First comment

I got my first comment since re-re-(re?-)opening the blog and re-enabling comments. It was totally stupid and easily rejected.

If you actually have something to say, something within spittin' distance of rationality, I'll probably publish it. But I'm just not interested in stupidity, especially arrogant stupidity.

Sunsara Taylor vs. Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago

According to the information I've received, the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago (EHSC) invited Sunsara Taylor, a writer for Revolution Magazine to speak on the topic of Morality Without Gods. This topic features prominently in Bob Avakian's recent book, Away With All Gods, which Sunsara has been promoting. Her invitation was subsequently cancelled, apparently because of ideological differences with some of EHSC's prominent members.

According to Sunsara:

Sunday night, October 18, less than two weeks before the program, I received an email letter from Anil Kashyap (copy attached) notifying me that some in the program committee are trying to cancel my talk.

According to Sunsara, the organizers felt that her presentation was "not what they had expected" and somehow objectionable because it refers to Christian Fascists. They also bizarrely allege that her talk does not "look anything like" a discussion about "how moral, ethical behavior need not depend on a theistic outlook."

I've also received a private communication that quotes the co-chair of the EHSC Program Committee, Prof. Anil Kashyap, as saying:

A talk that claims morality is inconsistent with a global economy is nonsense. The first order fact that cannot be ignored is that the greatest anti-poverty program in history is the growth in China over the last 30 years. That was only possible because of globalism. That transformation has lots of problems, but more starving and desperate people have been lifted up faster than ever in human history.

Whether one agrees with Prof. Kashyap or Ms. Taylor, this cancellation has the appearance of outright censorship.

I cannot speak for the EHSC or its membership, but I can say that if these kind of shenanigans occurred in an organization I was a member of, I would be outraged and call bullshit in the loudest possible voice — even if I did not know Sunsara personally or have a great deal of sympathy with her position.

Sigh... sometimes an atheist is a person with one fewer stupid belief than a theist.

A Google search has not revealed any position or explanation by the EHSC.

Economics Links

Any good communist or socialist should, in my not-in-the-slightest-bit-humble opinion, have a good basic understanding of capitalist economics. We must, of course, know the enemy, but slso the capitalists really are running the world, and reality does bite back. There are huge theological distortions in capitalist economics — capitalist economists are as much propagandists justifying the position of the ruling class as they are scientists — but they do need to keep a global economy running and they cannot retreat into pure fantasy even as far as religions. (And even religions have to have some connection to the realities of human psychology to retain believers.) Always keeping a sharp eye out for theological distortions (which we can do not on an ideological but on a scientific basis), we can still learn much about human economic behavior from capitalist economists, especially the relatively liberal capitalist economists.

You should, at the very least, read:

• Paul Krugman
• Brad DeLong
• More Brad DeLong)
• Mark Thoma

and follow their links. I'll have more recommendations as I sort out my reading list.

Some interesting recent articles:

• Financial Times: Long Road to Regulation* (via Brad DeLong)
• The Political Economy of Recovery and Rebalancing (also via Brad DeLong)
• Fair Prices? (via Mark Thoma)
• Labor's Share (also via Mark Thoma)

*To read Financial Times articles in full without registration, search the headline (i.e. "Long Road to Regulation") in Google News and click on the link from there.

Quotation of the Day

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

— Michael Shermer

Commodity Relations, part 1

The two essential features of capitalism are:

1. The dominance of commodity relations
2. The social, political and legal privilege held by the owners of capital

Commodity relations are a specific kind of economic relations, a particular way that people socially relate to each other regarding the use of purposeful human activity to create the "stuff" that we need for material survival and enjoyment.

Under commodity relations, each individual typically produces one or two commodities, such as hats, shoes, coats, wheat, rice, houses, computer programs, movies, and so forth. Individuals then exchange those commodities with other individuals. Furthermore, this exchange is "hostile", in that both individuals in any exchange are trying to get the "best" deal at the expense of each other (thus distinguishing commodity relations from the exchange of gifts).

Commodity relations existed before the capitalist era: people have exchanged the products of their labor since time immemorial, but under capitalism commodity relations are the dominant form of economic relations. People exchanged things under feudalism, but most labor was directed towards individual self-sufficiency (each individual directly consumed most of the products of his or her own labor, without exchange) and the dominant form of social economic activity was paying tribute to the feudal aristocracy and nobility, without a direct and immediate exchange of compensating commodities.

Similarly, although commodity relations dominate under capitalism, not all economic relations are commodity relations. If you do your own housework, that's labor (human activity that's not inherently desirable, but is purposefully and effectively employed towards a desirable end) but you don't exchange the product of your labor with others. (Of course, hiring someone to clean your house is a commodity relation.) Likewise, taxes are not a commodity relation; the benefits of taxation are indirect and deferred, not direct and immediate.

But still, under capitalism, most people spend the majority of their working day producing a single good or service, which they exchange for money, which they exchange for all the various commodities they need for survival and the enjoyment of life. In order to understand capitalism, we have to understand commodity relations in some detail.

Communism for Dummies

I want to articulate the case for communism as clearly and simply as I can.

Anyone who wants to make changes, especially radical, revolutionary change, must first answer the question: what's wrong with the status quo? Why not keep what we have, or at most fix what we have, instead of making radical changes?

We are in the middle of a world-wide depression. Unemployment is almost 10%, counting only those people actively looking for work, or about 17%, counting everyone un- or under-employed except voluntarily (e.g. retirees). Millions of people are facing poverty and the ruin of their productive lives. This poverty and hardship has clearly not been caused by some catastrophe — earthquake, hurricane, plague, drought, war, insurrection — that has somehow diminished our real wealth. We still have the same factories, the same farms, the same skills, the same labor power that we had just a few years ago when we all (at least people in the professional-managerial middle class, and a substantial percentage of wage-laborers) thought we were doing pretty well.

Nothing has changed between then and now except the behavior of the owners of capital.

There are also more persistent issues that any person who cares about the well-being of all human beings must label as at least objectionable, and often intolerable.

Tens of millions of people, most of whom work full time, have no health insurance at all, no access to routine health care; they have access only to emergency care, the most expensive form and least efficient mode of health care. Millions more have inadequate health insurance: three-quarters of all people who go bankrupt due to medical bills have health insurance.

Billions of more people around the world live in abject poverty, with hundreds of millions of people (perhaps a billion) facing malnutrition and starvation right now.

We are currently engaged in two wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the United States our ordinary political liberties, supposedly enshrined in the Constitution have been drastically curtailed, by both Republican and Democratic presidents and legislatures, with cooperation of the Supreme Court. Even president Obama, with historic popularity and a creepy, almost religious adoration among liberals and progressives (but nowhere near as extreme as the very creepy, explicitly religious adoration of George W. Bush among conservatives), has done little to restore habeus corpus, halt indefinite detention without trial, punish torturers, or extricate us from our wars of aggression. And the "war on (some people who use some) drugs" has made a mockery of the Fourth Amendment for the past thirty years.

(And how did a capitalist "democracy" ever elect a fool such as George W. Bush, a monster such as Dick Cheney, and a bunch of heartless bastards such as the Republican congresses of the early 21st century?)

There are many other problems, both here in the US and abroad: racism, sexism, a ballooning prison population, religious fundamentalism both Christian and Islamic, genocide in the Sudan. The list is depressingly long.

And, of course, with global warming we are staring an imminent world-wide ecological catastrophe right in the face.

Clearly the status quo is broken. It must at least be fixed, somehow. Can it?

The "conservative" answer is: capitalism not broken. 10% nominal (or 17% real) unemployment is just not a problem. It's right and just that tens of millions of working people are without health insurance. These people do not deserve jobs, they do not deserve health care, they do not deserve life itself; why can't they just lie down and die? A billion people starving is perhaps regrettable, but it's not the fault of capitalism or the capitalist ruling class, and they can't fix it. And there's nothing at all wrong with wars of aggression; after all, as Michael Ledeen famously asserted, "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."

The "liberal" and "progressive" answer is: capitalism can be fixed. After all, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic congress fixed it once in the 1930s and 40s, n'est-ce pas? But if we fixed it then, why didn't it stay fixed?

The socialist and communist answer is that the same structural and systematic features of capitalism that made it valuable in the 18th and 19th centuries, and even (if you hand-wave over two world wars and multitude of other sins) valuable in the 20th century are precisely the features that are either causing the problems of today or blocking effective solutions.

I have to make two cases: First that capitalism is not just implemented imperfectly, not just subject to human foibles, but inherently and structurally flawed. Second, I have to offer a reasonable and systematic alternative that addresses the inherent structural flaws in capitalism. Furthermore, this alternative system must have plausible mechanisms in place to prevent the potential of catastrophic failure in any radically new plan. I believe I can make both cases persuasively to any intellectually honest and caring person, without requiring either a "religious" conversion or massive historical or theoretical study.

Utilitarianism and intellectual dishonesty

This is what I'm talking about: A position so far wrong that mere mistake fails as a plausible explanation; the only conclusion one can come to is that an academic philosophy student is either being intentionally intellectually dishonest, or (more probably) simply has no conception whatsoever of what intellectual honesty actually means.

I'm speaking of Rob Jubb of Consider Phlebas, soundly thrashing a tired straw man version of "crude" Utilitarianism. There is no plausible conclusion but that Jubb is a liar or an idiot.

We can see his intellectual dishonesty in his attribution of "crude" Utilitiarianism to the article he responds to, This is the greatest good by Richard Layard. First, Jubb says,

Let us do him the charity of assuming that he actually means what he says. Presumably then he thinks it noble to discount the suffering caused by injustices, like say rape, against any pleasures that those who inflict them gain...

Generally, when you preface a comment with "assuming he means what he says" you should criticize something the author actually says. But of course Layard does not actually say that it is noble to discount the suffering caused by injustices. This subtle but vicious misrepresentation ought to decisively discredit Jubb's intellectual honesty.

Layard makes only one point that might support Jubb's critique, if you squint and ignore the context and any charitable interpretation of the actual text (making entirely hypocritical Jubb's comment that he's doing Layard a "charity" by "assuming he means what Jubb wants him to be saying he says):

[E]ven some sympathisers prefer the term "flourishing" to "happiness". Why is this? I fear it reflects a streak of puritanism – that happiness ought to come from some sources rather than others. But in the world's great literature, people discuss whether they are happy, not whether they are flourishing.

Saying that happiness is happiness, regardless of its source is not to say that suffering is not suffering; by refusing to discount the happiness (to use Jubb's example) of a child molester as authentic happiness, one does not thereby discount the suffering of the child. Jubb is criticizing a position that Layard does not actually take, and has the dishonest gall to assume he's criticizing what Layard actually says.

It is in fact true: a child molester is indeed authentically happy when he's molesting a child; it's moronic to believe otherwise. The utilitarian critique of child molestation is based precisely on the suffering caused to the child, not on the "authenticity" or legitimacy of the molester's happiness. More importantly, all serious proponents of utilitarianism have recognized conflicts between the happiness of one person and the suffering of another; addressing such conflicts is the meat of utilitarianism. Jubb is not only criticizing a view that Layard does not take, he's criticizing a view that no one (at least no one with a triple-digit IQ) takes.

But this is not just about one lying moron. I see this approach all the time, even (to a lesser degree) in philosophers I ordinarily like and respect. There's rarely attempt to get at the truth, especially subtle truths; I see only an endless series of legalistic wrangling, trying to bend — sometimes to the breaking point — the opponent's meaning to discredit his position. This is yet another rhetorical fallacy, an ad hominem fallacy: the flaw in an opposing argument does not support one's own. Much worse, of course, when one, as does Jubb, manufacture the supposed "flaw" out of whole cloth.

If any academic philosophers I've talked with are reading this, yes, I mean you: I have yet to meet a single academic philosopher who actually cares about the truth. They say they care, but this concern is at best superficial and usually hypocritical. Even if they (unlike Jubb) do not commit egregious, contemptible sins* against intellectual honesty, they are all too willing to tolerate others' dishonesty, and rebuke any direct and explicit criticism of dishonesty and egregious bullshit.

*The truth, of course, has immense utilitarian value.

The same is true in politics and social commentary. It's not that there's honest disagreement among the moderate and radical left about how we can best make a society where people can be happy. The discourse simply never gets there. The truth be damned: it's all about defending the doctrine du jour, come what may, and scoring points against the heretics, infidels, and iconoclasts; the closer the opponent's position to one's own, the more vociferous the criticism and egregious the offenses against truth and plain, ordinary honesty.

Is it any wonder I just don't give a shit anymore about philosophy or politics? Fuck it. If you do sincerely and deeply care about the truth, you don't need my superficial and trivial commentary to learn it. But if people don't realize only the truth will make them happy, if even some educated people such as Jubb resist the truth with every fiber of their being (and the rest simply don't care), who am I to force it on them?

Patently infantile

The whole thing [religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.

— Sigmund Freud

Famous dead white guys

There is a hallowed tradition in certain scholarly circles of simply quoting famous dead white guys who agree with you in order to lend your words some authority that reason cannot bestow on them...

— PZ Myers

Testing

trying to restore the search function.