An important element of anarchism is voluntary cooperation. As with "authority", I think it's useful to examine precisely what we mean or could rationally mean by this term.
It seems clear that under modern economic circumstances, there's a substantial material benefit to cooperation. No individual can create all the material stuff she needs to live a "good life". Other people made the house I live in; other people grow the food I eat, other people built the electric generators and other people operate them to provide the electricity I use, etc. Furthermore, regardless of the infrastructure, very few of the material things we can create today can be created by just one person working alone. We have created a world full of "irreducible" complexity (which we know can evolve through the use of scaffolding).
This is, of course, an observation about present day economic realities. There's nothing in the "deep structure" of reality that logically or ineluctably requires cooperation. It seems entirely plausible that we could develop the technological and social infrastructure that would make individuals truly self-sufficient, without requiring self-sufficient individuals to live in material poverty. We do not, however, have that level of technology today.
One of the biggest ideological differences between left-wing anarchists (libertarian socialists) and right-wing "anarchists" (Randians, anarcho-capitalists, big-ell Libertarians) is how they view economic or physical necessity. Right-wing anarchists see economic necessity as being inherently non-coercive; and if someone through some circumstances can leverage or employ economic necessity to interfere with the will of another individual, they are still not "coercing" that individual. Left-wing anarchists see economic necessity as genuinely coercive, at least in some sense.
I agree with the left-wing anarchists: economic necessity is coercive, and someone who leverages economic necessity is himself coercing others. "Work for me or starve" is just as coercive as, "Work for me or I'll kill you." I disagree with left-wing anarchists, though, in that I see economic coercion as being a part of present-day physical reality; economic coercion is not a purely social construction. Our social constructions do not establish but rather manage and distribute (or concentrate) coercion by economic necessity.
Just as we don't have true freedom of religion unless we have the freedom to adhere to no religion at all, we don't have voluntary cooperation unless we have the freedom to not cooperate at all. And we must have the freedom not just to survive, but to live a "good" life without any social cooperation at all. But noncooperation is simply not physically possible today, and without the physical possibility of noncooperation, we cannot have voluntary cooperation. We're just arguing over what kind of involuntary cooperation we want.
As I see it, the social constructions around economic necessity differentiate anarchists, "socialists" and communists. Anarchists seem to more-or-less want to wish away or socially-construct away economic necessity. You cannot, however, wish away reality; you have to work to change it. Socialists want to equitably distribute economic necessity (or, rather, equitably distribute capital, the means to respond to it). But capital, under today's circumstances, must be concentrated to be effective. Since workers must cooperate to concentrate capital, noncooperation is untenable, and we do not have voluntary cooperation.
The communist solution is to socialize the concentration of capital, in much the same sense that we socialize the concentration of directly coercive power in the hands of a more-or-less (and presently less rather than more) democratically elected government.
Must as I completely agree with anarchists that society of autonomous individuals more-or-less immune to organized coercion is desirable, we can't just declare an autonomous society. We must instead create a bridge to such a society. The specific set of social constructions we call "capitalism" cannot form such a bridge, not because it concentrates capital, but because it concentrates capital in the hands of private individuals, and almost forces those individuals to use that capital for their own individual benefit, without regard to mutual benefit.
Communism means, and has meant since Marx, to do the best we can with what we have today to build such a bridge: a bridge from a society dominated by economic and physical necessity to one dominated by each individual's self-actualization. To the extent that historical communist governments did not build such a bridge, they failed at the task I would have set for them, and at the task that Marx set for them. We can talk all we want about why they failed (did they jump or were they pushed?) but lack of success for any reason is failure.
But failure is not necessarily thorough discredit. The accomplishments of historical communist governments are notable and dramatic, and we can plausibly attribute their failures to circumstances external or accidental. The nascent Soviet Union first faced a bitter "civil" war openly backed and supported by the West, followed by the explicitly genocidal Nazi regime, followed by the implacable hostility of a nuclear-armed United States. And neither Russia nor China suffered through the century of armed conflict that established what few "Enlightenment" values that became part of the West's common social construction (and the West seemed willing and easily able to abandon those values in their relation to their colonies, leading to excesses as gross as the Belgian Free State, or the less malevolent but still socially distorting colonization of India).
It's not by any means a perfect or optimal solution, but communism still seems to be the best we can do presently to build an economic and social system that will indeed lead to the development of an autonomous society.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Jobs!
Remember that Hitler's rise to power was supported in no small part by his promise — which he kept — to put the German people back to work.
If the right-wing and Republican party can successfully merge the eliminationist narrative of purity — we must purge the corruption of liberalism and socialism and restore our pure American values — with the story that the Republicans can succeed in putting America back to work where the Democrats have failed, they will win handily in 2010 and 2012. The Republicans await only the emergence of a leader as disciplined, focused, and most importantly pitiless as Hitler. They lack only the will, not the opportunity.
Remember too that Hitler did not have a majority of popular support, but his minority was, like him, disciplined, focused and ready to do what was necessary. The Christian fascists are just as disciplined, just as focused, and just as ready to do the job, however dirty. They lack only leadership.
If the right-wing and Republican party can successfully merge the eliminationist narrative of purity — we must purge the corruption of liberalism and socialism and restore our pure American values — with the story that the Republicans can succeed in putting America back to work where the Democrats have failed, they will win handily in 2010 and 2012. The Republicans await only the emergence of a leader as disciplined, focused, and most importantly pitiless as Hitler. They lack only the will, not the opportunity.
Remember too that Hitler did not have a majority of popular support, but his minority was, like him, disciplined, focused and ready to do what was necessary. The Christian fascists are just as disciplined, just as focused, and just as ready to do the job, however dirty. They lack only leadership.
Friday, February 05, 2010
Anarchism and authority
It seems clear that anarchism at least entails opposition to "hierarchies" and authority and promotion of voluntary cooperation. The problem is, I can't figure out precisely what they mean by these terms. Worse yet, a philosophical investigation doesn't reveal any sense of these terms that makes rational sense as the organization principles of a working society of actual human beings on the planet.
Anarchists complain that I don't understand anarchism. They're probably right. But whose fault is that? I've never heard a convincing description of anarchism that didn't employ vague generalities. When I try to drill down to the specifics, I face increasing hostility and contempt, and I'm dismissed asnot having the spirit of the Lord not "getting it"*, that I should read The Bible the Anarchist FAQ, and that I'm just a heretic Maoist tyrant (or have unspecified "Maoist tendencies"**, whatever that means).
(Communism is, in contrast, relatively simple to describe: The "government" "owns" the capital; the people own the government. The devil is, of course, in the details, but communism is fundamentally predicated on the idea that concentrated capital is under present-day material circumstances orders of magnitude more effective than distributed capital, and there are mutually beneficial uses of capital that are not in any individual's or "freely associating" group's interest. Communism is not intended to be perfect or optimal, merely substantively less sub-optimal than modern capitalism.)
What precisely do anarchists mean by "authority" and "voluntary cooperation"? It's obviously not the case that anarchists are opposed to "authority" in the sense of expertise; it seems ridiculous to suppose that anarchists would consider it objectionable to label Bjarne Stroustrup as an authority on C++. Nor is it reasonable to suppose that anarchists oppose "definitional" authority: I can't see any sensible opposition to the idea that the distance traveled by light in free space in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second is the authoritative definition of the meter. It also doesn't seem sensible (to the extent that the Catholic church is to some extent a "voluntary association") to oppose the Pope's authority to define Catholic doctrine.
It seems logical at first glance to interpret the kind of authority that anarchists oppose as having something to do with coercion, the ability to force people to do things. Of course, coercion is (in an abstract sense) an ineluctable property of the physical universe; it would be ludicrous to be opposed to physics and entirely uncharitable to attribute that opposition to anarchists.
One might see anarchism as opposition to the "imposition" of coercive authority. This view, however, seems contradicted by the fact that there's no place to impose coercive authority from. All structures in human society — authoritarian or otherwise — are self-organized; they come from "within" the society.
(The anarchist opposition to "hierarchy" does seems really nonsensical; a small group that exercised coercive power should be objectionable even if it were organized other than hierarchically. For example, the capitalist ruling class employs hierarchical structures, but is not itself organized hierarchically. Similarly the self-organization of natural (non-human) ecosystems shows degrees of hierarchical organization, such as the "food chain" — strictly speaking a food web, but we can identify more-or-less hierarchical levels.)
Just by excluding plausible alternatives, we're almost forced to see anarchism as opposed in principle to any concentration of coercive power. (It must be "in principle" and "any"; were it otherwise, it would be something-archism, not nothing-archism.)
For coercion to not be concentrated, it must therefore be nearly perfectly distributed (any substantial deviation from perfect distribution is by definition concentration). But if coercion is perfectly distributed, then a majority of people can therefore arbitrarily* exercise coercive force on a minority. This "distribution" leads to Orwell's observation that,
The only alternatives to unchecked democracy would be if it an individual or group was not able to coerce any individual, or if people were so constituted that they categorically did not want to coerce others. The former seems physically (and perhaps logically) impossible; the latter definitely not presently the case.
Another important consideration is that there are intrinsic variations in individuals and in the organization of more-or-less "voluntary" associations. These variations can combine naturally to afford some groups more power to effect their desires than other groups. And, of course, one natural desire is for more power. Not only does power naturally concentrate, but the concentration of power forms a positive feedback loop. In order to keep power distributed, some group would have to have the authority — the coercive power — to block or reverse natural concentrations of power. Concentration of power is necessary to stop concentration of power, a nifty paradox.
We have a similar situation regarding people's desires and will. It sure would be nice if people didn't want to coerce others, but people's desires tend to vary randomly. In order to have a population without some set of desires, someone has to actually select against those desires, i.e. to exercise coercive force. We don't actually solve the problem by operating on desires instead of actions, we just move the problem of "authority" to who gets to perform the selection of desires.
I think anarchism is not a coherent or realistic political philosophy, but I'm not at all against anarchism and anarchists. I think it's a Good Thing to have a group of people in the world implacably opposed to any concentration of coercive force. While it seems physically necessary under present-day and foreseeable circumstances to have some concentration of coercive force, i.e. some kind of authority, no authority should ever sleep easy, and anarchists are necessary to disturb their sleep.
Anarchists complain that I don't understand anarchism. They're probably right. But whose fault is that? I've never heard a convincing description of anarchism that didn't employ vague generalities. When I try to drill down to the specifics, I face increasing hostility and contempt, and I'm dismissed as
*Scare quotes
**Actual quotation
**Actual quotation
(Communism is, in contrast, relatively simple to describe: The "government" "owns" the capital; the people own the government. The devil is, of course, in the details, but communism is fundamentally predicated on the idea that concentrated capital is under present-day material circumstances orders of magnitude more effective than distributed capital, and there are mutually beneficial uses of capital that are not in any individual's or "freely associating" group's interest. Communism is not intended to be perfect or optimal, merely substantively less sub-optimal than modern capitalism.)
What precisely do anarchists mean by "authority" and "voluntary cooperation"? It's obviously not the case that anarchists are opposed to "authority" in the sense of expertise; it seems ridiculous to suppose that anarchists would consider it objectionable to label Bjarne Stroustrup as an authority on C++. Nor is it reasonable to suppose that anarchists oppose "definitional" authority: I can't see any sensible opposition to the idea that the distance traveled by light in free space in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second is the authoritative definition of the meter. It also doesn't seem sensible (to the extent that the Catholic church is to some extent a "voluntary association") to oppose the Pope's authority to define Catholic doctrine.
It seems logical at first glance to interpret the kind of authority that anarchists oppose as having something to do with coercion, the ability to force people to do things. Of course, coercion is (in an abstract sense) an ineluctable property of the physical universe; it would be ludicrous to be opposed to physics and entirely uncharitable to attribute that opposition to anarchists.
One might see anarchism as opposition to the "imposition" of coercive authority. This view, however, seems contradicted by the fact that there's no place to impose coercive authority from. All structures in human society — authoritarian or otherwise — are self-organized; they come from "within" the society.
(The anarchist opposition to "hierarchy" does seems really nonsensical; a small group that exercised coercive power should be objectionable even if it were organized other than hierarchically. For example, the capitalist ruling class employs hierarchical structures, but is not itself organized hierarchically. Similarly the self-organization of natural (non-human) ecosystems shows degrees of hierarchical organization, such as the "food chain" — strictly speaking a food web, but we can identify more-or-less hierarchical levels.)
Just by excluding plausible alternatives, we're almost forced to see anarchism as opposed in principle to any concentration of coercive power. (It must be "in principle" and "any"; were it otherwise, it would be something-archism, not nothing-archism.)
For coercion to not be concentrated, it must therefore be nearly perfectly distributed (any substantial deviation from perfect distribution is by definition concentration). But if coercion is perfectly distributed, then a majority of people can therefore arbitrarily* exercise coercive force on a minority. This "distribution" leads to Orwell's observation that,
In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behavior is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by 'thou shalt not', the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by 'love' or 'reason', he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.It is simple observation that the rights and freedoms of minorities, including the individual as a minority of one, can be guarded only by a minority.
*Technically a redundancy; coercive force is necessarily exercised arbitrarily.
The only alternatives to unchecked democracy would be if it an individual or group was not able to coerce any individual, or if people were so constituted that they categorically did not want to coerce others. The former seems physically (and perhaps logically) impossible; the latter definitely not presently the case.
Another important consideration is that there are intrinsic variations in individuals and in the organization of more-or-less "voluntary" associations. These variations can combine naturally to afford some groups more power to effect their desires than other groups. And, of course, one natural desire is for more power. Not only does power naturally concentrate, but the concentration of power forms a positive feedback loop. In order to keep power distributed, some group would have to have the authority — the coercive power — to block or reverse natural concentrations of power. Concentration of power is necessary to stop concentration of power, a nifty paradox.
We have a similar situation regarding people's desires and will. It sure would be nice if people didn't want to coerce others, but people's desires tend to vary randomly. In order to have a population without some set of desires, someone has to actually select against those desires, i.e. to exercise coercive force. We don't actually solve the problem by operating on desires instead of actions, we just move the problem of "authority" to who gets to perform the selection of desires.
I think anarchism is not a coherent or realistic political philosophy, but I'm not at all against anarchism and anarchists. I think it's a Good Thing to have a group of people in the world implacably opposed to any concentration of coercive force. While it seems physically necessary under present-day and foreseeable circumstances to have some concentration of coercive force, i.e. some kind of authority, no authority should ever sleep easy, and anarchists are necessary to disturb their sleep.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Self-organization and democracy
All human societies are self-organizing. How could they be otherwise? Who is organizing a society other than the people in it? God? Hardly. Even colonialism and imperialism are self-organizing: once the people in one country, culture or society start interacting with people of another, they create a new society composed of both the original societies; the organization is coming from within that larger society.
All human societies are "democratic" in a sense: the self-organization comes from the interaction between all the people. Even the most brutal, tyrannical slave society is the result of the interaction of all the people in that society, including the slaves. If all things considered the slaves preferred rebellion to slavery, they would rebel; that they do not shows that all things considered they prefer slavery. And even in a the purest direct democracy, there will be great differences between the power of individuals to affect the course of society. There are individual differences in intelligence, discipline, focus and will, and there will be organizations or ad hoc collections of people that differ in the overall focus and unity.
I'm not trying to justify slavery or any other objectionable political or economic system. I'm saying only that a "meta-analysis" of how a society is organized is not a useful way of distinguishing between societies. You can't abstract away the details; you have to look at the specifics of how a particular society has organized itself to make any kind of judgment about that society. It's absurd to say that thus-and-such society is bad because its social organization was "imposed from without"; there is no "without" from which to impose a social organization.
It often appears that some social organization is imposed from within by a minority. The United States Constitution and much of its legal and political doctrine was created not just by the capitalists, but by an elite within that class. (And there was immediately a factional struggle within the capitalist ruling class between the federalists and the anti-federalists.) But it's important to understand that the capitalist class was able to shape society precisely because the combination of individual and aggregate qualities of the capitalists combined to give them power disproportionate to their raw numbers. Furthermore, their individual and aggregate qualities, as well as the power of the group, were all shaped by global properties, by their interaction with everyone.
This principle can be succinctly summarized as, "The people know what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard."
All societies conform themselves to their present-day economic necessities. Economic necessity exerts as profound a selection pressure on social evolution as it does on biological evolution. Elements of social organization that lead to sufficiently poor economic performance get selected against; what remains in a society is sufficiently well-suited to economic necessity to not be selected against. But, just as in biological selection, economic necessity does not entail or force an optimal system or any specific social system; it merely eliminates certain kinds of egregious sub-optimality.
A lot of social selection happens inside our heads, which means that social evolution can occur much faster than biological evolution. We can consider social elements abstractly in our thoughts, and eliminate elements we consider sub-optimal or otherwise objectionable, without actually trying them in physical reality and letting them succeed or fail. We can also transmit ("inherit") and consider social elements (ideas) individually, which means we can try many more different combinations of elements than we can in biological evolution, where an organism is stuck with a random collection of heritable elements from its parents, and all biological selection can operate on is the organism as a whole*. (To a certain extent, there are biochemical selection pressures that operate directly on the heritability of individual genes, but phenotypical selection can operate only on the organism as a whole.)
There's an interesting theoretical consequence of the above view. There will always be variation within the ideas of a population. Since human beings are genetically homogeneous and more or less socially homogeneous, people will sort themselves out into groups. The interactions of all the variations mean that the members of some groups, by virtue of their individual characteristics and the aggregate characteristics of the group, will have more power proportionate to their numbers to fulfill their immediate desires. Other groups, for the same reason, will have less power.
This is a scientific truth. This truth, however, leads to the naturalistic fallacy: Because some group actually has power, it therefore objectively "deserves" power. It is therefore "wrong" for another group to take power from the first, regardless of the changing mix of individual and aggregate characteristics and the conformance of that mix to changing material economic reality.
It is not the case that communists are (or should be) against capitalism because the capitalist class does not "deserve" power. (The construction "does not deserve" is ambiguous: it can mean there is such a thing as objectively deserving, and capitalists lack that property; it can also mean that there is no such thing as objectively deserving, and it is a category error to speak of this property as if it did exist.)
It's rather that communists are (or should be) against capitalism because they observe the disconnection and contradiction between modern economic reality and the traits and characteristics of the capitalist ruling class. By introducing new traits and characteristics into the population, and by creating their own group with its own individual, aggregate and global characteristics, we can introduce a new set of social constructions to the evolutionary mix, social constructions that better meet more needs, economic, political, social and psychological, of many more people.
All human societies are "democratic" in a sense: the self-organization comes from the interaction between all the people. Even the most brutal, tyrannical slave society is the result of the interaction of all the people in that society, including the slaves. If all things considered the slaves preferred rebellion to slavery, they would rebel; that they do not shows that all things considered they prefer slavery. And even in a the purest direct democracy, there will be great differences between the power of individuals to affect the course of society. There are individual differences in intelligence, discipline, focus and will, and there will be organizations or ad hoc collections of people that differ in the overall focus and unity.
I'm not trying to justify slavery or any other objectionable political or economic system. I'm saying only that a "meta-analysis" of how a society is organized is not a useful way of distinguishing between societies. You can't abstract away the details; you have to look at the specifics of how a particular society has organized itself to make any kind of judgment about that society. It's absurd to say that thus-and-such society is bad because its social organization was "imposed from without"; there is no "without" from which to impose a social organization.
It often appears that some social organization is imposed from within by a minority. The United States Constitution and much of its legal and political doctrine was created not just by the capitalists, but by an elite within that class. (And there was immediately a factional struggle within the capitalist ruling class between the federalists and the anti-federalists.) But it's important to understand that the capitalist class was able to shape society precisely because the combination of individual and aggregate qualities of the capitalists combined to give them power disproportionate to their raw numbers. Furthermore, their individual and aggregate qualities, as well as the power of the group, were all shaped by global properties, by their interaction with everyone.
This principle can be succinctly summarized as, "The people know what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard."
All societies conform themselves to their present-day economic necessities. Economic necessity exerts as profound a selection pressure on social evolution as it does on biological evolution. Elements of social organization that lead to sufficiently poor economic performance get selected against; what remains in a society is sufficiently well-suited to economic necessity to not be selected against. But, just as in biological selection, economic necessity does not entail or force an optimal system or any specific social system; it merely eliminates certain kinds of egregious sub-optimality.
A lot of social selection happens inside our heads, which means that social evolution can occur much faster than biological evolution. We can consider social elements abstractly in our thoughts, and eliminate elements we consider sub-optimal or otherwise objectionable, without actually trying them in physical reality and letting them succeed or fail. We can also transmit ("inherit") and consider social elements (ideas) individually, which means we can try many more different combinations of elements than we can in biological evolution, where an organism is stuck with a random collection of heritable elements from its parents, and all biological selection can operate on is the organism as a whole*. (To a certain extent, there are biochemical selection pressures that operate directly on the heritability of individual genes, but phenotypical selection can operate only on the organism as a whole.)
There's an interesting theoretical consequence of the above view. There will always be variation within the ideas of a population. Since human beings are genetically homogeneous and more or less socially homogeneous, people will sort themselves out into groups. The interactions of all the variations mean that the members of some groups, by virtue of their individual characteristics and the aggregate characteristics of the group, will have more power proportionate to their numbers to fulfill their immediate desires. Other groups, for the same reason, will have less power.
This is a scientific truth. This truth, however, leads to the naturalistic fallacy: Because some group actually has power, it therefore objectively "deserves" power. It is therefore "wrong" for another group to take power from the first, regardless of the changing mix of individual and aggregate characteristics and the conformance of that mix to changing material economic reality.
It is not the case that communists are (or should be) against capitalism because the capitalist class does not "deserve" power. (The construction "does not deserve" is ambiguous: it can mean there is such a thing as objectively deserving, and capitalists lack that property; it can also mean that there is no such thing as objectively deserving, and it is a category error to speak of this property as if it did exist.)
It's rather that communists are (or should be) against capitalism because they observe the disconnection and contradiction between modern economic reality and the traits and characteristics of the capitalist ruling class. By introducing new traits and characteristics into the population, and by creating their own group with its own individual, aggregate and global characteristics, we can introduce a new set of social constructions to the evolutionary mix, social constructions that better meet more needs, economic, political, social and psychological, of many more people.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Turning out the lights
It's not New York, but Colorado Springs is literally turning off the lights:
[via Paul Krugman]
More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.Given the concentration of Evangelical Christians in Colorado Springs, I can't help but feel just a touch of schadenfreude.
The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.
Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won't pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need. ...
Voters in November said an emphatic no to a tripling of property tax that would have restored $27.6 million to the city's $212 million general fund budget. [Colorado Springs businessman Chuck] Fowler and many other residents say voters don't trust city government to wisely spend a general tax increase and don't believe the current cuts are the only way to balance a budget.
[via Paul Krugman]
Rand and the class struggle
Atlas Shrugged is positively astounding in its complete omission of the class struggle: the struggle between the capitalist ruling class and the ruled working class. This omission is even more shocking considering Rand's reputation for anti-communism and her personal persecution by the Bolshevik revolution. It seems impossible to discuss communism without at least throwing a nod to the class struggle.
The working class is barely even mentioned in Atlas Shrugged. When the union opposes Dagny Taggart's plan to operate the railroad to Colorado made of "untested" Rearden Metal, her workers support her to a man: the only workers who don't actually show up to volunteer to work on the new railroad are the ones presently working. The "communist" regime at the Twentieth Century Motor Company is imposed from "without" by those who have inherited* instead of earned their ownership of the company. Rand explicitly notes that the workers' "democracy" the new owners impose is in truth manipulated; the workers themselves are helpless pawns of the new order. (Indeed, Rand's attitude towards democracy in general is at best ambiguous.)
Indeed, Taggart Transcontinental appears unable to function at all without Dagny Taggart's superhuman micromanagement. This general incompetence is in part due to John Galt's sabotage, but we know from John Galt's call for the competent people remaining in society to save themselves during the collapse of civilization that Galt has not recruited everyone competent in his strike, merely the "cream of the crop", mostly (but not exclusively) those who are both at the highest level of executive management as well as having direct ownership of their companies. Rand attributes labor unrest to the action of the union leaders, divorced from the actual working class they purport to represent.
The conflict in Atlas Shrugged is clearly between factions of the capitalist ruling class. The primary antagonists are James Taggart, president and majority owner of Taggart Transcontinental; Lillian Rearden (Hank Rearden's wife), who appears to be "old money"*, Orren Boyle, head of Associated Steel and Hank Rearden's business competitor, and of course Gerald and Ivy Starnes, who inherit the Twentieth Century Motor Company. Even the minor antagonists are upper-middle-class or ruling class, with the exception of Balph Eubank, whose economic failure makes his social influence inexplicable.
This narrative mirrors the situation in reality in the United States during the time of Rand's conception and writing of Atlas Shrugged: The laissez faire faction of the ruling class had lost decisively to the Keynesian, consumerist faction after the Great Depression. Even the post-war Republican party remained mostly Keynesian through Richard Nixon's presidency. The laissez faire faction, without any significant political representation, was struggling for its very identity and life within the capitalist ruling class.
The working class is barely even mentioned in Atlas Shrugged. When the union opposes Dagny Taggart's plan to operate the railroad to Colorado made of "untested" Rearden Metal, her workers support her to a man: the only workers who don't actually show up to volunteer to work on the new railroad are the ones presently working. The "communist" regime at the Twentieth Century Motor Company is imposed from "without" by those who have inherited* instead of earned their ownership of the company. Rand explicitly notes that the workers' "democracy" the new owners impose is in truth manipulated; the workers themselves are helpless pawns of the new order. (Indeed, Rand's attitude towards democracy in general is at best ambiguous.)
*Of course, Dagny Taggart and Francisco d'Anconia develop the "right" sort of values, so Rand does not consider their own inherited wealth to be problematic.
Indeed, Taggart Transcontinental appears unable to function at all without Dagny Taggart's superhuman micromanagement. This general incompetence is in part due to John Galt's sabotage, but we know from John Galt's call for the competent people remaining in society to save themselves during the collapse of civilization that Galt has not recruited everyone competent in his strike, merely the "cream of the crop", mostly (but not exclusively) those who are both at the highest level of executive management as well as having direct ownership of their companies. Rand attributes labor unrest to the action of the union leaders, divorced from the actual working class they purport to represent.
The conflict in Atlas Shrugged is clearly between factions of the capitalist ruling class. The primary antagonists are James Taggart, president and majority owner of Taggart Transcontinental; Lillian Rearden (Hank Rearden's wife), who appears to be "old money"*, Orren Boyle, head of Associated Steel and Hank Rearden's business competitor, and of course Gerald and Ivy Starnes, who inherit the Twentieth Century Motor Company. Even the minor antagonists are upper-middle-class or ruling class, with the exception of Balph Eubank, whose economic failure makes his social influence inexplicable.
*If not actually, then by adoption. Although supposedly a "self-made" man, Rand portrays Hank Rearden's mother and brother with the habits and attitudes of "decadent" old money. They in no way resemble, positively or negatively, the usual characteristics of parvenus or their hangers-on.
This narrative mirrors the situation in reality in the United States during the time of Rand's conception and writing of Atlas Shrugged: The laissez faire faction of the ruling class had lost decisively to the Keynesian, consumerist faction after the Great Depression. Even the post-war Republican party remained mostly Keynesian through Richard Nixon's presidency. The laissez faire faction, without any significant political representation, was struggling for its very identity and life within the capitalist ruling class.
Positive feedback
Consumer demand* is subject to a positive feedback loop: When consumer demand is high, there's incentive to produce to fulfill that demand. Increased production causes increased employment; as employers compete for labor, wages rise, further increasing consumer demand. Likewise, when demand falls, decreased demand causes decreased production, which decreases employment, further decreasing demand.
The risk is not just that a too-small stimulus will fail to restore consumer demand quickly enough, as most liberal capitalist economists are predicting. The big risk is that a too-small stimulus will fail to break the positive feedback loop decreasing consumer demand and unemployment.
This positive feedback loop has actually been going on for a decade: demand has been shifted from wages to stocks and then home prices: there's no longer any asset class to bubble to socially justify demand. The Randian faction of the capitalist ruling class realized it was easier to gain power and advantage over other factions not by creating new value, but by appropriating the value that had been "unjustly" allocated to consumers. This strategy is obviously poor in terms of mutual benefit, but it's obviously excellent in terms of individual benefit, and it seems that the Randian faction will indeed prevail over the productive faction.
Given the eliminationist tendencies of the Randian faction, we can expect widespread misery, poverty and probably outright oppression as they "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate... [Panic and depression] will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.*" Presumably the "less competent" people will be liquidated as well, perhaps literally.
The "death spiral" won't cease until popular misery forces radical change. As a communist, much as I might in theory like radical change, keep in mind that I'm a revolutionary communist not because I "want" to be, but because I believe I have no other moral choice. With all its weaknesses and outright evils, capitalism is at least the devil we know, and any revolution entails such uncertainty that no moral person should face its possibility without fear and trembling worthy of Kierkegaard or Lovecraft.
People, who are not very rational to begin with, are at their least rational during panic and crisis. The same conditions that provide the opportunity for real positive change also provide the opportunity for horrors undreamed of by more civilized societies.
I don't think it's all that morally wrong to preserve and reform capitalism as best you can; it's just that I can't figure out a way you can succeed. But when the inevitability of its collapse becomes apparent to you, I hope you will renounce the fascists and the Randians, even though they will promise material rewards undreamed for the trivial price of a bullet in some useless child's brain.
I hope instead you will join us, the communists, fighting imperfectly but as best we can for real positive change for the benefit all humanity.
*Demand is the socially constructed justification for fulfilling one's economic desires.
The risk is not just that a too-small stimulus will fail to restore consumer demand quickly enough, as most liberal capitalist economists are predicting. The big risk is that a too-small stimulus will fail to break the positive feedback loop decreasing consumer demand and unemployment.
This positive feedback loop has actually been going on for a decade: demand has been shifted from wages to stocks and then home prices: there's no longer any asset class to bubble to socially justify demand. The Randian faction of the capitalist ruling class realized it was easier to gain power and advantage over other factions not by creating new value, but by appropriating the value that had been "unjustly" allocated to consumers. This strategy is obviously poor in terms of mutual benefit, but it's obviously excellent in terms of individual benefit, and it seems that the Randian faction will indeed prevail over the productive faction.
Given the eliminationist tendencies of the Randian faction, we can expect widespread misery, poverty and probably outright oppression as they "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate... [Panic and depression] will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.*" Presumably the "less competent" people will be liquidated as well, perhaps literally.
*Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, ca. 1931
The "death spiral" won't cease until popular misery forces radical change. As a communist, much as I might in theory like radical change, keep in mind that I'm a revolutionary communist not because I "want" to be, but because I believe I have no other moral choice. With all its weaknesses and outright evils, capitalism is at least the devil we know, and any revolution entails such uncertainty that no moral person should face its possibility without fear and trembling worthy of Kierkegaard or Lovecraft.
People, who are not very rational to begin with, are at their least rational during panic and crisis. The same conditions that provide the opportunity for real positive change also provide the opportunity for horrors undreamed of by more civilized societies.
I don't think it's all that morally wrong to preserve and reform capitalism as best you can; it's just that I can't figure out a way you can succeed. But when the inevitability of its collapse becomes apparent to you, I hope you will renounce the fascists and the Randians, even though they will promise material rewards undreamed for the trivial price of a bullet in some useless child's brain.
I hope instead you will join us, the communists, fighting imperfectly but as best we can for real positive change for the benefit all humanity.
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Another bold prediction
I predict that the latest seasonally adjusted underemployment rate (U-6) available at the time of the 2012 election will be at or above 17%. The seasonally adjusted standard unemployment rate (U-3) will be above 9% unless a lot of discouraged workers have stopped looking for work.
Furthermore, the median income at the time of the electionshould will be down slightly from now, and income inequality will be greater.
The Obama administration is backing off of both health care reform as well as economic stimulus. This is precisely the error FDR made in the mid-1930s, and the result will probably be similar: something like a double-dip recession. It's much easier for the capitalist ruling class to manipulate the GDP (they ran it up in 2008 selling each other bad loans), so the telling metrics will be unemployment and income distribution.
Paradoxically, all of these statistics will result in a win for the Republican party in the 2012 elections. Then things will really go to shit.
Update: This prediction is based in part on Paul Krugman's post:
Update 2: From what I'm reading, it looks like the Bush tax cuts Krugman refers to may well be made permanent, leading to additional fiscal tightening. (More precisely severely retarding fiscal loosening.)
Furthermore, the median income at the time of the election
The Obama administration is backing off of both health care reform as well as economic stimulus. This is precisely the error FDR made in the mid-1930s, and the result will probably be similar: something like a double-dip recession. It's much easier for the capitalist ruling class to manipulate the GDP (they ran it up in 2008 selling each other bad loans), so the telling metrics will be unemployment and income distribution.
Paradoxically, all of these statistics will result in a win for the Republican party in the 2012 elections. Then things will really go to shit.
Update: This prediction is based in part on Paul Krugman's post:
There is a lot of near-term fiscal tightening built into the budget, mainly because of the fading out of the stimulus, but reinforced by the freeze and the expected wind-down of Iraq/Afghanistan and the planned expiration of Bush high-end tax cuts. All of this will take place in the face of high unemployment, with the Fed unable or unwilling to take offsetting action. 1937!Unlike FDR, Obama is not going to have any room to maneuver. He's going to trot out the old "Hope and Change" bullshit, which will stink on ice by 2012. All the Republicans have to say is, "We're not ineffectual half-assed whiny babies like the Democrats. Elect us and we'll purge the rottenness and corruption from American society." Americans will eat it up in 2012 just like the Germans ate it up in 1939.
Update 2: From what I'm reading, it looks like the Bush tax cuts Krugman refers to may well be made permanent, leading to additional fiscal tightening. (More precisely severely retarding fiscal loosening.)
Exposure to luxury can alter decision making
Exposure to luxury can alter decision making:
We can therefore plausibly expect people who enjoy actual luxury to have even less concern about the well-being of others. As octogalore puts it: "[T]he fact that things are this way is horribly, despicably unfair. And maybe so. But that’s how reality works..." God forbid we should actually take responsibility for correcting unfairness (unless that unfairness affects us personally).
I've got mine, Jack, go fuck yourself.
The mere exposure to luxury goods can have a corrosive effect on decision-making that pushes individuals to put their interests over the interests of others [individual interest at the expense of others' over mutual self-interest], according to a Harvard Business School study. ...
The students who viewed luxury goods were significantly more likely than the second group to endorse production of a new car that might pollute the environment, launch a new software with bugs, or market a video game that might induce violence, according to the study.
We can therefore plausibly expect people who enjoy actual luxury to have even less concern about the well-being of others. As octogalore puts it: "[T]he fact that things are this way is horribly, despicably unfair. And maybe so. But that’s how reality works..." God forbid we should actually take responsibility for correcting unfairness (unless that unfairness affects us personally).
I've got mine, Jack, go fuck yourself.
Monday, February 01, 2010
What is Naturalism?
Larry Moran inquires as to the difference between methodological naturalism and philosophical (or metaphysical) naturalism.
The biggest issue, however, is that we don't have a rigorous, precise and most of all consistent, definition of any sort of "naturalism", methodological, intrinsic, qualified or otherwise.
There are at least three definitions I'm aware of. (I've applied entirely ad hoc, arbitrary labels.)
Nonteleological Naturalism is fuzzy; we don't understand teleology very well. Furthermore, if we provisionally define "teleology" as "the sort of thing that human beings do (whatever that might happen to be)" it's fairly obvious that teleology is operative within the physical universe. It is both unjustified and unnecessary to assume the universe is fundamentally nonteleological; we can instead draw conclusions about fundamental teleology or nonteleology from empirical evidence.
Internal Naturalism is in one sense incoherent: one definition of "universe" is "everything that exists"; if a god exists, it is by definition part of the universe or the universe itself.
Adding a qualifier and talking about just the "physical" universe doesn't help much: what precisely does one mean by "physical" in this context? Furthermore, even if we could adequately define "physical", an interventionist god would by definition have to have to leave some sort of physical "fingerprint", which would then be by definition within the domain of science (and from which we might draw conclusions about the "part" of God outside the "physical" universe.)
This leaves us (assuming there are no alternative definitions) with Epistemic Naturalism: science can deal only with falsifiable theories (note that a statement that is confirmable is also falsifiable).
This definition has the added advantage that there seem to be statements — even seemingly prosaic statements — that seem semantically propositional (i.e. truth-apt, could be true or false) that talk about existence, and that are not falsifiable: statements about "the matrix", the assertion that not the real Mona Lisa but a perfect replica hangs in The Louvre, etc. The existence of unfalsifiable ontological propositions injects "philosophical life" into the discussion: we have real, constructable, apparently comprehensible sentences about the world that at least seem to have truth value, and which science seems to exclude a priori from consideration.
The biggest issue, however, is that we don't have a rigorous, precise and most of all consistent, definition of any sort of "naturalism", methodological, intrinsic, qualified or otherwise.
There are at least three definitions I'm aware of. (I've applied entirely ad hoc, arbitrary labels.)
- Nonteleological Naturalism: the universe is fundamentally not intelligent, sentient or conscious.
- Internal Naturalism: all scientific explanations should reference causes "inside" the universe.
- Epistemic Naturalism: science can only establish empirically falsifiable explanations by trying and failing to falsify them.
Nonteleological Naturalism is fuzzy; we don't understand teleology very well. Furthermore, if we provisionally define "teleology" as "the sort of thing that human beings do (whatever that might happen to be)" it's fairly obvious that teleology is operative within the physical universe. It is both unjustified and unnecessary to assume the universe is fundamentally nonteleological; we can instead draw conclusions about fundamental teleology or nonteleology from empirical evidence.
Internal Naturalism is in one sense incoherent: one definition of "universe" is "everything that exists"; if a god exists, it is by definition part of the universe or the universe itself.
Adding a qualifier and talking about just the "physical" universe doesn't help much: what precisely does one mean by "physical" in this context? Furthermore, even if we could adequately define "physical", an interventionist god would by definition have to have to leave some sort of physical "fingerprint", which would then be by definition within the domain of science (and from which we might draw conclusions about the "part" of God outside the "physical" universe.)
This leaves us (assuming there are no alternative definitions) with Epistemic Naturalism: science can deal only with falsifiable theories (note that a statement that is confirmable is also falsifiable).
This definition has the added advantage that there seem to be statements — even seemingly prosaic statements — that seem semantically propositional (i.e. truth-apt, could be true or false) that talk about existence, and that are not falsifiable: statements about "the matrix", the assertion that not the real Mona Lisa but a perfect replica hangs in The Louvre, etc. The existence of unfalsifiable ontological propositions injects "philosophical life" into the discussion: we have real, constructable, apparently comprehensible sentences about the world that at least seem to have truth value, and which science seems to exclude a priori from consideration.
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