a more-or-less "bottom-up" approach to seizing power from the capitalist class, in contrast with the communists' preference for a "top-down" seizure.

Revolutionary anarchists want a more-or-less immediate implementation of a classless society, and the demolition of authoritative coercion; anarchists are opposed to even the distributed authority of socialism. People are adults on the whole, and once they are freed of governmental tyranny, they can deal with the assholes, parasites and crybabies on the basis of individual action or voluntary cooperation.

Of course all sincere leftist revolutionaries want anarchism as the ultimate goal: the "withering away of the state" and the classless society is an essential doctrine of all leftist revolutionaries (those that do not sincerely subscribe to this doctrine are by definition rightists or crypto-rightists); they really differ in how to progress to that goal, in what steps are immediately required.

Noblesse oblige

An important principle of any effective ruling class is noblesse oblige, literally the obligations of the nobility to the commoners. No ruling class can survive long without it.

It's always nice to see how successful capitalists embody this principle.

Myers on Taylor vs. the EHSC

Deep Rift in Chicago: "Shame on the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago."

I am pleased that the vast majority of Myers commenters support Sunsara Taylor and are disgusted with the EHSC.

A couple of items from my own personal experience:

I know Sunsara personally, and I've heard her speak. She's a terrific speaker and extremely smart and morally grounded. I don't know whether she self-identifies as a humanist, but she is most definitely passionately concerned with the well-being of all humanity, and that's good enough for me. Any organization that considers itself in the least bit open-minded and concerned about ethical humanism would benefit greatly from having her speak.

Unlike some of Myers commenters, I do not believe that there must be "something more" to the story concerning the assault and arrest of the videographer. The police are prone to excessive violence; its an occupational hazard. Oversight and disciple are honored far more in the breach than the observance. In any case of police violence, I presume the officers are guilty until proven innocent.

Basically the police shouldn't have been there in the first place; there was simply no good reason for them to be there in force, only the paranoia and hysteria of the EHSC.

Revolution Magazine and its writers, the Revolutionary Communist Party, and Bob Avakian do not advocate a "revolutionary dictatorship" in the sense of putting one person with absolute power in charge of the government. They advocate the dictatorship of the proletariat in contrast to our present system of dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, i.e. making the government an instrument of privileging the workers instead of the owners of capital. Whether or not you like the word "dictatorship" it's actually true that we do in fact live under a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; what rights the workers and ordinary people have are granted only by the sufferance of the capitalists. Communism aims to reverse this orientation with the ultimate goal of making a classless society where it becomes meaningless to talk about privileging one class over over another. Whether this goal can be achieved remains to be seen.

In all my dealings with those associated with or promoting the RCP, I have never once encountered anyone perpetrating an offense against reason or truth. I don't agree with everything they say (of course, I don't agree with everything that anyone says) in the complex and emotional field of politics, but they exhibit the highest standards of reasoned evidentiary argumentation and respect for truth.

I am quick and severe to judge offenses against truth without regard for ideology or position (as many atheists and socialists will attest); the RCP has never given me reason to judge them negatively on this issue of paramount importance.

I've actually been a member of a personality cult, and I can attest that while those associated with the RCP have a considerable amount of respect for, loyalty to and appreciation of Bob Avakian (well earned, I might add: Avakian is smart and eloquent, and goes to considerable lengths to substantiate his arguments), the RCP is definitely not a personality cult. I've seen them exhibit nothing more than the ordinary loyalty, discipline and solidarity common to any organization that aspires to effective, organized action.

The privilege of capital

Under capitalism labor power and wage labor are treated more or less as "true" commodities: over time the price of labor power tends towards its cost; a person who exchanges her labor will receive not what she spends — the hours she works — but rather the lower cost of producing those hours.

Capital has all the features of a commodity: It has a cost, it has use-value, it is exchanged, yet the price of capital does not tend towards its cost. Rather, the capitalist expects a permanent and continuous rate of return, a price that always far exceeds the actual cost, even when adjusted for risk (and the risk is disproportionally borne not by firmly entrenched capitalists but by those trying to enter the capitalist class).

Human labor always produces a surplus — a tiny surplus under primitive conditions, an enormous surplus under more advanced conditions — but where does this surplus go? If everything is exchanged at its underlying cost (i.e. the cost of producing labor power, the cost of producing the labor that produces the capital) then nobody would get the surplus, which is obviously nonsense.

The short answer to "Who gets the surplus?" is: the man with the gun. The longer answer is that the allocation of surplus is not at all an economic question, it's a political question. The way that human beings actually construct their society by exchanging and promulgating ideas determines how the surplus is allocated.

I'm not saying its necessarily the best way to do things, but under relatively primitive physical conditions (i.e. under human- and animal-powered peasant agriculture), it makes a certain degree of sense to concentrate the surplus into industrialization, under the control of those who can provably create successful industrial enterprises. Social constructions that privilege the owners of capital thus have a powerful "statistical gravity" — at least relative to social constructions that do not tend to concentrate capital into industrialization.

Thus the rise of capitalism goes hand-in-hand with social, political and legal constructions that allocate the surplus generated by human labor to the owners of capital.

The most important of these social, legal and political constructions under capitalism are property rights. Property rights exist as "memes" (actual ideas in peoples minds): Actual human beings believe that Bill Gates deserves his tens of billions of dollars; every day he personally creates more wealth than ten million of the world's poorest people </sarcasm>. Property rights exist as legal constructions (statutes and precedents), and support for property rights are directly and indirectly "baked into" the Constitution and our governmental institutions.

But what specific property rights exist? Or, more pointedly, what specific property rights do not exist? Most notably, a person's own time is not her own property: a person does not own her own labor; she owns and can exchange only her labor power, her ability to produce labor. The capitalist, however, owns his capital, he owns the right to expect a continuous return long after the capital has actually been paid for. Essentially, the capitalist owns the right to rent his capital to workers: he allows them to survive in exchange for the surplus their labor produces.

Of course, the capitalists do not have absolute political power; the sheer numbers of workers relative to capitalists give them some power to obtain some of their surplus. But it's important to understand that the allocation of surplus is indeed political, it depends on the power of people to promulgate social ideas in others minds and translate those social ideas into legal and political principles that are actually enforced by police, prisons and soldiers. The allocation of surplus is not a matter of "objective" physical law. More precisely, the physical laws that govern the allocation of surpluses are psychological and social; they are not independent of people's minds.

The question is not: what sort of a society must we have. The question is: what sort of a society do we want to have?

They started it!

So sayeth Ludwig Von Mises:

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error...

The fundamental idea of these movements—which, from the name of the most grandiose and tightly disciplined among them, the Italian, may, in general, be designated as Fascist—consists in the proposal to make use of the same unscrupulous methods in the struggle against the Third International as the latter employs against its opponents.

[via Brad DeLong

The historical rise of capitalism

Let take a brief detour into how I see the historical emergence of capitalism. Keep in mind that I'm not an historian.

It should be no surprise that capitalism and the industrial revolution go hand in hand. Before both, the physical and technological means of production was human- and animal-powered peasant agriculture and crafts. These physical means of production had the following characteristics: Labor did not produce much of a surplus: the cost of a day's labor power was about one day's labor. It was difficult to exchange the products of labor both in quantity and over time and space. Mostly, people produced food, which (absent modern storage and preservation technology) spoiled relatively quickly if not consumed. And whatever surpluses could be generated and exchanged could not be employed — because we lacked the technology and knowledge — to improve efficiency.

The means of production do not strictly determine economic and social relations, but they do constrain them, and act as a kind of "selection pressure" between competing economic and social relations. Under animal-powered peasant agriculture, there wasn't much stuff to exchange, it was hard to exchange that stuff, and most of the stuff that was exchanged mostly could only be immediately consumed. The dominance of commodity relations (and thus capitalism) under these conditions was of course impossible. The predominant system of economic relations was feudalism (with many variants), which concentrated on military control of the land necessary for agricultural production, and all the political and social relations evolving to support and reinforce the feudal system of economic relations.

What changes everything is the invention of machine power. It suddenly becomes possible to transform surplus food into productive efficiency, by feeding surplus food to people who create steam engines and the ancillary machinery to use that power to create products.

At the beginning of the industrial revolution (and until the end of the 20th century, and even to some extent today in the beginning of 21st) machine technology was most efficient in specialized production; it was not efficient at making the ordinary (agricultural) workers able to produce all the various things they needed. It was vastly more efficient to build a shoe factory and produce tens of thousands of shoes than for tens of thousands of people to create machines to quickly produce their own shoes. Of course, now, these shoes must be exchanged. Thus commodity relations.

It furthermore becomes not only possible but economically feasible to raise the cost of labor power. There's only so much you can do under peasant agriculture to prevent periodic famine; despite his* best efforts the feudal lord just has to grit his teeth and bear the decimation of his work-force once or twice every generation. Feeding people more in good times doesn't translate well into surviving bad times. But improved agricultural productivity, food storage and transportation does indeed reduce famine. Improved medical technology and sanitation reduces death and disability from disease. Increasing the cost of labor power increases the labor available from the existing population of workers.

It required a fair amount of surplus to create a machine-powered factory, and even more surplus to feed the workers until the commodities one exchanged for the factory products arrived. This "high bar" gave social and economic privilege to those people able to somehow accumulate the necessary surplus to overcome that bar.

Relative to feudalism, commodity relations and the privilege of capital was pretty much a win for everyone (except for the feudal aristocracy). The capitalists got rich. Agricultural workers under feudalism lived at cost; living at a higher cost under capitalism was a direct improvement for ordinary workers. Sure, you had to work at a factory from sunup to sundown, but (to paraphrase P.J. Plauger) before capitalism you had to work on the farm from before sunup to after sundown, and in bad years you starved.

Politically and socially, the feudal aristocracy might have appropriated the role of ownership of capital, but in the main they did not. For centuries the means of production of peasant agriculture shaped and constrained all economic, social, political and legal relations. Social relations are in a sense the "memes", the principles, attitudes and habits of thought propagated from generation to generation more-or-less literally and seemingly for their own sake. All these habits of thought became ingrained into not only the workers but the members of the ruling class, the feudal aristocracy.

The habits of thought that make one an efficient feudal lord do not make one an efficient capitalist. Because habits are transmitted for their own sake, it's difficult for an individual to make radical changes to his or her own habits, especially when those habits have, for generations, "earned" him and his fore-bearers immense economic and social privilege. Hence most of the people who were efficient capitalists were not members of the feudal aristocracy and formed the then middle-class bourgeiosie*. Once the bourgeoisie amassed enough economic power, they violently replaced the feudal aristocracy as the ruling class in the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.

"Bourgeoisie" originally referred to townspeople in general, those who were neither agricultural peasants nor nobility. And even fifteen decades after Marx, "bourgeois" still carries connotations of the (now professional-managerial) middle-class and nouveau riche capitalist ruling class parvenus.

Strictly speaking (and notwithstanding Marx's backhanded praise) capitalism itself doesn't deserve any credit whatsoever. Capitalism — as much as improved productivity and workers' conditions relative to feudalism &mash; is a result of material economic forces. It's not like some guys got together in 1698 and said, "Hey, Thomas Savery just invented a steam engine, let's create a society based on commodity relations and the privilege of capital owners to take advantage of it." All the elements of capitalism emerged from material individuals doing material things for their own immediate material interests under the changed material environment afforded directly by machine power and indirectly by scientific thought.

Labor and labor power

We can define labor as human activity that produces a commodity*. Labor power is the ability to perform labor, very much like potential energy in classical physics. We make the distinction because under capitalism, the ordinary working person exchanges his or her labor power for some price; the purchaser of the labor power then uses the labor that the labor power affords to create a commodity.

*Technically, labor produces any item of value. Since most items of value under commodity relations are intended for exchange, I've cut out the terminological middle-man for the sake of brevity.

Labor power has a cost: the cost to feed, clothe, house, and maintain the person who embodies the labor power in a fit condition to perform labor, as well as the cost to reproduce, educate and train the next generation of laborers. Labor power has use-value: it can be used to create commodities that directly or indirectly have subjective value. Labor power is in fact exchanged for a price.

Thus: labor power is a true commodity.

Thus: the price of labor power under commodity relations will tend over time to its cost.

Thus: those people who exchange their labor for a price will, over time, receive the minimum necessary price for survival and reproduction.

Human beings have an amazing capacity for enduring hardship and misery as the price of survival; the cost of labor power — and thus its price — can thus be made depressingly low.

In my introduction, I enumerated some of the horrific and intolerable conditions of present day society. But just the bare fact of those conditions is not enough — and should not be enough — for a rational person justify a radical change abandoning capitalism. It might be the case that these problems are no more due to capitalism than the misery and suffering caused by earthquakes or volcanoes. It might be the case that we just have the "wrong" kind of people in the capitalist ruling class.

All of the above may be true, but even the nicest, most well-intentioned and intelligent person must submit to the larger social and economic relations of a society. It is inherent and ineluctable under commodity relations that as long as labor power is treated as a commodity, those who exchange their labor power will tend over time to receive the minimum necessary — which ain't a lot — for survival and reproduction, no matter how much surplus their actual labor produces.