Burning down the house

Regardless of the appropriateness of the comment, there is a substantive dimension to Burt Likko's criticism of a Black Lives Matter speaker's call to "dismantle the system". The question obliquely posed in the post, and discussed at more length in the comments, is whether it is desirable to dismantle the system.

Likko does not give us the context of the speech, so we don't know the speaker's intended meaning. We don't know what system the speaker refers to, and what he means to dismantle it. The phrase might well just be a rhetorical flourish, without specific meaning. But, in keeping with tenor of Likko's post and the subsequent comments, let's take the phrase to mean a radical overthrow of the capitalist system in favor of some variant of socialism. Aislinn Pulley's article, The System That Killed Alton Sterling and Philando Castile Cannot Be Reformed seems to support this interpretation.

I am a communist, and Likko and the majority of commenters at Ordinary Times seem to be sane Republicans, so it's perhaps unsurprising that I favor "dismantling the system" and Likko and his commenters do not. But declaring our preferences, or conducting an abstract normative discussion, misses the main points.

Under what objective circumstances will people actually dismantle the capitalist system? As human beings embedded in the capitalist system that might be dismantled, and who will (if we survive) inherit what follows, how can we think about the question effectively, and, on due consideration, what can we actually do about the issue?

The first question is mostly descriptive, not normative. The capitalist system will be dismantled when and if dismantling the capitalist system is in the interest a sufficiently large number of people, they become aware of this interest, and they have the will to gain the power necessary to dismantle the system.

In this sense, choosing to dismantle or preserve is a pure (as opposed to mixed) chicken game. To simplify for the sake of analysis, we can assume there are two "players": the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (and their respective allies). Because they are the existing ruling class, we say that the bourgeoisie "moves first"; thus their dominant strategy is to preserve the system. The proletariat "moves second", and because the consequences of trying to dismantle the system are worse than preserving it, the proletariat also chooses to preserve.

The goal of the sensible revolutionary is not to try to convince the proletariat to dismantle capitalism anyway and make themselves worse off in the short run; this strategy will never work. Instead, the goal is to change the game so that by dismantling the system the proletariat is better off in the short run.

The goal of the sensible capitalist is to not only preserve capitalism, but to keep the game a chicken game. They must convince the proletariat that they would be worse off by dismantling the system than by preserving it, however much privilege the capitalist class exercises. They have two classes of strategy to do so: increase the reward to the proletariat to preserve the system, or increase the punishment for attempting to dismantle the system.

The best strategy for the revolutionary is to sap the will of the bourgeoisie to impose punishment. The Soviet Union fell precisely when the Soviet Communist Party lost the will to punish the people for dismantling Soviet communism. (As it turned out, quite a lot of people were actually worse off, but thems the breaks. As some wag put it, "Everything the communists told us about communism was a lie; unfortunately, everything they told us about capitalism was the truth.")

Another strategy for the revolutionary is provoke the bourgeoisie into reducing the reward for the proletariat to preserve the system, or goad them into punishing the proletariat even if they preserve the system. This is the strategy that ISIS is using: to provoke western governments into repressing Muslims so severely that they have nothing to lose by dismantling the system, presumably in favor of some sort of Islamic theocracy.

Provocation poses considerable risk: if the proletariat believes that actions of revolutionary justify the consequent punishment by the bourgeoisie, the proletariat believes they have more to lose by dismantling the system. Hence kidnappings, bombings, and other acts of "terrorism" are so counter-productive for a communist revolutionary as to be dismissed out of hand. State repression against this kind of "terrorism" will be seen by the proletariat as justified.

Instead, the provocations must be so obviously righteous per se that the bourgeoisie lose credibility by attempting to blame the revolutionaries. The "riots" in Ferguson show the value of this strategy: protesting the actual police murder of a citizen and the state repression of black communities in the area is so obviously righteous that when they violently suppressed theses protests, the bourgeois state lost a lot of credibility by blaming the violent suppression on the organizers and victims.

All of these theoretical and descriptive considerations aside, it is actual human beings who act in political conflict, and human beings act in no small part according to moral reasoning.

The key moral question is not whether capitalism is better than socialism. For some people, capitalism is better; for others socialism would be better.

The real moral questions, the questions that each individual must ask him- or herself, are these: What am I willing to do to preserve or dismantle the system? What am I willing to suborn, to tolerate, to rationalize? Are there tactics that even if I have good reason to believe would be effective I still would not use or tolerate?

These question are made more complex because we must also contemplate them in light of the answers my opponents would give. We can see that the bourgeoisie and their allies are willing to use and tolerate assassination, murder, rape, torture, mass incarceration, the mass slaughter of civilians in war, the systematic repression of black communities, etc. ad nauseam, and they use and tolerate these means under the mantle of their own authority and thus bear full moral responsibility.

These questions cannot be answered out loud; more precisely, no one should ever trust someone's public answer. I pose them only for my own and my readers' private reflection.

As a revolutionary, I must consider my own actions in light of these answers the bourgeoisie has made manifest.

It is of course possible and not unreasonable to support the capitalist system while opposing these acts, calling them evil (a label I definitely endorse). By all means, work against the evils while supporting the system. But I recommend a sense of urgency: the longer these evils persist, the more the exhortations to work within the system ring hollow and shrill.

Daddies, “Dates,” and the Girlfriend Experience: Welcome to the New Prostitution Economy: A growing number of young people are selling their bodies online to pay student loans, make the rent, or afford designer labels. Is it just an unorthodox way to make ends meet or a new kind of exploitation?

Meaning and purpose

This is also how you do philosophy: good-humored nihilist Kevin Simler's A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

I've never been plagued by the big existential questions. You know, like What's my purpose? or What does it all mean?

Growing up I was a very science-minded kid — still am — and from an early age I learned to accept the basic meaninglessness of the universe. Science taught me that it's all just atoms and the void, so there can't be any deeper point or purpose to the whole thing; the kind of meaning most people yearn for — Ultimate Meaning — simply doesn't exist.

. . .

Now, if [dancing and farting around] were the final word on the subject, I'd be perfectly content. Unfortunately, some of my favorite writers of recent years — Sarah Perry and David Chapman, in particular — can't seem to shut up about meaning. . . . What follows is my attempt at figuring out what people mean when they talk about meaning.

Yet another concern troll

Burt Likko does not want to hear about dismantling the system. That's ok. I don't think the speakers wanted to talk to him.

Likko doesn't really give any actual reasons why Black Lives Matter shouldn't want to dismantle the system. His only "argument" is that he has at least some standing as an ally: he agrees that black people shouldn't have to worry about being shot by the police, and he's done a lot of civil rights legal work (presumably he's an attorney). As an ally, he doesn't like their goals.

However well intentioned — and Likko does seem well-intentioned — he's engaging in pure concern trolling.

First, he has no right to declare himself an ally of anyone. Allies are chosen by the principals, not the other way around. If BLM wants him as an ally, they'll ask him. Similarly, while I stand behind BLM 100 percent, I do not declare myself an ally, and I don't presume to advise them their goals, strategies, or tactics.

Analysis is a different matter. If Likko wanted to talk about actual reasons why he doesn't think BLM should want to dismantle the system, it would be entirely appropriate (IMnsHO) to talk about those reasons. But he doesn't.

I happen to agree with the speaker Likko cites: racism and the police murder of black people are so deeply baked into American capitalism that they have become nearly inseparable. If you think that the police can be reformed without dismantling the capitalist system, you don't need to cajole BLM or its representatives into not calling for dismantling the system; all you need to do is actually, you know, reform the system. Good luck with that.

Link dump

I don't have time to write about these, but they're good, and I want at least to preserve the links.

Our Awful Elites Gutted America. Now They Dare Ring Alarms About Trump, Sanders—And Cast Themselves as Saviors: Both parties ignored workers, spewed hate, enriched themselves, hollowed out democracy. Now the problem's populism?

Who Got Rich Off the Student Debt Crisis:

A generation ago, Congress privatized a student loan program intended to give more Americans access to higher education.

In its place, lawmakers created another profit center for Wall Street and a system of college finance that has fed the nation’s cycle of inequality. Step by step, Congress has enacted one law after another to make student debt the worst kind of debt for Americans – and the best kind for banks and debt collectors.

The Millennial Generation Is a Perfect Fit for Socialism:

Few developments have caused as much recent consternation among advocates of free-market capitalism as various findings that millennials, compared to previous generations, are exceptionally receptive to socialism.

There's some good but a lot wrong with DeLong's article, The Economist as...?: The Public Square and Economists. I'll try to get to it soon.

The case against equality of opportunity: It's an incoherent, impossible ideal. And if we're really going to fight inequality, it needs to be abandoned.

In Why millions of Americans — including me — own the AR-15, Jon Stokes gives us a glimpse into the minds of a lot of gun owners.

Why Do the Poor Make Such Poor Decisions? Rutger Bregman argues persuasively that it's because they're poor. The best way to fight poverty is to give people money.

Revolution or reform?

Aislinn Pulley, a lead organizer with Black Lives Matter Chicago, believes that The System That Killed Alton Sterling and Philando Castile Cannot Be Reformed: "What sense would it make to ask for a kinder slave patroller when the problem is slavery itself?" Pulley asks. "The same is true of US policing now."

Pulley argues (and I concur) that violence against black people and violence against poor people is inherent to capitalism. Capitalism produces not just inequality but poverty, and its production of poverty is not because capitalists happen to be evil, but because of the structural imperatives of capitalist economic and social relations. Capitalism rewards the accumulation and concentration of wealth without limit; those who concentrate the most wealth survive and prosper. But wealth concentrated in one place entails that it must be lacking elsewhere. It is no good for homo economus if everyone is wealthy; he has no power. The fundamental incentive of capitalism is for some people to have more wealth than others, and thus have power over them.

Before capitalism, most social systems were fairly upfront about how their social system worked. Under feudalism, the lord owned the land by virtue of noble birth and force of arms, and sent his soldiers to collect his share the peasants' product to feed himself, his servants, and his soldiers. Like it or not, everyone knew exactly where they stood and why.

Capitalism, on the other hand, systematically conceals and disguises its own true nature. Capitalism can survive only so long as its ideological contradictions remain hidden and its social and economic conflicts remain suppressed. The opacity of capitalism is not so much a conspiracy per se as a structural and social-evolutionary outcome: actors and actions that expose contradictions do not make money and thus wither; actors and actions that conceal contradictions do make money and thus prosper.

Capitalism thus always finds, reinforces, and magnifies any divisions within the working classes. When the workers are divided, the capitalists prosper; when they are united, the capitalists tremble. And, given the United States' history of slavery, there is no better way to divide the workers than by race.

It's not like the Bilderberg group sent out secret orders to American police forces; it's just that if some cop or or some police force shakes down black people, harasses them, and kills a few in the process, well, they don't make the capitalists tremble, and are thus tolerated. The pundits who blame black people for their own victimization don't make the capitalists tremble, and get published.

Trying to unite white and black workers makes the capitalist class tremble, and they do not pay for what they fear. Aislinn Pulley will not be published on the Op Ed page of the New York Times or Washington Post. She will not become a tenured professor. She will not sit on the board of General Electric. She will not become a partner at Dewey, Cheatem and Howe. She will not become a federal judge. At least not unless she sells out her cause and her convictions.

She might well sell out, at least sell out her socialism. Racism is a good tool, a sharp tool, but it's not the only tool. Capitalism is not fundamentally predicated on racism. We could have a capitalist system that exploited the workers but did not use the black-white division to maintain its exploitation. There are any number of alternative tools to divide the working class: immigration, drugs, skills, education, height, weight, even eye color. Why not? We can convince children in a few days that blue eyes are good and brown eyes are bad.

I stand 100 percent with Black Lives Matter. I would stand 100 percent with them even if they were not socialist: the continued police murders of black people is evil in itself, not just because it perpetuates capitalism. If Pulley and other Black Lives Matter leaders "sell out" their socialism just to end police murders, I would not utter a peep of complaint. And, if the capitalists are smart (and they're not completely stupid) that's just what they'll do: a judgeship here, a tenured faculty appointment there, a few partnerships and boards of directors, all to preserve capitalism. If the capitalists are really smart (and they have flashes of brilliance), they'll agree to a "process" and "statements" that preserve not only capitalism but the racial divide that helps perpetuate it. It worked on Obama, n'est ce pas?

But if the capitalists are stupid (and they can be just as obtuse as the next person), they'll dig in their heels and neither successfully co-opt Black Lives Matter leaders (and other leaders) nor give up the hyper-oppression and murder of black people. I don't hope this happens, but I don't have any control of whether or not it does happen. And sooner or later it will happen: the capitalists will choose to fight to the death over something, they will lose, and we will have another opportunity to liberate all of humanity.

Slavery and freedom

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is probably exaggerating for rhetorical effect, but in his essay, How to Own a Slave, he divides up the world into slaves and rugged individualists. To be sure, slavery today is much less malignant than before — we call them "employees" now, and there are more limits on how abjectly we can exploit them — but the metaphysical categories haven't changed: only the rugged individualists can get things done, whereas employees are mere instruments, mere tools. Worse yet, although employees are mere instruments, they are not instruments of any actual rugged individualist, who, of course, disdains the ineffectual and morally problematic assistance of the employee. Employees are simply free-floating instruments without any guidance. Taleb shows us, for example, the Vietnam war and the response to Saudi Arabia after 9/11: the disastrous consequences of groups of employees stumbling around, without guidance, doing what seems "safe", unable to take any kind of risk. Sadly,

Taleb does not draw any real conclusions. He opens his essay with a story showing the clear advantage of the employee over the individualist contractor, and he admits that a complex economy needs slaves employees, so he doesn't seem to advocate universal individualism. He's also unclear on what it means to have "skin in the game". Supposedly "skin in the game" is a good thing, but Taleb claims that unlike individualist contractors, an employee does have skin in the game: formerly his status with the company, presently his or her employability in the industry. As to alternatives, Taleb leaves us only with a teaser at the end: "Now compare these policies with ones in which decision makers have skin in the game as a substitute for their annual 'job assessment', and you would picture a different world." Unfortunately, I can picture any number of different worlds, from a techno-libertarian utopia to a law of the jungle dystopia.

Taleb is, at least here, himself a slave to capitalist ideological categories. The view of employees as merely slaves is, however, a capitalist idea. Employees are metaphysical slaves not because of some inherent Aristotelian slave nature, but because capitalism necessarily constructs the employee as a slave. Hence, I'm a revolutionary: socialism is not about some set of government policies, or even a different political regime; socialism is about a thoroughgoing transformation of all social relations, as thoroughgoing as the transformation from lord-subject relations to bourgeois-proletariat relations. A critical transformation is the elimination of the social relationship of the capitalist employee.

It's worth examining the story Taleb relates to open his essay. Taleb introduces the transportation entrepreneur who uses individualist contractors for all the tasks, including pilots. With a lucrative flight about to take off, his contractor pilot, having received a better offer, cancels his contract and pays the contracted penalty. Our entrepreneur is unable to find a replacement pilot and (presumably even with the pilot's penalty) faces financial ruin for not being able to actually make the trip. How much better, Taleb confidently asserts, if the pilot were an employee, with a reputation for reliability to maintain. An employee would never blythely abandon a task for a short-term financial gain. But Taleb poses a false dichotomy. Assuming that pilots really cannot be found at short notice, the obvious alternative to Taleb's contractor/employee dichotomy is to make the pilot a partner. Partners have "skin in the game" (presumably Taleb would thus approve) both financially and reputationally.

One transformation of socialism is thus to make most everyone a partner. Not disconnected individualists, maximizing their personal gain without a thought for others, and not employees, concerned only with pleasing or placating their masters immediate superiors.

Wittgenstein's golden turds

Now this is how you do you some philosophy! wittgenstein: on the fritz:

Now I’m thinking about all of those photos of Wittgenstein squirming around in the same tweed jacket, looking like he’s been repressing the same orgasm since 1922. Or maybe the same shit. It’s hard to avoid the impression that Wittgenstein was the kind of man who had trouble going to the bathroom. Even his philosophical style is basically a monument to sweaty triumph over constipation—squeezing out one little golden turd after another.

Fascism and violence

It's important to understand fascism in its historical context. Mussolini and Hitler used a complex of political, social, cultural, and economic ideas to seize and maintain state power. David Neiwert has done a lot of historical work on precisely what they did and how they did it.

But in another sense, I think it's important to analyze not just what fascism is or was, but what precisely we don't like about fascism. To no small extent, the specific ideas that the fascists promoted are historically contingent. They did what they did because material conditions in Italy and Germany in the 1930s made those specific ideas especially useful and effective. But it is no longer the 1930s, and the United States is not Italy or Germany, so we could relax some of the specifics of what fascism was, and concentrate on what was more generally bad about fascism.

So, for example, one element of fascism is subordinating the ordinary individual to the state, and the state to the Great Leader. If we're going to define fascism as the more-or-less "essential" elements of what Mussolini and Hitler did, this kind of subordination is pretty essential, and if someone we don't like doesn't have it, whatever they are, they're not fascists.

And on the other side, I personally don't want to subordinate myself to the state, but if that's what people want, why shouldn't they have it? Human individuality is at some basic level ineluctable, so if people were to individually choose to think of themselves as elements of the state, they are still actually individuals.

But what if the masses of Germans and Italians didn't actually choose to be good fascist citizens? Then our criticism wouldn't be that people chose some way to live that we personally don't like, but because the fascists violated the more general principle that people should exercise substantial freedom of choice. I'm not an historian, and I haven't studied the history of 1930s/1940s Italy and Germany in any detail, but from my cursory readings, it does seem that Italians and Germans didn't really choose to be fascists, but were intimidated into tolerating it.

And thus we can drill down into what's really bad about fascism in a more general way: legitimization of state power directly by violence. A regime is "fascist" in this sense to the degree that it maintains its legitimacy directly by its ability to perpetrate violence against its subjects, and not by its promise (even insincere) to maximize the well-being of its citizens. "We are the legitimate state," says the fascist, "because if you don't call us legitimate, we will beat you up or kill you." Such a state is a real state, it has legitimacy, but perhaps that's not the sort of legitimacy that we want.

Note that "legitimacy" in this sense is not the idea that some regime is legitimate by virtue of being the first unconstrained choice of almost all of its subjects; a state is legitimate to the extent that its subjects do not organize to oppose the state's monopoly on violence.

This idea subtly differs from the idea that the a state may legitimately use violence. Fascism is not the use or threat of state violence, but the establishment of legitimacy by means of violence. It is possible for a state to use considerable violence on its subjects — e.g. to punish unacceptably deviant behavior — so long as the mass of citizens legitimize that use on a non-violent basis. For example, people still murder their neighbors, and the state violently captures and punishes these people, but the prohibition on murder, and the state's legitimate use of violence to enforce that prohibition, is established morally and socially, not violently.

In this sense, then, a regime can be fascist to a greater or lesser degree, and can be more or less fascist towards different subsets of its population. So, for example, the American South* was absolutely fascist towards the black slaves, obtaining its legitimacy exclusively by its ability to perpetrate horrific violence against the slaves without organized opposition, and quite fascist against many white people, willing to use quite a lot of violence against white people who even hinted at opposition to slavery. In the South, slavery and the slave state was legitimate because any organized opposition to slavery was suppressed by violence.

*With the usual disclaimer that I'm not an historian of the antebellum South.

To a certain extent, it doesn't even matter that, in a climate of legitimacy-by-violence, some subjects will internalize what is supported by violence. Presumably, if the vast majority of citizens support some idea, it is unnecessary to use violence against a few idiosyncratic opponents. We do not, for example, presently hunt down and kill people who advocate biblical theocracy, despite this idea being completely contrary to our notions of a democratic republic. Thus we can infer that either opposition to slavery in the South was actually a majority*, or that allowing a minority to express opposition to slavery threatened the legitimacy of the Southern regime. Hence the South was strongly fascist.

*Of white people; we can confidently assume that almost every black person was opposed.

And too, the present neoliberal regime is quite fascist towards black people. At every level from local to federal, black people know that to effectively oppose state oppression of black people in any way means death. Organized opposition to racism is thus suppressed directly by violence. Organizations such as Black Lives Matter are tolerated only to the extent that they are ineffective. If BLM were to actually threaten the racist state, their leaders would be jailed or assassinated and their membership dispersed or slaughtered. (Most likely, BLM will be co-opted, their leaders inducted as junior members of the servants of the neoliberal ruling class, and the fascist violence against ordinary working-class black people will continue unabated.)

So too could socialists become fascists in this sense. A socialist state would be fascist to the degree that its legitimacy were established and maintained directly by violence. One of the core principles, therefore, of socialism should be that its legitimacy should never be established by violence, that socialism is absolutely anti-fascist. We must persuade the great mass of people that socialism is better, not that we have the soldiers and bullets to make people socialist, like it or not.

Fuller vs. Sullivan

Someone should do an epic rap battle on Roslyn Fuller's essay, Democracy — Too Much of a Good Thing?, a pointed rebuttal of Andrew Sullivan's Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic. Fuller argues that Sullivan's application of Plato's polemic against democracy (from The Republic) is inapt.

Fuller notes that the American republic is modeled not after the Athenian democracy of Plato's time but explicitly and intentionally after the Roman republic. Thus, whatever the reasons for our conflict, they cannot be about too much democracy, because we don't have any democracy. Instead, surprisingly enough, our problems closely resemble the problems of the Roman republic around the time of Julius Caesar. In Caesar's time, the republic was not democratic, but had some public participation in elections. The elites became out of touch with the common people, and Caesar was charming enough to harness their dissatisfaction to use the elections to gain control of the Roman state, and his heir was able to overthrow the republic. (Note that the Roman Empire lasted undivided for more than 400 years, and the eastern empire lasted another millennium; the fall of the republic does not necessarily entail collapse.)

In contrast to Fuller's direct and compelling comparison, Sullivan's analysis is vague and theoretical. Indeed, in his defense of his original analysis (appended to Fuller's essay), Sullivan explicitly disclaims attempting any historical analysis whatsoever. Sullivan further specifies that what he means by democracy is the "the very recent democratization of online media." But online media, however open to the public, is not democracy: it is not state power held directly by the people. If online media is Sullivan's "hyper-democracy", then it is difficult to see Sullivan's argument as anything but that the people should not even have an independent voice not carefully crafted by the neoliberal ruling class.

It is also important to consider Plato's criticism of democracy in its context: Plato argues that even his ideal republic (which is a "republic" only in the loosest sense that it is without an actual monarch) will eventually become corrupted, leading to a process of degeneration and renewal, in which democracy is but a single step along the way. Even if Plato were correct (and I don't think he is), using Plato to condemn democratization is like using Newton to condemn gravitational acceleration: yes, if you are falling, gravitational acceleration will have very bad consequences, but Plato claims that the process of political corruption is just as inevitable.

We must keep in mind that Andrew Sullivan is a neoliberal, and if successful, the neoliberal project must necessarily end in the absolute disempowerment of the people. Any actual power must be stripped from the people — they will simply use it unwisely — and the people must be left with only the illusion of power. Even the kind of individual power the various capitalist ruling classes thought would perpetuate their rule — the power of whites over blacks, natives over immigrants, men over women, parents over children, law-abiders over law-breakers — just fuels fascism, which the neoliberals fear almost as much as they do democracy and socialism. Any "democracy", any actual power held by the people, is too much democracy.