Last night, the President announced a new twelve year commitment to the maintence of U. S. forces in Afghanistan. From the very beginning of the 2008 presidential primary campaign, Obama has been wrong on Afghanistan, and at every step along the way he has compounded that mistake. He had the opportunity to reverse course after the in-depth strategic review he ordered, and he chose instead to escalate America's military involvement. Despite the total failure of the announced goals of that escalation, he has now made what is essentially an imperial commitment in perpetuity. As Tallyrand said of Napoleon's decision to execute the Duc d'Engien, this is worse than a crime. It is a blunder. Even if you endorse America's imperial foreign policy, which I have been arguing against for more than fifty years, this is a mistake. Because America is so rich and so powerful, it is not a fatal mistake [save for all those who will die as a consequence of it], but it is a mistake nonetheless.
Obama has received much counsel opposing this sort of Afghan involvement, so this is clearly his deliberate decision. Nor do I think it is based on a politial calculation [like his obvious decision not to "evolve" into support for same-sex marriage until after the election.] He really believes this is in America's national interest, which it is his job to promote, and he is just wrong.
Since 1959 at least, I have been publicly arguing for a non-imperial foreign policy -- for a foreign policy commitment to the advancement of progressive interests around the world. I will not repeat those arguments here. For half a century and more there has been a bi-partisan consensus on the fundamental direction of American foreign and military policy that has won the support across the political spectrum of every major American political figure, from the Kennedys to the Bushes. I have long since despaired of ever seeing that policy changed.
Naturally, all those who oppose my decision to work for Obama's re-election will now ask how I can possibly do so in light of this decision, and the policy on which it rests. My answer is the same: Consider the alternative. Do not be deluded by the non-interventionist stance of marginal figures like Ron Paul. The Republican Party is as committed to the bi-partisan imperial policy as the Democratic Party, and on the evidence of the past dozen years, considerably more destructive in its implementation of that policy.
If this decision, or all the previous decisions, persuades you to disengage from electoral politics and commit your energies to other projects that advance progressive interests, I honor and respect that. But do not imagine that by doing so you are somehow weakening the grip of imperialism on America.
Wednesday, 2 May 2012
A CRITIQUE OF KEYNES PART TWO
Originally, as we have just seen, economists presumed that all indices, including rents, were determined by the interplay of objective factors (facility of production, fertility of land, and so forth) as these are taken up into the rational calculations of profit-maximizing agents. The calculability of economic magnitudes -- the possibility, that is, of deducing the magnitude of changes in prices, rents, wages, or profits that would result from a change in a technique of production, say, -- depends completely on this assumption of rational self-interest. In order to determine the effect of an improvement in the technique for producing corn, for example, we must assume that corn producers will adopt the new technique unhesitatingly once they calculate that it is more profitable; that consumers will bid down the price of corn as soon as there is excess supply in the market; that producers in less profitable lines will shift their capital as soon as possible to the corn sector, where higher profits are being made; and that landlords will readily rent out their land for as much as or as little as they can get.
Once we introduce Mill’s factor of custom, however, all such deductions become in principle impossible. If the rental for land depends in part upon custom and habit, what will be the effect on rents of an improvement in the techniques for producing corn? If custom is not a factor, the answer is simple: rents will rise. With a little modern algebra, one can even calculate exactly how much they will rise. But if custom is a factor, there is really no telling. The most we can possibly say is that if custom holds sway, rents may change not at all. If competition is the sole determinant, the full effect will be felt. Somewhere between the two lies the answer.
The value of k, obviously, cannot be calculated by the sort of a priori reasoning on which classical theory rests. In order to put a value to k, it would be necessary for us to collect large amounts of data from actual land-rentals over long periods of time. We would then have to make a number of simplifying assumptions, such as that all renters are affected by custom to the same degree, that the effect of custom is reasonably constant over time, and so on.
Now, it is very important to understand that this something called custom which is thereby introduced into our model has an ontological status if you will permit me some heavy philosophical artillery, fundamentally different from that of the rational self-interest underlying competition. “Custom” is not that name of a principle of rational choice, nor is it even the name of a stable, identifiable non-rational psychological element. “Custom” is simply a catch-all title for the sum-total of all the deviations from rational self-interest that might cause ground-rents to be something other than what the pure theory of competition dictates. Some landlords may fail to adjust rents because of laziness, others because of stubbornness, others for religious or family reasons, and others still because of bonds of baronial loyalty to the peasantry. Obviously, a wide variety of historical, social, economic, and cultural forces may manifest themselves under the heading of custom, with economic consequences of quite varied sorts.
With the marginalist revolution of the 1870’s, based on the substitution of subjective utility for objective technology as the fundamental determinant of price, all hope is given up of a theoretically a priori determination of economic magnitudes. Individual consumers are assumed to have consistent preferences among alternative bundles of commodities, but these preferences -- summarized under the heading “utility functions” -- are asvaried, as idiosyncratic, and as unfathomable as any subjective psychological phenomena can be. Economists have sought to overcome the anarchy of subjective preference by a number of heroic assumptions about the general mathematical shape of individual indices of satisfaction -- assumptions that bear no particular relation to reality. The result is an elegant structure of microeconomic theory -- what is now called the theory of consumer behavior -- whose principal virtue is its ability to support the ideological claim that capitalism is both efficient and fair. What has been lost, however, is the ability to relate the objective facts of technology and production in some direct way to the structure of prices, wages, profits, and rents through which the social product is distributed among the major classes of the society. It is in fact quite striking that the original theoretical model of equilibrium put forward by Leon Walras is actually a model of pure barter or exchange, in which production does not figure at all. Only after he has established his major theoretical propositions for the case of an exchange economy in which the goods being exchanged are simply posited, or given, at the outset, can Walras move on to extend his theory to the case of production.
I do not propose today to review Keynes’ theory. Rather, I wish to call attention to certain of its foundations which tend to be lost sight of in the complications and elaborations of macroeconomic model-building. Essentially what Keynes does is to extend and generalize Mill’s notion of custom by introducing into his analysis of the behavior of capitalists and workers the idea of subjective preference and subjective estimates of probability.
Keynes then offers a mathematical expression of this so-called “law” which makes it look quite impressive and objective, but obviously we have here nothing more than an ad hoc stipulation.
Tuesday, 1 May 2012
A CRITIQUE OF KEYNES PART ONE
Herewith the first part of as lecture I gave at Williams College a quarter of century ago. Although much has happened since, the central thesis is, I believe, even more pertinent now than it was then. This is the first of three parts.
A Critique of Keynes
The profession of economics – or political economy, as it was once called – has gone through a succession of stages of confidence and self-doubt during the past two centuries. The triumphant reception of the elegant and powerful theories of David Ricardo in the first quarter of the nineteenth century gave way to increasing doubt and confusion as the century wore on, both because of the internal theoretical inadequacies of Ricardo’s principles and because of a succession of increasingly violent business cycles of boom and bust which threatened both social peace and the continued growth of capitalist enterprise. The new marginalist theories of the last third of the nineteenth century laid the theoretical foundations for a moral justification of capitalism, as set forth most famously in the work of J.B.Clark, and also for the scientific conclusion that in a properly functioning free market, there could be no sizeable long-term involuntary unemployment. The great depression after the first world war strained belief in this bit of economic science to the breaking point, for as the depression grew deeper and unemployment in the United States, for example, exceeded a quarter of the work force, it became more and more difficult to maintain that this violent deviation from rational, efficient full-employment was simply a short term frictional imperfection or a perverse consequence of sub-optional collective bargaining.
The great test of Keynesian theory came with the end of the second world war. In the United States and Western Europe, the experiment was made of capitalism with the state as a macro-economic governor. For a quarter of a century, the theory seemed to work with brilliant success. Unemployment was low, growth was steady and rapid, inflation was kept to an acceptable level and the inevitable business contractions were softened so as to be nothing more than pauses on the way to ever greater growth. It was during this period – the golden age of the profession of economics – that Nobel prizes began to be distributed to these physicians of the body politic. Clearly, ideology and politics had given way to science.
Alas, the reputation of economics, like the housing and automobile markets, has soared to ever greater heights, only to plunge to new depths. As unemployment creeps toward ten percent and the United States, once proud leader in per capita gross national product, dips to tenth place behind even Italy, once the weakest partner in the Atlantic Alliance, it is perhaps time to stand back and reflect a bit on what has gone wrong.
L et me begin my story almost two centuries ago, with the classical vision of a capitalist economy as a free market system in which the pattern of prices, of capital accumulation, of distribution, and of growth emerges as the unintended consequence of the interactions of rationally self-interested workers, consumers, and entrepreneurs. This vision, first adumbrated by Adam Smith and brought to rigorous fulfillment in David Ricardo’s PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AND TAXATION, rested upon a number of simplifying assumptions, each of which in a different way made it possible for Ricardo and his followers to draw powerful theoretical conclusions from the premises of perfect competition, rational self-interested, and a free market.
T he assumptions fall into three categories: behavioral assumptions about the criteria or guidelines followed by the several classes of agents in their economic decisions; knowledge assumptions about the kind, degree, and accuracy of the information available to economic agents; and a rather special assumption about the nature of money.
The behavioral assumptions are these: capitalists were assumed to be motivated entirely by a rationally self-interested pursuit of profit, which they measured in monetary terms. Confronted by a choice among several alternatives, capitalists could by and large be counted on to choose the most profitable. Furthermore, capitalists were conceived as perfect accumulators, so to speak. “Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets!” said Marx of the capitalist class. In effect, what this meant was that the total private consumption of the capitalist class was so small, in comparison with the aggregate output of the economy as a whole, that it could, for purposes of economic calculation, be treated as effectively zero. In part, of course, this assumption was justified by the relative smallness of the capitalist class as a group. Even a high standard of living per capitalist does not add up to much in the way of aggregate consumption. But more important was the behavioral assumption that capitalists, for whatever reasons, were driven by a desire to accumulate capital as rapidly as possible. To this end, they reinvested almost their entire profits in an expanded scale of operations. The classicals and Marx viewed this process of reinvestment as the primary engine of economic growth.
The landlords – who loom larger in the writings of Smith and Ricardo than in those of Marx – are by contrast conceived as grasshoppers, as perfect consumers. They save nothing, and support a large population of unproductive servants. As a consequence, of course, the portion of profits diverted to them as rentals drops out of the economy and plays no role in the process of growth.
The effect of these behavioral assumptions, you will immediately realize, is to make certain theoretical calculations extremely simple. The quantity of capital directed toward investment will be exactly equal to aggregate profits. Effective final demand for consumer goods will simply equal rents plus wages. And so forth. To an extent that is not always recognized, particularly by those outside the profession of economics, the distinctive a priori character of the reasoning of classical economic theory derives directly from these behavioral assumptions.
In addition to the behavioral assumption, classical theory makes a number of powerful simplifying knowledge assumptions. Consumers and sellers are presumed to have effectively a perfect knowledge of the market – what is being sold, where, and at what price. Entrepreneurs have perfect knowledge of the available production techniques, of the prices in factor markets, of the risks and constraints of different modes of production. Entrepreneurs know also how other entrepreneurs are doing, so that superprofits anywhere in the economy will fairly quickly draw interested investors to the favored sector. The result of these assumptions is to consign to the margins of the theory any consideration of market imperfections.
The familiar model of a self-correcting economy in dynamic equilibrium, efficiently allocating available resources in response to consumer demand, rests upon these twin pillars of simplifying behavioral assumptions and the assumption of perfect knowledge. The theorems of the classical model, and also those of the neo-classical model as well, can be proved only because the knowledge and behavior of economic actors is conceived in this manner.
The assumption of commodity-money, as it was called, an assumption which Marx shared, makes even modern capitalist economic transactions essentially sophisticated acts of barter. The grounding of the economic system in a physical base of commodity production is thereby rendered transparent, with the consequence that such phenomena is inflation, credit squeezes, the so-called money-illusion, and so forth can play no theoretical role in the analysis of the economy.
The classicals concluded from their simplified model that in the absence of distorting interventions from the central government, a capitalist economy would function efficiently in long-run equilibrium. Marx sought to demonstrate that capitalism, even in this extremely simple conception of it, is internally unstable and prone to operational breakdowns. But Marx shared with the classicals all of the behavioral and knowledge assumptions I have just sketched.
One of the first major departures from this simple model appears in John Stuart Mill’s PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, a book which, in many editions, was the leading economics textbook of the nineteenth century. In a little chapter entitled “Of Competition and Custom,” Mill introduces a new element into political economy which, I shall argue, destroys classical theory and eventually leads to an entirely different understanding of capitalism. It is completely typical of Mill that at one and the same time he understands the theoretical significance of what he is doing, and yet treats it as a mere adjustment to a theory which he is otherwise prepared to continue supporting. This paragraph, from the opening page of Mill's little chapter "Of Competition and Custom," is worth quoting:
"So far as rents, profits, wages, prices, are determined by competition, laws may be assigned for them. Assume competition to be their exclusive regulator, and principles of broad generality and scientific precision may be laid down, according to which they will be regulated. The political economist justly deems this his proper business: and as an abstract or hypothetical science, political economy cannot be required to do, and indeed cannot do, anything more. But it would be a great misconception of the actual course of human affairs, to suppose that competition exercises in fact this unlimited sway. I am not speaking of monopolies, either natural or artificial, or of any interferences of authority with the liberty of production or exchange. Such disturbing causes have always been allowed for by political economists. I speak of cases in which there is nothing to restrain competition; no hindrance to it either in the nature of the case or in artificial obstacles; yet in which the result is not determined by competition, but by custom or usage; competition either not taking place at all, or producing its effect in quite a different manner from that which is ordinarily assumed to be natural to it."
In his development of this idea, Mill emphasizes the customary character of groundrent, and also to a lesser degree of market prices for consumer goods. Now, I wish to suggest that once custom has been acknowledged as a determinant of any of the central economic variables, the entire edifice of classical economic theory must surely crumble. Before turning to the way in which Mill’s little point about custom has been expanded into a full-scale theoretical transformation of the classical theory, let me explore for a bit the significance of the elementary example Mill offers.
A Critique of Keynes
It is my purpose this afternoon to urge upon you the virtues of socialism. I shall argue that at the present time, the proper way to manage our economic life is through social planning founded upon collective management of the means of production. I shall not advance this proposition in the customary way, however, by telling you affecting tales of human suffering or by thundering at the injustices of the capitalist system. Human suffering we have aplenty in our society, and there is more than enough injustice to support a multitude of tirades. But I have charted a quieter course for myself this afternoon. I shall review with you something of the history and development of economic theory during the past two centuries; in order to show you why even the most sophisticated elaborations of modern neo-classical econometric model-building no longer serve to keep us from disastrous economic trouble. My argument will be quite simple and rather abstract, as benefits a philosopher, and there will be very little in it to puzzle or put off those among you who have not yet undertaken the study of economics. The heroes of my story are an Anglo-Jewish stock broker, an émigré from Soviet Russia, the son of an Italian jurist, and a left-Hegelian romantic philosopher -- which is to say, David Ricardo, Wassily Leontief, Piero Sraffa, and Karl Marx.
I begin by voicing what is, I hope, our shared agreement that the American economy is in a godawful mess. We will also agree, I hope, that the establishment of professional economists is no longer able to speak with solid, collective scientific confidence about the causes of our present disaster and the alternative possible cures. The present disarray of the economics profession is manifest in the self-doubts expressed in technical journals and presidential addresses to associations of economists, in the absence of consensus among those middle-of-the-road economists who are routinely looked to by both major parties for guidance and counsel, and in the bizarre emergence into respectability and even hegemony of such pseudo-science -- Voodoo economics, our vice-president once called it -- as supply-side theory.
With the macro-economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, the economics profession entered a new era. If Keynes was right, then it ought to be possible to salvage capitalism by managing the swings from boom to bust with counter-cyclical actions by the central government. The state, it seemed, was not to be confined under capitalism to the role of night-watchman. Instead, it had a much more important task to perform, as the regulator of effective demand in the service of full employment growth.
My message today is scarcely original, but it is, I believe, true. I shall argue that it is fundamentally irrational to permit the direction and shape of our economic life to emerge as the unplanned consequence of a myriad of private decisions. For reasons which are simple but theoretically quite fundamental, an industrial economy in which there is both population growth and technological innovation cannot be relied upon to grow in a crisis-free manner. What is more, efforts to shape or direct an essentially private economy by fiscal or monetary policies of the central government are doomed to fail. The only rational solution, I shall suggest at the end of my talk, is a thoroughly socialised economy in which the course of capital accumulation and allocation, as well as the pattern of distribution of the social product, is made the object of collective social choice.
Finally, the workers are presumed to live at or near the subsistence level, with the consequences that as a class they do not save. In the short run, to be sure, individual workers may succeed in saving enough to rise into the class of small entrepreneurs, and during the transitional periods of labour shortage wages may rise significantly above subsistence for large numbers of workers; but both Ricardo and Marx thought that over the long run, external pressures of population or unemployment would hold wages at a level at which worker saving could not regularly take place.
One final theoretical assumption underpins the classical theories, an assumption concerning the nature of money. It is an odd fact – odd, I might say, to the point of absurdity – that there is no place for real money as we know it either in the economic theories of the classicals or in the marginalist theories of modern economics. Ricardo conceived of money as simply one commodity among others – gold, of course, in the world he was looking at – whose value was determined, as was the value of every commodity, by the conditions of its production. An ounce of gold exchanged for so much linen, coal, or corn, he thought, because the conditions under which it was mined and refined bore a certain relation to the conditions under which linen was woven, coal dug, and corn grown. Just as a change in the techniques for growing corn would affect its value relative to other commodities, although in ways more complex than Ricardo had originally thought, so too a change in the techniques for mining and refining gold would alter the rate at which gold exchanged with other goods.
Monday, 30 April 2012
COMING TOMORROW
I have now finished proofreading and editing the paper I delivered a quarter of a century ago, called "A Critique of Keynes." It runs about 7500 words, which should make a three-part post. Interested readers will find it a companion piece to my essay, "The Future of Socialism."
ONE MORE TIME
My post, "Why Do I Work for Obama?" and the follow-up have triggered a substantial series of interesting, lengthy responses, for which I thank all of you. I am going to say a few more things and then move on.
Note, first, that I titled the original post "Why Do I Work for Obama?," not "Why Should You Work for Obama?" It was not my purpose to try to persuade people to do what I do. Indeed, the whole point of my comparison of social change to an avalanche was that there are endlessly many different ways of being political, and all of them are needed. So long as you are working on the left, not on the right, I salute and celebrate your efforts. You may be staffing a free food center in your neighborhood, or taking part in an Occupy protest, or handing out petitions for the recall of Governor Walker, or volunteering for an environmental organization, or donating money to a progressive candidate somewhere in America -- or even doing data entry for the Obama campaign.
Two things seem to me to be clear: First, all of these actions are praiseworthy; and Second, it will make virtually no measurable difference if you personally stop doing them. This second point needs a bit of elaborating. This is a world of seven billion people. The United States alone has more than three hundred million. Progressive social change [or regressive social change, for that matter] requires the actions of vast numbers of people. One might imagine that there are certain special individuals whose actions, all by themselves, have major consequences, such as an American president, or a politically active billionaire, or a Nelson Mandela or Rosa Parks. But that, I think, is a mistake. These seemingly special individuals derive their power from the beliefs, support, and acquiescence of millions of others. As Marx remarks in that wonderful footnote in Chapter One of Capital, "One man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the other hand, imagine that they are subjects because he is king." This truth is depressing because it means that no matter what you do, you alone will make scarcely any difference at all. That is why I emphasized the importance of choosing a form of political action that you enjoy. Lord knows, you won't keep at it decade after decade because of the enormous impact you alone are having on anything at all.
Even local action, by and large, requires the efforts of enough people so that any one shirker or no-show will not make a great deal of difference. You have to go pretty local for it to be otherwise. My wife and I once got ourselves elected as Jackson delegates to the Massachusetts state Democratic Party convention from the tiny town of Pelham. We accomplished this political machination by getting two friends to ride with us to the meeting. The four of us constituted an absolute majority of those present, and Susie and I were swept into office. That is just about the only time in my entire life that I can say my actions personally made any sort of noticeable political difference.
So, I do not want to argue with anyone at all who is identifiably rolling down the same side of the hill as I am. If voting gives you heartburn but working with the homeless makes you feel good about yourself, so be it. Just so long as you are doing something that helps those who need help and advances in some way progressive policies. There is a long history on the left, as in Christianity and Islam, of sectarian squabbles between groups only minutely different from one another -- what Freud famously called, in another context, the "narcissism of small differences." I have been opposed to that sort of in-fighting all my life. That is why I said political action is not like brain surgery. One slip of the knife can kill the patient. But nothing much hinges on my adopting this variation of Marxian economics rather than that one.
I hope that everyone reading this has found, or will find, some way of being politically active that contributes something, however insignificant, to the advancement of progressive principles and goals. The only thing that is really unacceptable, in my view, is to mount an excoriating critique of everything, and then use that as an excuse for doing -- nothing.
Sunday, 29 April 2012
A REPLY TO ENGLISH JERK
In response to my post "Why Do I Work For Obama?" "English Jerk" wrote a long and very thoughtful comment. Rather than respond to it in the Comments section, I have decided to write a separate post addressing each of the three points he [?] makes. To obviate the necessity of switching back and forth between this post and the comment, I will reproduce the relevant portions as I go along.
After an opening remark, EJ asks three questions. Here is the first one:
"1) What if Candidate X is better on, say, unions than Candidate Y, but is worse on foreign policy? As an option 2 guy who is in the process of organizing a union, that issue has immediate practical consequences for my political activities. But do I really want better labor laws in the US at the cost of millions of people exterminated abroad? For that matter, do I want better labor laws in the US at the cost of the US government supporting the violent suppression of unions in Colombia (where a few hundred labor organizers are murdered every year)? In other words, it seems to me that, in order to make this assessment, we'd have to determine in some detail what a candidate is likely to do (which is no easy matter) and then to find some way to compare (or even quantify?) his various evils so that we can determine whether it's a net gain to have X rather than Y in office. In Obama's case, of course, we could at least look at his past record and assume he'll continue in the same vein. So I'd like to see what it would look like if we really try to balance out all the good and bad things he's done and see where the scales fall. To put this another way: many of your arguments hang on an evaluation of Obama's specific policies, and I'd like to hear more about your views on those details."
EJ is completely correct in his description of the problem we all face when called upon to choose between two candidates, or even among three or more, each of whom in all likelihood embraces some policies and actions we approve of and some we do not approve of. EJ is also correct that we are obligated to consider the long term and indirect consequences of these policies as well as the direct, short term consequences. There is simply no way around this dilemma, given the nature of American politics. A parliamentary system might offer the opportunity to vote for a party, however small, whose platform very closely approximates one's own convictions, but we do not have a parliamentary system. Indeed, this is one of the many reasons, as I explain in In Defense of Anarchism, why the state is not, and cannot be, de jurelegitimate.
As I hope is clear, there are many issues on which I disagree with Obama -- America's imperial foreign policy and America's capitalist economy, both of which he embraces, to name the most obvious and important of them. For me, the relevant question is not whether I agree with him on these crucial matters, but what the alternatives are. Today's Republican Party offers a worse version of American Imperialism and a worse version of American capitalism. Of virtually all the choices facing America in 2008, when Obama first ran, there was only one -- albeit a very important one -- on which Obama proposed to move in exactly the wrong direction, from my point of view, namely his espousal of an escalation in Afghanistan. With regard to every other important issue -- LGBT rights, health care reform, regulation of financial markets, tax reform, the environment, immigration reform, and so forth, Obama proposed to move in what I consider the right direction. What is more, on every single issue, including Afghanistan, Obama's positions were better than those of his opponent. So the decision to support him was, for me, a no-brainer. I was convinced that the world would be better, or at least less bad, with him as President than with McCain as President. And as things have turned out, I think that judgment was correct.
Four years have gone by, and once again I am faced with a choice between supporting Obama, supporting [as it turns out] Romney, or sitting out the election. Once again, the choice is, for me, a no-brainer. If you accept my argument that someone in my position is morally obligated to do what he can to advance the better of the available alternatives, then it is easy to see how I have concluded that I ought to support Obama. And if I ought to support him, then I ought to work for him. That is what "support" entails, at least for me.
Now, I confess that I did not anticipate just how bad the Republican Party would become in these past four years. The full-scale assault on women's health is horrific. The endless enrichment of the rich is appalling. The punitive, racist attack on Hispanics is unconscionable. This is no longer the Republican Party of Eisenhower, Rockefeller, or even Nixon. Anyone who cannot see the difference between them and Obama just is not looking.
Here is EJ's second question: [By the way, every time I wrote "EJ" I think for a moment that I am talking about E. J. Dionne, columnist for the Washington Post. I apologize to English Jerk for that.]
"2) What if capitalism is more adaptable than Marx supposed precisely because of these "progressive" strands in government, so that encouraging them actually prevents radical change? I know this line of thinking can be harnessed to the "making things worse until they get better" strategy, but it doesn't have to be. We might, for example, opt for direct action that helps people in our communities while pointedly avoiding any participation with state-corporate entities. If all participation in government makes capitalism stronger, then we'd need to find other avenues of political action—and, in light of the infinite capacities of humans, I think there are always infinitely many such avenues."
The first thing I must say in response to this point is that political action for change is not like brain surgery, where the slightest wrong move can bring disaster. It is more like an avalanche, with rocks, trees, pebbles, bushes, and debris all rolling down a hillside. Only a few of us in such a situation are boulders -- Martin Luther King, say, or maybe Noam Chomsky. The rest of us are pebbles and bits of tree bark. The important thing is to be rolling down the right hill. To put the same point another way, political action is like exercising: you will only stick with it, year after year, if you can find some form of it that you actually enjoy. There are lots and lots of things that need doing -- circulating petitions, organizing street protests, carrying signs, writing letters, raising money, giving money, running guns [maybe]. They all need to be done if we are to see real change. Now, I, for one, hate to march in street protests, but I like to raise money. So by and large I do not turn out for street protests, but I do raise money. Even when it comes to raising money, I cannot raise money for all the good causes in the world, or even in America, so I make choices, hoping that others will cover the bases I am leaving uncovered. The important thing is to find something you enjoy doing, so that in bad decades as well as in good ones, you will keep at it. I was lucky enough to live through the Sixties [which actually mostly happened in the Seventies, but never mind.] I have also lived through the Eighties, Nineties, and Oughts, which were pretty bad. That's life. You have to just soldier on.
Now, with regard to EJ's second point, I don't actually believe the story about how you make things worse by "cooperating" with the world, by trying to engage with it. That is not why revolutionary change does or does not happen, but that is another story. I agree entirely with the thrust of EJ's point. If you are more comfortable with local action, then commit your energies to local action, not because of some speculative theory but just because, of all the options available to you, that is the one you are comfortable with. If you like it, you will keep doing it year in and year out, and that is what matters. As far as I am concerned, you and I will be rolling down the same side of the hill.
Finally, here is EJ's third point"
"3) What if it turns out to be necessarily impossible to determine what political outcomes these particular circumstances make possible? We would, in that case, lack information that is crucial to the kinds of moral deliberations you describe. Marx seems sometimes to have thought that a given situation was fairly deterministically related to what could come next, but Hegel (on my reading, anyway) thought that contingency itself was necessary, which makes all real situations deeply unpredictable. My thinking is that it might be better to devote our energies to local action, since we are more likely to have sufficient grasp of the local situation to make a good guess about what that situation calls for. The energy would thus be better spent locally. And I know that the act of voting by itself doesn't require much energy, if all one does it to pull a crank in a curtained booth; but surely if one engages in the careful research and deliberation required to reach morally justifiable conclusions (and even more so if one actually advocates for the candidate, as one should of one really wants the candidate to win), then voting actually is going to take quite a lot of energy. I'm still not convinced that the energy wouldn't be better spent elsewhere."
"3) What if it turns out to be necessarily impossible to determine what political outcomes these particular circumstances make possible? We would, in that case, lack information that is crucial to the kinds of moral deliberations you describe. Marx seems sometimes to have thought that a given situation was fairly deterministically related to what could come next, but Hegel (on my reading, anyway) thought that contingency itself was necessary, which makes all real situations deeply unpredictable. My thinking is that it might be better to devote our energies to local action, since we are more likely to have sufficient grasp of the local situation to make a good guess about what that situation calls for. The energy would thus be better spent locally. And I know that the act of voting by itself doesn't require much energy, if all one does it to pull a crank in a curtained booth; but surely if one engages in the careful research and deliberation required to reach morally justifiable conclusions (and even more so if one actually advocates for the candidate, as one should of one really wants the candidate to win), then voting actually is going to take quite a lot of energy. I'm still not convinced that the energy wouldn't be better spent elsewhere."
It is in fact impossible as a general thing to " determine what political outcomes these particular circumstances make possible?" but I think it takes almost no energy to figure out that Obama and the Democrats are a more progressive option than Romney and the Republicans. I don't think that conclusion should cost you more than a New York minute's worth of deliberation. So decide to vote Democratic, go back to your local action, and on Election Day take thirty minutes to vote. Any local action worth doing will be easier with a Democratic government than with a Republican government. If you have doubts about that, ask the folks in Wisconsin!
If you have doubts even about this brief summary judgment concerning the relative merits of the Democrats and the Republicans, let me suggest that you carry out the following thought experiment:
Imagine that America had a political system in which the party that wins control of the House, Senate, and White House gets to rule without any opposition whatsoever from the other party. So, if the Republicans control the House, Senate, and White House, then the Democratic Senators and Representatives simply evaporate, leaving the Republicans with 100% in both houses. And the same of course for the Democrats. It would still require majorities to pass legislation, and 60% of the Senators to impose cloture and end a filibuster. Now, in this fanciful situation, what sorts of legislation do you suppose would be passed and signed into law? I suggest that if the Democrats were in power, you would see legislation that moved dramatically to the left, because the opposition would only come from relatively more conservative "Blue Dog Democrats" [there being no Republicans in either chamber, in this thought experiment.] The legislation passed if the Republicans were in power would be horrendous -- the end of Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment Insurance, any sort of regulation of business, the outlawing of abortion, and possibly even of contraception, and so forth.
The point of this thought experiment is to make it easier for you to grasp just how different the two parties are. I think you can do all the complex moral reasoning about this that you need to do while waiting for the light to change at an intersection.
Friday, 27 April 2012
WHY DO I WORK FOR OBAMA?
For some time now, a woman who uses the webname "High Arka" has been posting abusive and insulting comments on this site. Because she hides behind anonymity, not having the courage of her convictions, I have taken to deleting her comments. I do not think that sort of discourse has any place on a site like this one. Just recently, however, she has raised in a slightly more acceptable fashion the question why I engage actively in electoral politics, supporting Barack Obama despite all the ways in which I fundamentally disagree with him. She takes this support [which she always characterizes in personally insulting fashion] as evidence that I cannot possibly be, as I claim to be, an anarchist and a Marxist. Somewhat in support of "High Arka," Chris says ” Amongst the Anarchist crowd, I don't know a single one that actually votes, let alone has a single positive thing to say about the president or an executive branch in general."
I think the time has come to address this question in a serious fashion. Nevertheless, I shall continue to delete High Arka's comments until she decides to observe the norms of courtesy in debate that I have tried to exemplify and encourage here. Since she has her own blog, you are free to follow her there if you find her mode of discourse congenial. This is, I might observe, one of the great attractions of the web. As a professor, I occupied a position of status and power in the classroom. It was, after all, I who handed out the grades at the end of the semester. But as a blogger, I have exactly the same status and power as High Arka and all the other hundreds of millions of folks who have blogs. Google makes its blogging utility available for nothing, so that if you are on line [or have access to an internet cafe], you have the same access to public opinion that I have. If what you write draws a crowd, then you become a somebody in the world of blogging. This blog, for example, has a rather small readership. A famous blog like the Huffington Post or TPM probably pulls as many hits in a minute as I do in a day.
Now let me address the question why I engage actively in mainstream politics. The first point to make is that I am a well-to-do person who has for most of his life lived an upper-middle class existence. I come from a lower middle class background [my mother was, until her heart attack, a secretary and my father was a high school teacher and then near the end of his career a high school principal,] but I did rather better financially, spending my life as a college professor. I was never out of work for even a day until I retired, and thanks to a generous Commonwealth of Massachusetts pension, Social Security, and Medicare, I have a secure and comfortable old age. I mention these facts because I believe they are important. Since I have led a comfortable, secure, affluent life, I have, I believe, a more than ordinary responsibility to concern myself with the well-being of the many, many scores of millions of Americans who have been less fortunate. I mean that quite seriously. For me to turn my back on the public political world of America out of anger or disgust, and fail to do what I can to make things better for other Americans, would be in my opinion unconscionable. High Arka may mock me for espousing leftwing opinions when I am one of the comfortable and fortunate, but I think she has it exactly wrong. I have a greater obligation to express those views and act on themprecisely because I am one of the comfortable and fortunate.
I am, as I have often said on this blog and elsewhere, a socialist. But it is perfectly obvious that there is not the slightest probability that either major political party in this country will embrace and espouse, let alone implement, a socialist program. Of course, not everyone who thinks of himself or herself as a Marxist or a socialist agrees with this assessment. There was a time, after all -- roughly when my grandfather was active in the Socialist Party -- when many serious, committed socialists believed the world was on the brink of a revolutionary period during which there would be a real chance for the working class to seize power and put an end to capitalism. I don't think that was a foolish belief, as I have made clear in my paper "The Future of Socialism," but it proved to be incorrect, again for reasons I have spelled out in that paper.
What, then, is someone with my beliefs and commitments and life situation to do? There are, so far as I can see, five possibilities.
First, I can turn my back on the public world, out of disgust, despair, or simple disappointment, and refuse to have anything to do with it, not even bothering to vote, inasmuch as none of the alternatives presented on the ballot offers any hope of the realization of the socialist dream. To do that is implicitly to say that it really makes no difference which political party comes to power. Well, it certainly makes no material difference to me. As I have indicated, I am quite nicely cushioned against the inevitable traumata and trials of old age. Of course, it might make a difference to my children and grandchildren, who could find themselves deprived of a social safety net in a world of ever greater income and wealth inequality, but that, after all, is their problem, not mine. I will be dead before they have to confront it.
But it does make a very great deal of difference to hundreds of millions of Americans, now and in the future. The policies and proposals of the two major political parties are fundamentally different with regard to all of the economic questions that are summarized in the phrase "social safety net." Is a nation with universal health care socialist? Hardly! Is a nation with secure rights of unionization socialist? Of course not. Is a nation that pursues an imperial foreign policy socialist? That is actually a more complicated question, but I am happy to say No. But a nation with universal health care and strong union protections is a better nation, for those who need the health care and belong to the unions, than a nation without them. About this there seems to me to be no possibility of dispute. Just speak to someone who, upon changing jobs, finds that she cannot get health insurance because of a "pre-existing condition."
Do I have the right to ignore the needs of my fellow Americans because doing something might require me to choose between imperfect alternatives? I don't think so, especially because I am one of the fortunate whose life is comfortable and secure. So I work for the party whose policies seem to me more beneficial for those whose life circumstances are inferior to my own. So far as I am concerned, this first option, to do nothing, is simply unacceptable.
My Second option is to engage actively in politics in support of a party or individual candidates who openly and enthusiastically embrace the socialist principles I espouse. This is, I think, an honorable course of action, but if I choose it, it is essential to be honest with myself about its prospects for success. Now, this is always difficult to calculate. For example, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which looked about as quixotic as anything one could imagine, has succeeded against all the odds in almost immediately transforming the public discourse in America, so that the notion of the opposition between the 1% and the 99% is now a part of mainstream discussions. That is a triumph far beyond anything I have ever achieved or could have achieved with my involvement in mainstream politics. [That is why I have supported the local manifestation of the Occupy movement here in Chapel Hill.] If someone decides to take this route, and shun major party politicking, I think that is fine. But not voting on election day is just irresponsible, regardless of how one has decided to act politically.
The Third alternative, much favored a generation or two ago by some folks who thought of themselves as revolutionary, is to embrace the thesis that things can only get better after they have gotten worse, and thus to retreat from the public arena and wait for the crash that will presage the great Revolution, or indeed even to do what one can to hasten the crash [perhaps by pursuing a career as a trader in Credit Default Swaps.]
Marx held a version of this theory, of course, expecting that capitalism would be unable to moderate the ever greater booms and busts, so that eventually there would be a world crash, from whose ashes would rise a united working class to seize the reins of power. Well, I am old enough to feel my heart begin to flutter at these words, but I am seriously doubtful that this is what the future holds. If I am wrong, I will be delighted to admit, indeed to celebrate, my error.
The Fourth option is to go underground and work for violent revolution. Or, if not that, then to hang out in countercultural coffee houses and talk about violent revolution. Well, good luck with that! There have been a number of successful violent revolutions in the past century -- the Russian, the Chinese, the Cuban. In every case, there were objective circumstances that made the revolution possible. Now, I really do not think the United States presents such circumstances. Indeed, the real possibility at the present time is a counter-revolution, a religiously inspired reactionary destruction of whatever good has been achieved by struggling men and women in this century.
Finally, the Fifth option is to work within the existing political system, always supporting, in any election, the candidate who is farther to the left, recognizing that this means supporting candidates with whom one disagrees, and in any other way that one can, trying to build popular support for more progressive alternatives, hoping, but without much hope, that someday socialism will, in Marx's evocative phrase, emerge from the womb of the old order.
So, there we are: Do nothing, work on the fringes of the system, scheme [or hope] to make things worse so that they will get better, plot violent revolution, or work within the system and try to pull it to them left. I think that for someone in my material circumstances, only the second and the fifth are honorable and plausible. If someone wants to tell me that the second is preferable, I will not argue. I think it is just a matter of choice and preference.
However: young people who refuse to vote because they do not like the choices presented to them had better not complain about how things turn out! They have forfeited that right by refusing to use what little power they have.
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