tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-81057087550612378972024-03-14T02:18:44.834-04:00Accelerate the Contradictions!dilletantish, amoral, and inconsistentWill Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08526758278565458289noreply@blogger.comBlogger235125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-61682373615168281042023-07-17T20:01:00.001-04:002023-07-17T20:01:40.387-04:00How dumb is Steven Smith? <p><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">How dumb is Steven Smith? </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-e67422b6-7fff-7f58-4fdf-fa418bb6fd2c"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Smith teaches political theory at Yale. He is a Straussian. Strauss’s apology for his mode of teaching political philosophy is that philosophy is the only thing that can innoculate ambitious and capable young men of leisure – Straussians call them gentlemen – against the desire for political power. In the context of Strauss’s own early sympathies for fascism and his lifelong belief in a muscular, more or less theocratic, and very nationalist Israel, this apology was necessary and perhaps inadequate. It was also, I think, sincerely meant. Philosophy, or fearless rational inquiry and skepticism of all popular dogmas, religious faiths, and civic cults, is anathema to politics. But politics always tends towards the narrow, the sectarian, the idiotic, and the cruel, and politics will stamp out philosophy if it has a chance. So Strauss thought that philosophical education, approached in a suitably circumspect and flirtatious way, could temper the most dangerous young men, give them a taste of more cosmopolitan and more personal pleasures, and keep them liberal (in the older, aristocratic sense of the term). </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Costin Alamariu – better known to the world as Bronze Age Pervert – <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/bronze-age-pervert-dissertation-leo-strauss" target="_blank">wrote a dissertation at Yale, supervised by Smith</a>, which argued that Plato’s secret teaching is that Callicles is right, that philosophy and power are identical, and that natural right is the complete domination of the weak by the strong. This is, of course, the opposite of Strauss’s apology. Alamariu is himself one of the ambitious and capable young men of leisure that Strauss thought so necessary and so dangerous to political life. <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/16/bronze-age-pervert-masculinity-00105427" target="_blank">Smith was, apparently, completely overawed by his student.</a> He disagrees with Alamariu’s argument, he says. He also says, though, that “The dissertation was, in many ways, a brilliant sort of tour de force.” Rather than taking an ambitious little rich kid and giving him an innocuous hobby and a high-minded disdain for political power, Smith has, apparently, flattered and pampered a little fascist into thinking he is the philosophical prophet of warrior kings and the extermination of the bugmen. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">In the process, Smith has made American Straussianism look not so much evil – remember Shadia Drury’s <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Strauss-American-Right-Shadia-Drury/dp/0312217838" target="_blank">dark fantasies</a> of Straussians as the puppetmasters of the Bush White House? – as pathetic and stupid. And East Coast Straussians, even! The dumb subservience to Republican electoral politics and the cultural Right was supposed to be confined the <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/137410/pro-trump-intellectuals-want-overthrow-america" target="_blank">the West Coast</a> (Californians are classically airheads). The East Coast was for the cynical Brahmins of the clan – sophisticated, gay, and Europe-oriented. But here is Yale out-Claremonting Claremont, producing a highly-literate guttersnipe intent on rallying the basement dwellers of 4chan. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">So, congratulations to Steven Smith. He has managed to eviscerate Strauss’s apology for Straussianism, egg on an aspiring Nazi, and make the West Coast Straussians look like the smart, morally sane ones. That’s pretty dumb!</span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div></span>William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-56064012679311894162022-09-24T13:21:00.000-04:002022-09-24T13:21:18.988-04:00On the new class fundamentalism<p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>These are my comments from a roundtable organized by Igor Shoikhedbrod at APSA 2022. They are a first, rough attempt to think through issues of class in social theory and in socialist politics. They are both rather tentative and rather basic, but I hope they are also somewhat helpful.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-wrap;">---</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m trying to figure out the new “class is fundamental” discourse. In some of its aspects, it is not so new. Adolph Reed has been pushing the same line for 35 years. Aging Trotskyists are not saying anything they haven’t been saying forever. But older tendencies have gained a new inflection by interaction with elements that are much more genuinely recent. The post-Bernie anti-liberalism of certain parts of DSA, the anti-PMC line being pushed by the romantic workerists who publish in <i>Compact</i>, etc., seem very conjunctural.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Within this context, what does it mean to insist that class is fundamental? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I find this a hard question to answer, in part because it is hard to isolate the theoretical account offered by these authors from the critical attacks on others that carry the message. The critical attacks often seem to boil down to an imperative to say the word “class” more, and the words “race” and “gender” less. Nonetheless, the critique seems to be motivated by the sense that “class” cuts the social world at its joints. There is a conviction that organizing around racial, gendered, or other identities, and around injustices of status and standing, are distractions from (a) what is *really* going on, and (b) what might actually *work* politically.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">"What is really going on": The fundamental social processes that drive, undergird, and explain the conflicts about status and standing and identity are the class processes of capitalism in its current neoliberal form.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">"What might work politically": Naming and appealing to people’s material interests – which are their class interests – is both more motivating and more inclusive than naming and appealing to people’s status, standing, and identity, which are particularistic and divisive, rather than universalistic and unifying.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I understand the appeal of this, I think. The individual claims out of which these intuitions are constructed are themselves compelling. The class processes of capitalism <i>are</i> fundamental for understanding the world. Appealing to common and material interests, and building universalistic policy programs, are the best shot we have of moving things in a better direction. And yet, the class fundamentalist position as whole doesn’t seem to me to make much sense. When I think about how and in what sense each of the elements is true, then it seems impossible to combine them in the way that the new class fundamentalism does, and the whole things seems to fall apart. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I want to look at the two aspects of the position in turn, and to point out where I keep getting tripped up.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">In what sense, first, are class processes and conflicts the fundamental social processes that drive or explain other conflicts? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Class is fundamental, in this sense, because production is fundamental. Class relations organize production, and so, since production is fundamental to the existence of human society, solving the class relation problem is a constraint on everything else that goes on in society. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, you could say the same thing about reproduction. Since reproduction is also fundamental to the existence of human society, it might seem that relations of reproduction – sex and gender – are equally primodial and equally basic to everything else going on in society. But here there is an illuminating contrast. It turns out that human beings can reproduce the species in in a wildly divergent set of social relations. Reproduction does not require any particular social relations to be successful. That is, in the case of reproduction, stable functionality radically </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">underdetermines</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> social form. As long as there is enough food, humans find ways of reproducing the species, and the ways they find to do so are flexible and varied to an incredible degree. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not so for production. Production at a certain level – for a given population, at a given level of social wealth – binds us socially to a much greater extent. Hence, production relations are much stickier. We cannot produce food and technology for a world of 8 billion people, who are used to and reliant upon modern life, in just any old way. We are, in this sense, locked in – for now – to certain relations of production, and this means to certain class relations. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Class, in this sense, names the relations of domination and exploitation that are </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">productively necessary for a given society</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The point of base-superstructure materialism is to underscore this fact, that class relations are themselves a “social technology” of production, and that more </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">productive</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> class relations are more </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">powerful</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> class relations, which tend to win out in competition with other, less productive class relations. (The mechanism of this winning out can vary. It might be that more productive class relations outspread less productive, or that they developmentally outstrip them, or that they lead to military overmatching, or…)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">However, there are a couple wrinkles. First, a tendency is just a tendency, and will be more notable and stable at a large scale and over a long time than it is locally and at any given point. Historical materialism is not a species of determinism. Second, the more productive the economy, the greater the surplus, and the greater the inequality in how this surplus is spread around, the greater the “slippage” between socially necessary class relations at the level of the whole and the relations of production that obtain locally in any given workplace or jurisdiction or line of production. That is, the more productively developed an economy, the less likely its “competitive edge” is to be critically present in some one site or line of production.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In this situation – and it is, I think, our situation, to a greater extent than it has ever been any other society’s situation –</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> class</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> relations remain fundamental, but they are progressively distinct (without being independent) from </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">work</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> relations. Work relations – relations of domination and exploitation at the site of production – are labor-management relations, not proletarian-capital relations. Proletarian-capital relations obtain in an abstract but determining way at the level of society, which is mediated in its essential productive processes by the labor market. Work relations obtain in an empirically perceptible but overdetermined way at the level of everyday life, which is mediated in its contingent productive processes by all sorts of things.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This analysis – which is based on Marx’s distinction between abstract and concrete labor – highlights a constitutive obscurity in the new class fundamentalism's political project. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The injunction to focus on class in political practice is itself interestingly out of step with the injunction to trace things back to the political economy of capitalism. After all, “class” does not name a reality proper to capitalism, but a constitutive element of almost all human societies to date. The corollary of tracing the fundamental dynamics of capitalism would be an emphasis not on class but on </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the proletariat</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. But naming the proletariat would emphasize what so much of the new class discourse obscures, that the working class as the producers of things is not equivalent to the working class as the class of wage-workers, and neither is equivalent to the proletariat, the class of people dependent upon wages for life, whether they are working or not. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think this conflation of capitalist <i>class</i> relations with <i>work</i> relations is an understandable but regrettable feature of the new fundamentalism. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Understandable, because it’s not as if capitalist class relations are independent of capitalist work relations, and work relations are much more empirically tractable and politically salient in an obvious way. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Regrettable, though, because it leads this current emphasis on class to fall into a false opposition between “class-based” politics and other forms of political organizing. This is because, by shifting between features of the structural class relation basic to capitalism (between capitalist and proletarian) and features of one or another work relation, the new class fundamentalism makes its political task too easy. Class politics has the immediacy of work relations, but the universality of class relations. Class politics – like workplace organizing – appeals to material interests, but it also – unlike workplace organizing – has a national and even international constituency. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">There’s the old saying in labor circles that “the boss is the best organizer.” I think the new class fundamentalism wants this to be true, not only at the level of the shop floor, but at the level of society at large. And there are points in time when that actually seems plausible. In the second half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century, in Europe and North America especially, it was reasonable to think that capital organized labor at scale. The emptying out of the countryside, the massive amalgamation of the industrial working class in factory, mine, city, and district – all of this encouraged Marxists and other socialists to think that capital was itself forging the proletariat into a political subject with common experiences, common spaces, common mores and traditions. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">That belief is not reasonable anymore, about Europe and North America at least – and it was never as correct as it was reasonable. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cedric Johnson said the other day, at a panel honoring Adolph Reed’s work, that what victims of police harassment and violence have in common is not race but class. That is true – but it is also abstract. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Around here</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, it may be that everything I see and know tells me that police harassment and violence are about race. And local truths about racial harassment and violence are no less true than local truths about workplace harassment and precarity and overwork.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It seems to me that the real challenge of a class-based politics in our world is that it is an inherently abstract, theoretical politics. Building a global alternative to the capital-proletarian class relation is necessarily the most challenging and difficult political struggle imaginable. It is </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">tempting</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to think that there is some local crystallization of this abstract, global struggle, some everyday struggle that doesn’t have to be translated into this global struggle because it just is this global struggle in a bite-sized form. But I don’t think that’s true. </span></p>William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-40019762809074400882022-04-16T08:14:00.001-04:002022-04-17T13:53:41.443-04:00Ideology: tentative conclusions<p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The curriculum vitae of ideology as a concept has followed the trajectory of social theory. </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-f44f3af1-7fff-d84c-32db-fb37b3fb8d92"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It originated in Destutt de Tracy’s project of educative social reform. Ideology was here the science of ideas, of which political economy was a central extension. The goal was to realize society as a totality of voluntary and mutually beneficial exchanges or contracts of exchange, and to do so by enlightening the consciousness of social agents, so that they could see what they were trying to do and do it in the most rational way possible. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The critique of ideology was born with the critique of political economy. For Marx and Engels, the ideological project was doomed to failure. Consciousness lags behind practice and cannot grasp all of the ramifications of practice. We know not what we do, and our aims and intentions do not so much determine our acts as express our retrospective efforts at self-justification and self-understanding. The ideals of market exchange are not realized in market exchange, of necessity, since the “society” of exchangers is only possible on the basis of non-exchange: the exploitation of labor-power. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This materialist critique of ideology, however, is radically indeterminate – and hence inadequate – for the forward-looking project of the revolutionary transformation of the mode of production. Lukács tries to turn this inadequacy into a virtue with his theory of class consciousness. He presumes that Marx’s theoretical critique of political economy also has the effect of making transparent to the proletariat their demiurge-like position at the center of society. In proletarian class consciousness, conscious self-justification and self-understanding catches its own tail and turns thereby into a prospective knowledge of how to transform society in accordance with human intentions. A new ideology is born – communist ideology – but one with a distinct advantage over Destutt de Tracy’s bourgeois ideology: it can actually grasp the totality of social relations and thereby transform them at will.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mid-twentieth-century social theory takes Lukács’s hypothesis seriously, but also takes a generic humanism seriously enough to generalize the hypothesis to all human agents. What was in Lukács’s hands a partisan ideology of communist militancy becomes an omni-historical fact of human life: the social construction of reality. When this is operationalized, however, it becomes immediately apparent that, rather than transparency and conscious control, the result is an ever-renewed and massive opacity of social institutions. Made by “us” and re-makeable by “us,” they constantly confront us as made by </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">others</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and resistant to any change we can initiate. With the generalization of ideology, “the level of the sociology of knowledge is reached – the understanding that no human thought … is immune to the ideologizing influences of its social context” (Berger and Luckmann, <i>The Social Construction of Reality</i>, 9). The social world becomes the world of meaning, and ideological division becomes the interminable contest between different meanings of the world. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In this context, the critique of ideology reasserts itself, but not by reference to social dynamics that frustrate our efforts at conscious control and that falsify our normative ideals. Instead, ideology critique is the critique of </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">every</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> value, </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">every</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> meaning, by reference to a posited counterfactual: another world is possible. Our allegiance to </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> world – that is, this world’s legitimacy – is undermined by the rational projection of another world, a world free of coercion and temporal restraints, a world where rational conversation would be the only determinant of meaning and value. The entire Marxian problematic is here flipped on its head: whatever frustrates our efforts at conscious control and falsifies our normative ideals is hereby identified as itself ideological, and only the nonexistent society of voluntary and mutually beneficial relations is non-ideological. Ideology critique has taken the place of ideology (in Marx's sense of the term).</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is a shortcut from this moment to the present, a wormhole that takes you from Adorno and Marcuse to neo-Kantian ideal theory in a heartbeat, but I want to take the scenic route. Althusser reasserted Marx’s multi-level conception of society even as he emphasized the relative autonomy of the ideological superstructure. This seems like a return to a path not taken, since it opens the door to analyzing the distinct effectivities of different institutions and practices and reinstates Marx’s distinction between what we are and what we imagine ourselves to be. At the same time, though, by seeing ideological institutions as the key to the reproduction of labor power, Althusser magnifies the stakes of controlling the educational apparatuses. His writings were received in the Anglophone world in tandem with Gramsci’s prison writings, with their attention of culture, their emphasis on coalition politics, and their analysis of civil society. No war but culture war seemed to be the lesson. The long march through the universities had begun. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m not being dismissive. Gramsci, Althusser, Therborn, and Hall seem to me to be immensely promising resources. One of the reasons they are so promising, however, is that they provide the tools for analyzing ideology-discourse </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">as ideology</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ideology </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">qualifies</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and it </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">authorizes</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It qualifies individuals as agents of a particular sort, and thereby qualifies them to act in particular ways. It enlists individuals in projects of world-creation and world-maintenance and world-destruction by calling on them according to this name or that: son, comrade, doctor, m’lady. But it also thereby authorizes particular courses of action or practices. It rationalizes, legitimates, justifies.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kathi Weeks and Sandra Harding are quite explicit about the qualifying work done by standpoint theory. As Weeks says, </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"> </p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">a standpoint is a collective interpretation of a particular subject position rather than an immediate perspective automatically acquired by an individual who inhabits that position. … Thus a standpoint constitutes a subject, but one which does not rely on a transcendental or natural essence. A standpoint is a project, not an inheritance; it is achieved, not given. (</span></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Constituting</i></span><i style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Feminist Subjects</i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">, 136)</span></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"> </p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Qualifying as a feminist is not automatic. A collective practice of calling one another feminists is required, and such a collective practice is neither indiscriminate nor bound and determined by a pre-existing code of attribution. Hence, as Harding drives home, </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"> </p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">it cannot be that women are the unique generators of feminist knowledge. Women can not claim this ability to be uniquely theirs, and men must not be permitted to claim that because they are not women, they are not obligated to produce fully feminist analyses. Men, too, must contribute distinctive forms of specifically feminist knowledge from their particular social situation. ("Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is 'Strong Objectivity'?"in Alcoff and Potter, eds., <i>Feminist Epistemologies</i>, 67)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"> </p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What emerges here also is the </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">imperative</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> edge of ideological qualification. You </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">must</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> qualify, and if you qualify, you </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">must</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> live up to certain expectations. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"> </p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To be a subject is to be subject to certain norms and expectations, of course, but the particular imperative that accompanies the feminist standpoint requires a significant amendment to Therborn’s universe of ideological interpellation. In addition to existential and positional ideologies, we must recognize that </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">political</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> ideologies – e.g., feminism, liberalism, nationalism, Labourism, etc. – operate according to a different set of imperatives. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"> </p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like inclusive ideologies, political ideologies qualify individuals as members of a social world. Like positional ideologies, however, they also acknowledge the oppositional partiality of this social world. To qualify as a feminist is both to be part of a collective subject and to be excluded from and opposed to another collective subject, whether this is conceived as the world of men, the patriarchy, the traditional family, or whatever. But to be a feminist is also to claim that everyone </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ought</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to be</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> – in some sense of ought, which we must yet articulate – a feminist. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"> </p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The same imperative to be or become qualified is found in all political ideologies, but not always in the same mode. Some political ideologies are explicitly local in the socio-historical mode of address. The imperative to be or become a Lib-Dem is not addressed to or entertained by anyone outside of England and Wales, and even within these domains there is no pretense that it is addressed to everyone. Hegemonic political ideologies – say, Congressism in mid-century India or Zionism in Israel – may address and seek to qualify nearly everyone in a nation or area, but with a much more limited address abroad. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"> </p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Other political ideologies, however – liberalism, feminism, Marxism, fascism, Islamism – operate at a different level of generality. These are the ideologies that are often referred to as ideologies as such. They are not confined to any given local or national space, and address themselves, in principle at least, to everyone in the world. This universal address – the hailing of anyone and everyone – need not be univocal. Marxism qualifies factory workers and peasants differentially, for instance. Nonetheless, no one is permitted by Marxism to be a non-participant in the relations of production or the revolutionary process. The feminist standpoint is a political ideological project with the same universal aspirations. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"> </p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But ideologies do not just qualify individuals as subjects. They also authorize subjects to act in certain ways. And what is so striking about standpoint theory as an inheritor of the theory of ideology is that as a project it authorizes its subjects to know, to speak as knowers, and to recognize one another as sources of knowledge. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"> </p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In retrospect, I think we can appreciate how novel this is. The original liberal project – and the first self-conscious ideology – authorized its subjects to want things, to prefer one state of affairs to another, and to exchange with one another in pursuit of their desires. The Marxist project – the first self-critical ideology – authorized its subjects to make things, and to cooperate with and struggle with one another in the effort to create a new world. The standpoint project authorizes its subjects to interpret themselves and one another, to produce feminist and resistant knowledge, and to speak from their experience. If Althusser’s and Gramsci’s analyses of ideology functioned ideologically to authorize ideological struggle in the universities, standpoint theory authorizes us to treat the whole world as if it were a research university.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"> </p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The irony is that this has led, in the </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">actual</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> university, to the recovery of “ideology” as a concept, the recovery of “ideology critique” as a project, and the call – by philosophers even! – to attend more carefully to social theory and social movements. Mills – on the basis, I think, of his own reading and re-reading of Marx and Engels on ideology – calls for more attention to “ideal-as-descriptive-model” theorizations of “the reproductive dynamic” of actual systems of oppression ("Ideal Theory as Ideology," 168-9). This would include, though it is not reducible to, tracing “the consequences of oppression for the social cognition of these agents, both the advantaged and the disadvantaged” (169). Mills’s recommendation of non-ideal theory presupposes but goes beyond standpoint theory insofar as it proposes not simply beginning the knowledge project from a particular social position but also mapping social positions themselves. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"> </p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Haslanger goes even further in this direction I think. Her criticism of Shelby’s “high road” approach to ideology critique issues in the claim that “systematic racial injustice” – and we can extend this to any social system, I think – “is explained by the systematic looping of schemas and resources that occur in practices and the structures they form. Practices are guided by ideology, i.e., a racist cultural technē. But the ideology is not an independent causal factor… To focus entirely on ideology would be tantamount to explaining why the temperature of the room remains constant by simply pointing to the fact that the thermostat is set at 68F” (<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.11612/RESPHIL.1547" target="_blank">"Racism, Ideology, and Social Movements,"</a> 14). </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"> </p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To end on a programmatic note, I’d like to outline some lessons I am taking away from this:</span></p><ol style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-inline-start: 48px;"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: decimal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Inquiry into and criticism of ideology always takes place in ideology. We will get nowhere unless we recognize our own situatedness and orientation as inquirers and critics. </span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: decimal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our location and orientation as subjects qualified by ideology is downstream from the institutional structure of society, the distribution and ordering of rule-generating practices. Hence, one’s location and orientation are not adequately accounted for by listing one’s identities and political affiliations. </span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: decimal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These institutional practices are themselves material-social in their constitution; that is, they organize social relations among people around material resources and powers. The basic question of social theoretical inquiry is: <i>Who can do what to whom at what cost?</i></span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: decimal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Inquiry into and criticism of ideology, if it is to get anywhere, must base itself in a social theoretical account of the material-social bases of practices and the location of the subjects of ideologies in these practices. Haslanger’s example – “that individuals share racist beliefs because they live in a world in which certain groups get the good stuff” (13) – has the form of a general truth. </span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: decimal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hence, social theory has to take into account the ideological positioning of the inquirer, but the study of ideology has to base itself in social theory, and social theory cannot be reduced to ideology critique. </span></p></li></ol></span>William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-37476500571787955332022-04-16T08:08:00.002-04:002022-04-17T13:44:41.236-04:00Is the Frankfurt School's approach to ideology critique ideological?<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW0PoVaPenOFCq1AXVKgqFKy0al1cxA-h4yPgFSoMVG7BYpFWhCjhyfmSUiM1Uq3WfpW_4kKoFZ2VZ5taIjxUOBva94iCVHSitgLtP_XM4zahQRIcwqkJaITC0tByzgUv_NHDzEly_58irAfxtuOVnpmphjXYV2fwSKtXMZ_gZjqdLJ8bR5hQ48upk/s768/6A40E72F-BE5A-4FF1-B569-346DDE5A2554.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="501" data-original-width="768" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW0PoVaPenOFCq1AXVKgqFKy0al1cxA-h4yPgFSoMVG7BYpFWhCjhyfmSUiM1Uq3WfpW_4kKoFZ2VZ5taIjxUOBva94iCVHSitgLtP_XM4zahQRIcwqkJaITC0tByzgUv_NHDzEly_58irAfxtuOVnpmphjXYV2fwSKtXMZ_gZjqdLJ8bR5hQ48upk/s320/6A40E72F-BE5A-4FF1-B569-346DDE5A2554.png" width="320" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />Raymond </span><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Geuss is a sympathetic, meticulous, and reasonable reconstructor of ideology critique as it is advocated and practiced by the Frankfurt School of critical theory. That ideology critique emerges from his <i>The Idea of a Critical Theory</i> in such a state of hopelessness and helplessness ought to be the final nail in the coffin of the Frankfurt School’s paradigm in this respect. Either Geuss has badly mischaracterized this aspect of the tradition – which is unlikely given his sympathy, meticulousness, and reasonableness – or else this aspect of the tradition is beyond resuscitation.</span><p></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-dce63f6d-7fff-a627-3ba4-dbd23ff69dbd"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Geuss makes clear that </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Herrschaft</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, for the Frankfurt School, is essentially hegemonic in the Gramscian sense or voluntary in the Boétian sense. “‘Herrschaft.’” Geuss writes, is power to exercise normative repression,” where “normative repression” is the “frustration of agents’ preferences which makes a claim to legitimacy that is accepted by those agents because of certain normative beliefs they hold” (16). The dominated, on this account, consent to their domination, by definition. More than this, they think their domination is right or good in some sense. As Geuss puts it, “repression is ‘normative’ if the agents are prevented from pursuing their interests </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">by</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a set of normative beliefs they accept,” and </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Herrschaft</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is just the asymmetrical power of normative repression (34-5; my emphasis). The normative beliefs of the dominated, therefore, are the </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">source</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of their frustration or repression. The claim of legitimacy, in other words, is not just a claim made by the dominant, but is fully accepted by the dominated.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This does not necessarily mean that the legitimacy belief </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the basic normative belief, however. The dominated may consent to their domination and believe it to be good because it seems to them the most reasonable means of realizing an independently held normative belief. They may believe that God’s will should be done, and that mortal flesh is weak, and that this weakness requires, therefore, a firm government by a divinely ordained minister, and that the royal line of the Hohenzollerns happens to provide this needed government here and now. The legitimacy of Carol I is not basic to their moral worldview, and their joyous consent to his rule – and the consequent frustration of their pursuit of their own interests – is not entirely personalistic, but depends upon more fundamental moral beliefs, together with some basic factual judgments about the royal succession, etc. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nonetheless, this is a very strong version of the voluntary servitude thesis. The normative beliefs of the dominated are the fundamental cause of the repression they experience. The dominated suffer from “false consciousness” and from unfreedom, but “the ‘unfree existence’” from which they suffer “is a form of </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">self-imposed</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> coercion,” since its “‘power’ or ‘objectivity’ derives </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">only</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> from the fact that the agents do not realize that it is self-imposed” (58; emphasis in original). </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This last claim, that the objectivity of their unfreedom is self-imposed, must be expanded upon. Not only is ideological false consciousness the primary cause of the repression experienced by the dominated, it also gives rise to “real social oppression” that is “objective” (74), in the sense that a group of rational agents would arrive at a consensus judgment that it exists – i.e., it is not imaginary or ‘in the heads’ of the oppressed (72). This “objective power” cannot be “automatically resolved by critical reflection” (74). The dominant have an interest in the maintenance of the oppressive status quo, and “established social institutions” are not undone simply by people losing faith in their legitimacy (75). </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">However, the Frankfurt School is committed to the notion that the objectivity of these social institutions and the conservative interests rooted in them are </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">consequences</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of self-imposed ideological coercion. Even if “enlightenment does not automatically bring emancipation in the sense of freedom from the external coercion exercised by social institutions” (75), enlightenment is a prerequisite of freedom from external coercion because external coercion is the house that false consciousness built. False consciousness has constructed an objective, institutional world, and that world will not be torn down by critical theory alone, but critical theory is a prerequisite to that tearing down, just as false consciousness was a necessary prerequisite for the building. Consciousness comes first in both cases. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This also </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">seems</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to be the presupposition of Rahel Jaeggi’s rethinking of ideology and ideology critique, although she is more equivocal ("Rethinking Ideology," in </span>B. de Bruin et al. (eds.), <span style="font-style: italic;">New Waves in Political Philosophy, </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)<span style="font-size: small;">. When she analyzes the way in which freedom and equality are ideological in capitalism, she claims that “the labor contract, as a precondition for the market exchange, is at once the </span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">embodiment</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of freedom and equality as well as a means of generating inequality” (68; my emphasis). The notion that practices embody ideas is ambiguous, but Jaeggi’s language generally states that ideas “inform,” “leave their imprint on,” “maintain,” or “constitute” social practices or institutions. These word choices all suggest an ideas-first account, in which ideas are expressed in or at least shape practices and institutions.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To be fair, thought, this is not the whole story. Jaeggi also claims that ideology critique “establishes the link between the normative ideals of freedom and equality and the actual properties and conditions of the institutions that </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">claim to be guided by</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> these ideals” (70; my emphasis). This suggests that ideas come second, as ex post </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">justifications</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, rather than first, as ex ante </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">intentions</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But this passage also leads into one of the most surprising moments in Jaeggi’s depiction of ideology. She follows the above description of ideology critique’s operation with another description, according to which ideology critique exposes how “the ideological understanding of the freedom of contract puts one of the contract parties at an advantage” (70). This implies that it is not the practice of the wage contract itself but the ideological understanding thereof that puts the workers at a disadvantage. To my eye, this casts her previous statements in a new light. Ideological versions of ideals like freedom and equality take hold of practices, it seems, and “leave their imprint” on them in the sense of twisting them or distorting them so that they produce the opposite of the proclaimed norms of freedom and equality. Jaeggi concludes, therefore, that ideological “norms (as in the above-mentioned case, the values of freedom and equality that are constitutive for civil society) are effective, but </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">as effective factors </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">they have become inconsistent or deficient” (75). </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If this is right, then, Jaeggi’s position is somewhat distinct from the Frankfurt School position reconstructed by Geuss, but it may be a distinction without a difference. False consciousness does not necessarily come </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">first</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for Jaeggi, since it may result from attempts to justify existing practices. However, once ideological justifications exist, they shape or reconstruct the practices from which they emerged, and are effective insofar as they make the practices into engines for producing the opposite of the declared justificatory values. Ideology has </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">rebuilt</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the objective, institutional world, and that world will not be torn down by ideology critique alone, but ideology critique is a prerequisite to that tearing down, just as ideology was a necessary factor in the reconstructing of the world.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think Jaeggi and Geuss both get caught up in the defense of ideology critique as a practice in its own right, and thereby trap themselves. They wish to defend the honor of the practice, and to underscore its importance. Thus, Jaeggi claims that “The critique of ideology is not something that stands outside of social reality that is regarded as a constellation of delusion and deception; it is the instance that confronts us with the problems and contradictions of this reality in a way that is at the same time a ferment of their transformation” (80). Geuss is much more restrained, concluding only that “the construction of an empirically informed critical theory of society </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">might be </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a legitimate and rational human aspiration” (95). His other work since </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Idea of a Critical Theory</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, however, has consistently maintained the value of ideology critique as a part of “a political philosophy that can be taken seriously.”</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (</span><a href="https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?22ozBw" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Geuss, “Realism, Wishful Thinking, Utopia,” 233; see also, Geuss, </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Philosophy and Real Politics</span></a>.)</p></span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This investment in the utility or even necessity of ideology critique encourages the critic of ideology to emphasize – and perhaps to </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">over</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">emphasize – the importance of ideas to the construction and maintenance of domination. In this sense, the critic of ideology falls back into the position and characteristic errors Marx and Engels diagnosed in the ideologists. Ideologists, as superstructural workers, have a tendency to exaggerate the effectivity of their product, and to see themselves as closer to the center of social life than they really are. </span></span></span>William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-8207065419606631592022-02-07T14:33:00.001-05:002022-02-07T14:58:20.584-05:00On Lukács's construction of class consciousness<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjDNcqJgUwrxbeoe2PVHmfAkKYpAlfGUg2gcBnHwHLZuQ1drlCcw_C11dHpcyh5Xqy7UPsCGMlPoz3dGqaaP00IF7977gDZR_2Eb9t9cT28S1Wje0vtw9b9i8iFmM_N2e8Hhq_-rOGfR_yJ79Of5ivMy2uDNNWSgK-yoY-y6C7l-oZDa7lIHR5yK9u6=s463" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="463" data-original-width="440" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjDNcqJgUwrxbeoe2PVHmfAkKYpAlfGUg2gcBnHwHLZuQ1drlCcw_C11dHpcyh5Xqy7UPsCGMlPoz3dGqaaP00IF7977gDZR_2Eb9t9cT28S1Wje0vtw9b9i8iFmM_N2e8Hhq_-rOGfR_yJ79Of5ivMy2uDNNWSgK-yoY-y6C7l-oZDa7lIHR5yK9u6=s320" width="304" /></a></span></div><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />I did not write the following text with public presentation in mind – it was merely an exercise in trying to clarify for myself Lukács's arguments regarding class consciousness. However, since there have been a few requests on Twitter for me to explain at greater length some of my many objections to Lukács's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>History and Class Consciousness</i>, I thought it might be worthwhile to make this available for those who are interested. </span><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Because it originated as reading notes, what follows basically marches through the "Class Consciousness" essay from beginning to end. I do not, except right at the end, bring in anything from Lukács's other essays. I wanted only to make as clear as possible how the essay's argument unfolds. When I copy/pasted this into the blog editor, I lost all the footnotes – and hence all of the page citations – and all of the diacritical marks. I added a few of each back in (notes are at the end) but it was too tedious, so I gave up. Apologies for that! All quotations come from the standard Livingstone translation, but I have sometimes modified them. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">---</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lukács begins from Engels, but interprets Engels in a particular way. Engels makes two claims about historical materialism: that individual motives may spur individual action, but that they do little to determine collective outcomes; and that preceding historical causes drive the formation of individual motives. Lukács transmutes these claims into “the essence of scientific Marxism”: “the realization that the real motor forces of history are independent of man’s (psychological) consciousness of them.”</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He also takes Marx’s remark, from </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Capital</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, that reflection on human forms of life “begins </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">post festum</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">” to be specifically about “bourgeois thought.” Rather than a general claim about human beings acting first and seeking to understand afterwards, it becomes a specific claim about bourgeois “dogma.”</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> On this basis, he diagnoses a “dilemma” in bourgeois thought: either the social institutions of the bourgeois epoch become “fossilized” as the eternal form of society itself, or else “everything meaningful and purposive is banished from history,” which becomes a senseless series of fatalities.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lukács maintains that Marx has exposed this dilemma “as an illusion” cast by “man’s plight in bourgeois society,” wherein people are “at the mercy of the forces of production.”</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Marx reduces “the objectivity of the social institutions so hostile to people to relations between people,” and this is supposed by Lukács to “overcome the objectivity attributed both to social institutions inimical to man and to their historical evolution,” an overcoming which results in “the restoration of this objectivity to their underlying basis, to the relations between people.” “This objectivity,” Lukacs claims, is thereby revealed to be “the self-objectification of human society at a particular stage in its development.”</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is all incredibly unhelpful. It only brings Lukacs back to where he began. “Dialectical materialism,” he claims, “does not deny that people perform their historical deeds themselves and that they do so consciously. But, as Engels emphasizes in a letter to Mehring, this consciousness is false.”</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is not what Engels wrote to Mehring, however. Engels’s claim was much more limited. He wrote:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Engels is not discussing people in general, but ideologists in particular. As he continues in the next paragraph:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If Luther and Calvin “overcome” the official Catholic religion, or Hegel “overcomes” Fichte and Kant, or if the constitutional Montesquieu is indirectly “overcome” by Rousseau with his “Social Contract,” each of these events remains within the sphere of theology, philosophy or political science, represents a stage in the history of these particular spheres of thought and never passes outside the sphere of thought. And since the bourgeois illusion of the eternity and the finality of capitalist production has been added as well, even the victory of the physiocrats and Adam Smith over the mercantilists is accounted as a sheer victory of thought; not as the reflection in thought of changed economic facts but as the finally achieved correct understanding of actual conditions subsisting always and everywhere – in fact if Richard Coeur-de-Lion and Philip Augustus had introduced free trade instead of getting mixed up in the crusades we should have been spared five hundred years of misery and stupidity.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Engels is discussing the peculiar idealism that sees the movement of history as an ongoing argument in which certain intellectual developments supplant older forms of thought by winning ‘the battle of ideas.’ Engels’s point is twofold. The active life of doing and making both precedes the intellectual life of understanding and constructing arguments and this active life is the effective force behind changes in the realm of ideas. Practice precedes theory and drives theory; theory does not precede or drive practice. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lukacs turns these claims about theoretical systems into claims about consciousness as such. For Lukacs, action precedes and impels consciousness, and is misrecognized by the consciousness that accompanies it from behind, as it were. The historical objectivity of previous results – themselves unintended outcomes – impels us to act without any awareness of this real motive power. Thrown into the future by the accumulated force of the past, we act without knowing why we act. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lukacs, in essence, substitutes “history” for “ideology” in Engels’s claim. In Lukacs’s rewriting, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">history</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a process accomplished by the so-called </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">historical agent</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">historical</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This substitution of history for ideology leads up to Lukacs’s famous “twofold dialectical definition of ‘false consciousness’” and to his definition of class consciousness as “imputed” [zugerechnet] consciousness. Lukacs drives a wedge between “concrete investigation” of false consciousness and the examination of “the empirical individual” – be it “man, class, or people” – in order to discern the “empirically given (and hence psychological or mass-psychological) consciousness.” According to Lukacs, “concrete investigation” can only be carried out as an investigation in “relation to society as a whole.” </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Only when this relationship to the whole is kept in mind does the “dialectical definition” of false consciousness appear. The individual historical agent has a certain “</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">subjectively</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> justified” consciousness, a consciousness that is understandable as a response to the social situation in which agents find themselves. Nonetheless, this subjectively justified consciousness is partial, limited, and, to that extent, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">objectively</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> false. The historical agent cannot see the whole picture, and strives, therefore, for something it cannot achieve. Because of its objective falseness, this consciousness is not able to obtain its subjective aims, but – and this is where Lukacs pulls the rabbit out of the hat – what it </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">does</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> achieve are “the objective goals of social development, which it does not know and did not will.”</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This result depends upon rechristening the unintended outcome of intentional action as the intended outcome of the social totality’s action, the realization of history’s goal by the unwitting agency of individual people, classes, and nations.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> But this determination of, as it were, the total social consciousness does not yet give us </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">class</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> consciousness, which is supposed to be the object of this investigation. Class consciousness is discerned by moving back one step from the totality, by “infer[ing] the thoughts and feelings which people would have in a particular situation if they were able to assess both it and the interests arising from it in their impact upon immediate action and on the whole structure of society.” This counterfactual consciousness – the rational assessment and aims “appropriate to their objective situation” – gives us the form of imputed consciousness in general. Class consciousness proper comprises “the rationally appropriate reactions imputed to a particular typical position in the process of production.”</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first three moments of the dialectical definition of false consciousness gave us something intelligible: individuals acting on a partial understanding of the social whole and thereby achieving unintended results. Similarly here, Lukacs has so far given us something counterfactual but theoretically reasonable: a reconstruction of the consciousness that would be rational for a class-positioned agent with full information. But now he seems to pull another rabbit out of the hat, concluding that “the historically significant actions of the class as a whole are determined in the last resort by this consciousness and not by the thought of the individual.”</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, this might be salvageable in a way that the goal of social development is not. It may be that the irrational and inappropriate actions of class-located individuals amount to nothing, precisely because they are irrational and inappropriate. The rationally appropriate course of action for an individual capitalist is to pump as much surplus labor out of their workforce as possible. Any capitalist who is soft-hearted or soft-brained enough to slack up on the exploitation will lose market share and profitability to competitors who act in the rationally appropriate manner. Thus, the social action of the capitalist class as a whole will approximate to the rationally appropriate policy. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This result depends, however, on the operation of selection mechanisms like competitive markets. Do all class actors face analogous, clearly-defined collective action scenarios with dominant strategies?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No. And Lukacs admits as much. The section that follows his definition of (imputed) class consciousness details the failure of this model to generalize. “For pre-capitalist epochs and for the behavior of many strata within capitalism whose economic roots lie in pre-capitalism,” he begins, “class consciousness is unable to achieve complete clarity.” But this is the thin edge of the wedge. It is not just that the class consciousness of estates and castes is muddled by the “political and religious factors” that mediate their relationship to the economic basis of their existence. “There is,” in fact, “no possible position” within a pre-capitalist society “from which the economic basis of all social relations could be made conscious.*</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This veil between “the vantage point of a particular class” and “the totality of existing society,” a veil that precludes the formation of an actual class consciousness, does not afflict only pre-capitalist classes.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Even within capitalist society itself, most classes are so situated that their vantage point “is ambiguous or sterile.”</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> In the cases of the modern peasantry and petit bourgeoisie, “we cannot really speak of class consciousness,” since “a full consciousness of their situation would reveal to them the hopelessness of their particular striving.”</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> That is, there is no rationally appropriate and fully informed strategy in their situation. Only two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, are “pure classes,” capable of forming a real class consciousness. “Only from the vantage point of these classes,” Lukacs writes, “can a plan for the total organization of society </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">even be imagined</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.”</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> We can see here just how strongly Lukacs is attached to the notion of social totality (the complete information proviso in my reconstruction of his definition above). </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This attachment creates a paradox, however. Already we have seen that the causal force of class consciousness depends upon the operation of a selection mechanism that excludes all pre-modern classes from the set of class conscious historical agents. The totality condition has whittled this down further, leaving only the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. But it actually has ramifications beyond this. When the totality condition is combined with the selection mechanism, the bourgeoisie ends up in an impossible position. The bourgeoisie has a rationally appropriate strategy – maximize exploitation in order to maximize profits – that can be causally effective in determining the actions of individual members of the class, but this strategy is incompatible with complete information (or a infinitely reiterated game scenario), under which condition it turns into an irrational strategy. In Lukács’s terms, the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie “is cursed by its very nature with the tragic fate of developing an insoluble contradiction at the very zenith of its powers.”</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lukacs is himself very unclear on this point, and may not have understood the implications of his own argument here. The most plausible reconstruction is the most straightforward one: the bourgeoisie, in pursuing the rationally dominant strategy of maximizing profits, immiserates the working class and renders it incapable either of purchasing the products of its own labor (a demand-side theory of crises) or of reproducing its own labor-power (a supply-side theory of crises). In the words of the </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Manifesto</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, the bourgeoisie is “incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him.”</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lukacs adorns this conclusion with fancy dress, calling it a “dialectical” antagonism within bourgeois consciousness rather than a “contradictory” one,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> but the plain conclusion is that the bourgeoisie cannot possess a real class consciousness, either.** The position of the bourgeoisie in production is such that “if they were able to assess both [their situation] and the interests arising from it in their impact upon immediate action and on the whole structure of society,” they would not be able to find any rational strategy to pursue. The strategy that </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">seems</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> rational in guiding their immediate action is fatal in its ramifications on the whole structure of society. The bourgeoisie can have a class consciousness </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">only</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in the form of a “‘false’ consciousness.”***</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thus, Lukacs is driven to the conclusion that only one class in the history of humanity is capable of possessing class consciousness: the proletariat. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But then he is caught on the other side of the paradox that undid bourgeois class consciousness. The same selection mechanism that ensures bourgeois false consciousness prevails over the idiosyncratic motives of individual capitalists – the operations of market competition in the exchange of commodities – works against the determination of proletarian action by class consciousness. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The situation of the individual proletarian – or individual group of proletarians – exerts selective pressure to prioritize achievable local goals, such as better pay and better job security, over long-term and highly risky strategies like mobilizing for revolution. Lukacs knows this. He highlights it. He locates “in the center of proletarian class consciousness … and antagonism [</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Widerspruch</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">] between momentary interest and ultimate goal.”</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> But this just leads him to double down: “class consciousness is identical with neither the psychological consciousness of individual members of the proletariat, nor with the (mass-psychological) consciousness of the proletariat as a whole; but it is, on the contrary, the sense, become conscious, of the historical role of the class.”</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> In other words, the rationally appropriate strategy for anyone located in the class position of the proletariat is to recognize the long-term untenability of reforms to capitalism and to embrace revolutionary socialism. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But this is too convenient by half. Lukacs is simply presupposing that his theoretical construction of class consciousness – which assumes that one’s position in the process of production is the only aspect of one’s situation that gives rise to rationally appropriate strategies – is not only a) present to individual proletarians as an available psychological consciousness but also b) that the the analysis of the false consciousness endemic to all the other classes is both i) available to individual proletarians and ii) basically descriptive of the actual strategies pursued by those other classes, such that iii) proletarians can recognize it as the strategy being pursued. In other words, the rationally appropriate strategies (even when these are self-contradictory and hence not rational) are the actual strategies being pursued, and this fact is available to regular empirical consciousness. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This reveals two insuperable problems with Lukacs’s theory. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">First, he has to, in the case of the proletariat, violate his own strictures about keeping imputed class consciousness separate from empirical-psychological consciousness. He argues that “every momentary interest” of the proletariat is ambiguous – “either it will be a step towards the ultimate goal or it will conceal it” – and that what decides the matter is only “the class consciousness of the proletariat.”</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> But this only makes any sense if class consciousness has here come to mean the mass-psychological consciousness of empirically identified proletarians. The success of the proletarian revolutionary movement depends entirely upon “the ideological maturity of the proletariat, i.e., on its class consciousness,”</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> which can only mean on the psychological uptake of class consciousness. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thus, class consciousness as an imputed rationally appropriate strategy is impossible for all non-proletarian classes – since they cannot pursue a rational strategy given their social situation – but also impossible for the proletariat, since “the historically significant actions of the class as a whole are,” it turns out, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> “determined in the last resort by this consciousness” in contrast to “the thought of the individual,” but only by the becoming individual of this consciousness. The proletariat makes the whole world, and will make the whole world consciously just to the extent that individual proletarians become psychologically conscious of belonging to the class that makes the whole world. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Second, therefore, Lukacs’s construction of class consciousness reduces to a pure moralism. The imputed proletarian class consciousness is simply the capacity to rationally plan the totality of human society. This consciousness belongs to the proletariat because their situation in production is that they make the entire concrete world, the world of use-values, and are therefore able “to see society from the center, as a coherent whole.”</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> As they become psychologically conscious of this class consciousness, they form “revolutionary workers’ councils,” which embody “the economic an political defeat of reification,” since they tend to abolish all separations: “the bourgeois separation fo the legislature, administration, and judiciary,” as well as “the fragmentation of the proletariat in time and space” and the separation between “economics and politics.”</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> In short, the </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">real</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> proletarians, as soon as they are </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> conscious of being proletarian, will act in a </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> proletarian manner to consciously and methodically create the totality of society as a unity – and thereby also to cancel their existence as proletarians by eliminating classes altogether. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is pure moralism because it posits a form of consciousness that sees all, knows all, and acts only and always for the sake of humanity as a whole, and claims that the effectiveness of this consciousness “can only come about as the product of the – free – action of the proletariat itself.”</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> That the proletariat is capable of the conscious and unified creation of the social totality – the total planning of society – is simply a matter to be taken on faith. Any failure to rationally produce this planned society is a failure to achieve the self-canceling proletarian class consciousness. To ask </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">how</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> this consciousness proceeds to determine its acts is to admit that one does not possess this consciousness. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">* </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">HCC, 55-7. This is, in fact, a very interesting conclusion with far reaching implications. In many respects it foreshadows the arguments regarding the “moral economy” of the peasantry that emerged from New Left studies, including those of E.P. Thompson, Ranajit Guha, and James Scott. As Thompson put it at one point, “the contest for symbolic authority [between plebians and gentry] may be seen, not as a way of acting out ulterion ‘real’ contests, but as a real contest in its own right” (“Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class,” </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Social History</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> 3:2 [May 1978]: 159). The point is that in pre-capitalist conditions of production, it is not rationally appropriate for any class to ‘play the game’ – production, exploitation, and resistance to exploitation – economically. Under pre-capitalist (or incompletely capitalist) conditions, forms of economic ‘irrationality’ – cultures of prestige, traditional limits on production, ‘natural’ price-setting, etc. – are themselves rational.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: x-small;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">** </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The standard English translation is hopeless here. Lukács contrasts a </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">dialektischer Widerspruch</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to a </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">kontradiktorischer Widerspruch</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but Livingstone often translates </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Widerspruch</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> as “contradiction,” muddying the waters. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">***</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">HCC, 65. Thus, further down the same page, Lukács observes that, while the bourgeoisie is driven “to clarify its own class interest on every particular issue,” this “clear awareness” – class consciousness itself – “becomes fatal when it is extended to the question of the totality.”</span></p>William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-33119752989758938472021-11-17T12:29:00.004-05:002021-11-17T12:29:57.644-05:00Productivity and Science in Marx: A Response to John Ganz<p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let’s talk about science and the productive forces in Marx!</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">John Ganz provoked everyone a couple weeks back by tweeting, </span><a href="https://twitter.com/lionel_trolling/status/1455204693492256776" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">first</span></a><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, that Marx teaches us that “socialism and eventually communism is not supposed to be a more moral system, but such an abundantly more productive system that the moral issues that arise in capitalism no longer exist.” He followed that up with another </span><a href="https://twitter.com/lionel_trolling/status/1455523531379326979" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">banger</span></a><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: “people want marx to be the cool humanist political writer who references shakespeare etc. and ignore the cringe 19th century parts where he's like ‘this is actually all science,’ but they are both there,” </span><a href="https://twitter.com/lionel_trolling/status/1455524842673999876?s=20" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">adding</span></a><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that “taking the deterministic parts [of Marx] seriously is kind of more interesting, even if it creates big problems.” After merrily engaging in the pugilism for a while, he wrote up his argument </span><a href="https://johnganz.substack.com/p/marx-o-mania?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in essay form</span></a><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> on his Substack. </span></span></p><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I love some good Marxology, so I want to evaluate Ganz’s interpretive arguments. But I also want to say something about why these questions of science and productivity are politically important. In fact, I think two of the most important lessons we can take from Marx for contemporary emancipatory politics are embedded in these questions. So kudos to John for putting his finger on both of them – even if I am going to disagree with him about a number of issues. But also, the question of how best to relate to the thought of 19th century socialists like Marx is a motivating one for Ganz, and for me as well. </span></span></p><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ll take the issues in the same order they came up: production first, science second.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">Let’s establish some common ground first. Marx repeatedly and consistently maintains – and Ganz cites some of these passages in his essay – that the relations of production allow for the development of the forces of production, but that, as these forces of production develop, they come into conflict with the relations that have till then fostered them. At this point, the relations of production become fetters on the forces of production. This fettering continues until a social revolution transforms the relations of production into new relations, which can be forces- developing at this higher stage. Since socialism or communism is the highest stage of human development, and supercedes capitalism, it follows immediately that socialism </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">must</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, according to Marx, have more developed forces of production than capitalism does. This is Hist-Mat 101. </span></span></p><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The disagreements start as soon as we ask: what the hell does all of that mean? I study and teach Marx professionally and I will be the first to admit that Hist-Mat 101 sounds like a heaping bowl of word salad. Can we say the same things in a way that specifies the forces and relations of production, development, and fettering such that it sounds like anything other than a series of formulae? </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ganz implies that Hist-Mat 101 means that the sufficiently-developed productive powers of labor </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">cause</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> – that is, are necessary and sufficient conditions for the coming into being of – socialism. That’s how I understood his first missive. If socialism is so much more productive that the moral issues that arise in capitalism don’t come up, it seems that the increase in productive powers is what brings socialism about – otherwise the moral issues about how to distribute scarce goods would still be coming up under socialism. This is also why Ganz later insists that Marx is a determinist about history: the development of the productive powers of humanity follows a causally determinate and causally determining path, and social, political, and moral issues tag along for the ride but do no independent work.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is a respectable interpretation of Hist-Mat 101, with a long lineage. One of its greatest proponents was the young G.A. Cohen. His 1978 book, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, explicitly set out do give to the COMINTERN Marxism Cohen grew up with the most rigorous statement possible. I think it is fair to look to KMTH, therefore, to see the very best version of the argument Ganz is making.</span></span></p><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">According to Cohen’s version of Hist-Mat, the underlying trajectory of human history is the expansion of the productive power of humanity. Despite all local and temporary setbacks, there is a tendency for the forces of production to grow or develop. Since the productive forces produce use-values, of which there is no common measure, the development of the productive forces must be measured by “the amount of the day which remains after the laboring time necessary to maintain the producers has been subtracted” (Cohen, 2000, p. 61). The core of Hist-Mat, then, is this historical growth of our power to produce surplus time. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But Hist-Mat is scientific because it is explanatory: the core claim is supposed to </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">explain</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the form taken by the dominant relations of production or by the economic structure of society. Economic structures that allow or encourage this development in natural power win out over those economic structures that hamper this development. Hence, any socialist economic structure must be better able to produce surplus time than is capitalism. Hence, also, social revolutions can be premature, when the forces of production are not developed enough to support the relations of production introduced by the revolutionaries. In Cohen’s terms, social or economic power is </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">functional</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for productive power, and takes the form that is compatible with the current level of development of productive power.</span></span></p><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Except, that is, when it is not and does not. </span></span></p><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For it is also true that, as Cohen puts it, “the production relations are capable of fettering, that is, restricting the use and development of the productive forces” (2000, p. 41). During any period of time when fettering is occurring, “Dysfunctional relations persist” (p. 161). This dysfunctional state of affairs poses a significant difficulty for the Cohen/Ganz construal of historical materialism. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">During periods of fettering, the relations of production are </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> explained by their functionality for the forces of production on hand, since they are dysfunctional given those forces. Hence, during periods of fettering the perseverance of the economic structure, if it is to be explained at all, must be explained by </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">something other than the material powers</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></span></p><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Cohen thought the US was in a period of fettering in the late-1970s. According to Ganz, Marx thought that “the social organization of capitalism, with its class relations, was holding back or ‘fettering’ productive power” – and presumably this means in the England of the 1860s. That’s a lot of fettering! </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It seem that, according to Hist-Mat 101, fettering has been happening in the capitalist core for 150 years. The productive powers we have are incompatible with the economic structure we have, and call for a new economic structure, and yet the old economic structure persists. The moral issues that arise in capitalism </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">shouldn’t</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> be coming up now, and </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">shouldn’t have been</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> coming up for a while. The functional explanation of social power by natural power – the fundamental theorem of Hist-Mat 101’s social physics – is unable to explain anything that has happened in the capitalist core since Hist-Mat 101 was formulated. That seems bad.</span></span></p><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So maybe Marx and Cohen were both wrong, and fettering isn’t happening yet. Maybe the forces of production still have to develop for a while under capitalism before they will be sufficiently mighty to burst the constraints of the capitalist relations of production. Maybe?</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, maybe. But the basic problem with the causal reading of Hist-Mat </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">as a reading of what Marx was up to</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is that it makes politics apparently superfluous, and yet eighty percent of what Marx did in his life and in his writing was engage in politics and encourage the workers’ movement to engage in politics. In other words, if productive-forces causality is the right way to read Marx, then the consequence is not only that Marx was very wrong about the state of development of those productive forces, but also that he was fundamentally confused about his own argument, since he ought to have drawn the lesson that political struggle is epiphenomenal to the progress of the productive powers of labour. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rather than taking the development of the forces of production as </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">causal</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, though, Marx seems to have taken this development as </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">motivational</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. That is, the growing productive powers of cooperative and large-scale labour motivate the working class to organize themselves and to struggle for socialism, not because these powers make the moral issues that arise from capitalism – the question of how to distribute the needs of life – irrelevant, but because these powers make these questions more and more pressing. </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Or, to expropriate a phrase from Rosa Luxemburg, the development of the powers of production is indispensable to socialism, not because it renders superfluous the political tasks of socialism, but because it renders these political tasks both necessary and possible. </span></span></p><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The political tasks are necessary because the crises caused and threatened by these massive productive powers are increasingly existential. The political tasks are possible because the workers are increasingly aware of the scope of the problems and are increasingly able to communicate and organize with one another. If Marx was too optimistic about anything, it was not that humanity was on the cusp of an age of superabundance in which we wouldn’t have to fight over scarce resources any more, but that the working class was on the cusp of solving the collective action problems presented by the market economy through concerted, international, and solidaristic action. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is another side to Ganz’s claims, though. He also argues that Marx thought socialism (and then communism) would </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">cause</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a huge increase in productive powers, such that socialism would be “abundantly more productive than capitalism.” This was already implied, of course, in the notion of fettering, but it can also stand independently. Even if Marx did not think the growth of productive powers causes socialism, he might still have thought that socialism would cause such a massive increase in productive powers that everyone’s desires could be met without anyone ever having to weigh the tradeoffs or make hard decisions about whose desires ought to be satisfied. In the parlance of the internet, did Marx believe in fully automated luxury communism? </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let’s tackle the passage Ganz cites from Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” since this is not some explosion of youthful enthusiasm, but the argument of a man who had already written </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Capital</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Marx there writes:</span></span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!</span></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is certainly Marx at his most utopian, and he seems to express here a sort of cornucopianism. And yet, what has always stood out to me about this passage is that Marx is postponing the cornucopia to a distant time. What Louis Blanc wanted to institute immediately – from each according to his ability, to each according to his need – Marx is claiming could only become a reality after the division of mental and physical labour is overcome, after labour has become a thoroughly pleasurable activity, and after everyone has become capable of all manner of cooperative scientific work. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Far from being something that would be unlocked by the socialist revolution, this is a possibility that Marx kicks far down the road in order to emphasize, instead, how much work socialists will have to do to solve the tricky distributional questions that will arise immediately from a socialist economy. Fully automated luxury communism, if it is a possibility at all, is not an </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">immediate</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> possibility, suppressed by the social organization of capitalism. </span></span></p><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">On the question of science, finally, Ganz argues that “Marx viewed his own thought on analogy to or even an extension of the natural sciences.” These are two very different things, though. Ganz is on stronger ground when he emphasizes the analogies Marx draws between his own thought and the natural sciences. There is simply no doubting that. Like Hist-Mat 101, though, there is a question of what those analogies mean. Do they imply that Marx’s approach to history is positivistic or deterministic? </span></span></p><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Short answer: no. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There’s a lot of confusion about these issues generally. Marxists and anti-Marxists alike have claimed that Marx’s perspective, according to which “ the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history,” implies the elimination of free will or individual agency. I think it does not. As I wrote in in my book on </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Capital</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Marx’s Inferno</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">:</span></span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Marx does not argue that economic relations manipulate individuals like puppets, but that economic relations dominate their decision making. Commodity producers in a commercial society face competitive pressures from other producers. These competitive pressures predictably incentivize certain courses of actions. Moreover, competition replaces producers who are insufficiently susceptible to those incentives with producers more susceptible to them. Under these conditions, producers – regardless of their personal idiosyncrasies or perfect-world preferences – will tend to act on market incentives, and to be price sensitive in their decision making. Their agency remains intact. They continue to make decisions based on their beliefs and desires, and to have all the characteristics attributed to persons by the standard accounts of agency. But they are not, for all that, fit to be held responsible for their actions in view of the market. They are not </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">forced </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to act as they do, but they are subject to a kind of hazard that rules out discursive deliberation except within arbitrarily narrow parameters. (p. 96)</span></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The question of determinism is whether prior causes compel human action, or whether, on the contrary, humans are able to choose from among courses of action. Denying determinism does not require denying the causal order or the explicability of human action; rather, it requires only the denial that causation implies compulsion. The issue is complicated in Marx because – like many of his major influences, such as Adam Smith and Hegel – his social theory is centrally an exploration of the unintended outcomes of intentional action, or the various ways in which the action of human beings is transmuted, by macro-social processes of aggregation, into scenarios in which it doesn’t seem to matter what any individual does. Smith and Hegel tended to focus on the positive outcomes of these scenarios – this is Smith’s invisible hand and Hegel’s cunning of reason. Marx was more interested in the negative outcomes – the negative externalities of economies centered on a market in labour-power. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Neither of these perspectives imply determinism, however. And neither does Marx’s faith in the inevitably of socialism. As G.A. Cohen </span><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2397783" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">put it</span></a><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Marx believed socialism was inevitable, not no matter what people did, but precisely because the proletariat had good reasons to bring it about and would, being rationally concerned with their well-being and the well-being of future generations, figure out how to bing it about. Human agency is what </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">makes</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> socialism inevitable, and so the inevitability of socialism cannot deny human agency. </span></span></p><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The question of positivism is a bit different. Positivism in the social sciences is the doctrine a) that the methods and modes of inquiry appropriate to the natural sciences are also appropriate to the social sciences, b) that the goal of all science is causal explanation and prediction, and c) that there is a fundamental distinction between science and everyday cognition or “common sense.” All of these elements of positivism can be given more or less strict constructions – so you might think that only experimental methods can arrive at scientific knowledge, or you might think that a wide range of empirical methodologies are adequate to the task. </span></span></p><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Marx certainly adheres to the third element of the positivist program: he constantly reiterates that, if simple observation of the apparent surface of the world were adequate for knowledge, no science would be possible. Science always penetrates the appearances of things in order to reveal the true order, which both differs from and explains how things appear. This is true of astronomy and it is true of political economy. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a sense, Marx also adheres to the second element of the positivist program: explaining and predicting the course of events is certainly Marx’s interest. However, this is complicated by what I said above. Marx thinks human beings act in more-or-less predictable ways, but this is predicated on them seeing and understanding their rational interests in a certain way, which cannot be taken for granted. The intelligent political action of a few can change how a huge multitude see their interests, and scientific works can do the same. Since Marx’s aim in writing and publishing </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Capital</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was to have just such an effect as this – to change how the working class movement saw its situation and ints interests – there is a fundamental tension between Marx’s project and positivism. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But it is regarding to the first element of the positivist program that Marx most obviously diverges: he denes that the same methods and modes of inquiry are appropriate to scientific inquiry into the natural and the social world. One of his most famous invocations of science indicates this quite clearly. In the preface to the first edition of </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Capital</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Marx </span><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">writes</span></a><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, by way of a caution to the reader: </span></span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences. To understand the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will, therefore, present the greatest difficulty. That which concerns more especially the analysis of the substance of value and the magnitude of value, I have, as much as it was possible, popularised. The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it all, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But in bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour — or value-form of the commodity — is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy.</span></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="background-color: white; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The lines I have emphasized indicate why it is misleading to assimilate Marx’s project to positivism. The methods he advocates and uses are essentially and necessarily different from the methods of the natural sciences. Experimentation and the isolation and observation of empirically identifiable objects and events are, according to Marx, inappropriate to the task of scientifically understanding the laws of motion of capitalist production. </span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For all of these reasons, I think that Ganz is incorrect – or only superficially and partially correct – in his treatment of Marx. Marx was not a determinist about history, nor was he a productive forces determinist about socialism. He was not a positivist. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nonetheless, I think Ganz is exactly right that Marx’s emphasis on scientific inquiry, his denigration of the effectiveness of moral transformation, and his hard-nosed insistance that socialism has material prerequisites do indeed mark out “</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1a1a1a; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">what is so radical, strange and distinctive about Marx as a thinker, what it is that makes him still fun to read and compelling in the 21st century.” I think he is right that there is a real resistance and even embarrassment among many on the Left, including on the socialist and communist Left, about these aspects of Marx’s work. </span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #1a1a1a; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">However, I think this resistance and embarrassment stem, at least in part, from the very conflations – of science with positivism, explanation with determinism, and the material prerequisites of socialism with accelerationist faith in the autonomy of productivity – of which Ganz’s provocation is guilty. </span></span></p>William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-57774273099190103852019-05-24T14:35:00.001-04:002019-05-24T14:35:28.968-04:00On “Doing better in arguments about sex, gender, and trans rights”<br />
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This is a response
to the essay published on Medium yesterday by <span style="letter-spacing: -0.05pt;"><a href="https://medium.com/@s.r.allen" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Sophie Allen</span></a>, <a href="https://janeclarejones.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Jane
Clare Jones</span></a>, <a href="https://hollylawford-smith.org/media/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Holly Lawford-Smith</span></a>, <a href="https://philarchive.org/archive/ALLOAA-3" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Mary Leng</span></a>, <a href="https://rebeccarc.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Rebecca Reilly-Cooper</span></a>,
and <a href="https://medium.com/@kathleenstock" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Kathleen Stock</span></a>.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">I probably shouldn’t do this,
but… The authors claim that they want to have a good faith conversation. And a
number of people who I know, or know of, and who I respect or take seriously
are linking to this and taking that claim at face value. For the sake of those
people, and other people of good faith who don’t know what to make of the very
loud and very sharp arguments about trans rights, I think it might be worth
saying something.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">I am not a woman. I am not
trans. I am a feminist – my earliest conversion experience was reading Andrea
Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. I love very dearly a little trans girl who I
hope grows up in a world where she is safe and free, or at least has a
righteous and fierce community of people fighting at her side for safety and
freedom. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">My response follows the authors’ essay point for point, for the most
part, but it gets away from me a bit at the end. Anyway, I hope this is helpful
for someone besides me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">Section one: fallacious arguments<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">1. ‘Your position has been historically
associated with far right-wing thought, and hence fails’.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">The authors write: “Associating our intellectual position with a far
right-wing one, because some far right-wing thinkers would agree with us in
some of our conclusions, and insinuating that our position is all the worse
because of it, is an ad hominem. Ad hominems are widely recognised as
inappropriate in philosophy.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">Political arguments are
different from purely philosophical arguments. The fact that one group of
political advocates makes the same, or similar, arguments as another –
politically dangerous and loathsome – group is not irrelevant to the political assessment
of those arguments. It is true that “the fact that person shares a conclusion
with a far right-wing person could never show, on its own, that the conclusion
was false.” However, when people claim “that women, by definition, are adult
human females,” and conclude, on this basis, that “no trans woman is correctly
categorised as a woman,” this is not like happening to agree with a far right
wing person about what day of the week it is. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">The “gender critical”
position is a reactionary political position – in the sense that it is a
“backlash” position, reacting to trans people’s progress towards social and
political liberation – which politically aligns with the efforts of the
far-right to naturalize social differences and make outcast groups more
vulnerable to physical and economic harm. No doubt most, if not all, “gender
critical feminists” regard themselves as being on the left, and find it
disconcerting at the least to be accused of holding a reactionary position. But
this has happened before. When radical feminists, in the ‘80s, made common
cause with the Christian Right in the US to attack pornography and the sex
trade, they were rightly criticized for taking a reactionary position, a position
that hurt women – especially the most vulnerable women – more than it helped.
The same goes for the current “gender critical” backlash against trans women:
some left feminists are taking a bad position out of a misguided and mistaken
belief that, in order to protect cis women from sexual violence, they have to police
the bodies and movement of trans women. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">2. ‘You are biological essentialists’<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">According to the authors, to
call the “gender critical” view “‘biological essentialism’ is a misnomer.
Moreover, it is a misnomer apparently rhetorically designed to draw some of the
harsh criticism which appears in progressive circles about biological
essentialism, in the true sense, onto the view that women, definitionally, are
adult human females.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">Frankly, I don’t understand
what this rejoinder is trying to accomplish. If the “gender critical” position
is that all and only women are adult human females, and if “female” is supposed
to denote a set (or cluster) of biological traits, then why doesn’t it follow
that “womanhood” is “biologically produced”? The “gender critical” position is
that to be a woman is to be a member of a biological sex category. To call this
position “biologically essentialist” is not a “misnomer,” and it is certainly
not a “fallacy.” Calling the position biologically essentialist does not mean
it is wrong, of course! The critics of the “gender critical” position disagree
that “womanhood” is a matter of biology alone, and calling the “gender
critical” position biologically essentialist <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">signals</i> this disagreement, but is not yet an argument for the
social (co-) determination of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>womanhood.
The authors call their position “realism about biological sex categories”; the
critics call it “biological essentialism.” The authors’ preferred term implies
that social constructivism about womanhood is a form of anti-realism. This is
no more or less a “fallacy” than calling their realism “essentialist.” These
are disagreements, not fallacies!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">3. ‘You want to reduce women to their
genitalia, or to womb-possession’.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">“None of us,” the authors
maintain, “hold a view according to which either a woman or a female is defined
as such by her current possession of a particular configuration of genitalia,
womb, or any other single primary sex characteristic, for that matter. … In the
light of this, the correct question should be, not ‘Do we ‘reduce’ women to
their genitalia, or wombs?’ but ‘Do we ‘reduce’ women to a cluster of primary
sex characteristics?’”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">I disagree. The real question
is actually this: how do we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">police</i>
women? When and how do we – in our social and political arrangements and
institutions – stop people and ask them if they are “really” women or not? The
authors are concerned to keep (some) people who claim to be women out of (some)
“women only” spaces and institutions. In practice, that means looking in
people’s underpants. It means empowering the police, social workers, volunteers,
and people on the street to demand to know what is between other people’s legs.
That is what the critics of the “gender critical” position are practically concerned
about when they say that “gender critical” feminists “reduce women to their
genitalia.” They are concerned that, to the extent that the “gender critical”
feminists get their way, people who claim to be women will be asked – in order
to access social services and facilities – to prove it by displaying their
genitals to someone or another. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">4. ‘You think there is a “right way” to be,
as a woman/ lesbian/ mother’ (etc.).<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">The authors think that this objection “trades on an ambiguity between
two separate senses of the word ‘right’: <i>normatively right</i> versus <i>descriptively
right (i.e. descriptively correct). </i>As such, it’s another rhetorical
move. It can quickly and unfairly bring to the reader’s mind a metaphor of our
gatekeeping for a special club </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">—</span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">‘</span><b><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">you</span></b><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"> can come in, but
not <b>you</b>!’.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">The “gender critical” feminists
object, “To say that we think there is a definition of femaleness or womanhood
is not to say that there is a ‘right way’ for females or women to be, in any
normative sense.” Ah, but it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> to
say that there are people who shouldn’t call themselves women, and that the
police should be able to check your papers (or your genitals) to see whether or
not you are authorized to call yourself a woman. The “gender critical”
definition of womanhood is normative in this sense: it is political and
enforceable. It is, indeed, gatekeeping, and it does say, precisely, “you can
come in, but not you!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">5. ‘You are transphobic’; or ‘You may not be
transphobic but your views are’.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">The authors want you to know
that their views are not motivated by “an attitude of disgust, fear, or
revulsion towards trans people because they are trans people,” and that their
trans friends agree with them – and not “for self-hating reasons.” I’m happy to
accept their report of their own – and their friends’ – introspection. I would
ask, in return, that when someone tells them that they are a woman or a girl, the
authors would accept this self-report and not call the police to check on the
status of their genitalia. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">6. ‘You think all or most trans women are
violent against cis women’.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">“This is a straw man,” the
authors claim, “and none of us have ever said this, or think it’s true.” Rather,
the authors are worried about what might happen, (1) “in a culture where it
becomes increasingly widely known that sex-self-ID (with or without a Gender
Recognition Certificate), rather than birth sex, is the determiner of entry/
lack of entry for biological males into woman-only spaces where females undress
or sleep, and so are particularly vulnerable.” They are also worried about (2)
“those who, we predict, would socially transition opportunistically for
sinister motives, if the proposed changes to the UK Gender Recognition Act were
to go ahead.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">This is the real nub of the issue, I think. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">The authors – and I am
willing to believe them on this – are not worried about trans women per se, but
about opportunistic and predatory men. They are worried that opportunistic and
predatory men will take advantage of a culture in which we believe people when
they say they are women, and use that trust to harm and abuse women and
children. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">When stated this way</span></i><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">, I think this concern is reasonable. All social
institutions and norms are susceptible to opportunistic abuse, and it is worth
our while to think about how any reconfiguration of social institutions and
norms might be abused by the unscrupulous. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">However, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mutatis mutandis</i>, the same scrutiny should be applied to our
current social institutions and norms, the ones trans activists and organizers
want to change. And this is where, I think, the limits of the “gender critical”
position become stark. The authors simply show no awareness of how the current
regime of gender policing harms trans and gender creative people, or how gender
policing itself exposes women and children – including trans women and children
– to predatory violence. And because they do not express any sympathy or
understanding for what trans people are going through – the harassment, abuse,
mockery, and violence they are trying to protect themselves from – the authors
end up giving the impression – against their beliefs and intentions – that
trans women are dangerous to cis women. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">I accept that the authors do
not think all or most trans women are violent towards cis women, but they
manifestly do think that trans women are a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">vector</i>
for the endangerment of cis women. The authors think that if we start believing
women when they say they are women – if we stop policing self-reported
womanhood, stop asking for proof – then cis women will be at greater risk of
sexual violence. The women who say “believe me when I say I am a woman” are
dangerous to women: that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> the
“gender critical” position. And the authors have not at all grappled with – or
even realized – the fact that this position is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">reasonably</i> taken to be deeply offensive to trans people, and is a
barrier to working with trans people on solving the common problem of how to
make people safe and secure and free.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">7. ‘No true trans woman is ever violent’
(See also: ‘No detransitioned person was ever really trans’)<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">I have never seen an example of this argument, so I am not sure what the
authors are actually responding to. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">8. ‘Women get attacked and aggressed in
women-only spaces anyway’.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">All people have an interest
in being safe from physical and sexual assault. There are ways of making women-only
spaces safe that do not rely upon policing people’s genitals. Moreover, an
overall assessment of how safe women-only spaces are should include the safety
of those excluded by a policing regime as well as those admitted. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">9. ‘Why don’t you want to exclude lesbians
from women-only spaces too?’<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">The authors get into trouble here for a couple reasons. First, they claim
that “We aren’t arguing for the exclusion of lesbians from women-only spaces,
because as far as we know, there is no documented statistical pattern of
lesbian violence or aggression towards other females, whereas there is such a
documented pattern of male violence.” This implies that there is “documented
statistical pattern” of trans women violence or aggression towards other women.
There is no such documented pattern, and asserting that there is would cause
problems for the authors’ denial, above, that they think all or most trans
women are violent against cis women. The authors could reply that statistically
elevated risk does not imply that all or most trans women are violent. But it
won’t do to justify a categorical regime of gender policing on the basis of a
statistical risk – this is why racial profiling schemes are not only evil but
also counterproductive. Sam Harris embarrassed himself repeatedly arguing for
profiling observant Muslims after 9/11. Profiling doesn’t work.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">Second, the authors also
claim that “</span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">‘</span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">lesbian-free spaces</span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">’</span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"> would be impractical as an
imposed social norm, since there</span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">’</span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">s no even roughly reliable way of visually identifying lesbians and
differentiating them from non-lesbians. In contrast, we do have a
rough-and-ready way of visually identifying males in women-only spaces. It
isn’t perfect, and will regrettably cause misgendering in some cases; but no
such system could be perfect, and we consider something as better than nothing.”
This is simply begging the question. The critics of the “gender critical”
position are arguing that the harm caused by not believing people when they say
they are women is not merely regrettable but horrendous, and that letting people
go to the bathroom or changing room where they are most comfortable would be
significantly better than what we do now. That is, they are denying that the “something”
we have is “better than nothing” – or, rather, they are denying that “nothing”
is the relevant alternative. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">10. ‘You need to understand why trans women
are angry with you’.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">I actually cannot bring myself to dignify this set of remarks – which are
solipsistic and condescending in equal measure – with a response. Sorry. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">11. ‘You are making violence to trans people
more likely by your writing’.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">12. ‘Trans rights are not like a pie; no-one
gets less pie if trans people have rights’.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">These points go together. The
authors claim to “recognise two sets of rights and interests, those of trans
women and women,” and to be “determined to foster a public conversation which
takes both into account.” They treat these interests as if there were simply a
zero-sum trade-off between them, however: “we <i>do </i>think that
giving the social and/or legal capacity to male-bodied people to self-identify
into woman-only spaces and resources, will take something substantial away from
women, given a wider context of misogyny in society. That is precisely our
point.” And they show no willingness to trade the interests of cis women for
the interests of trans women: “We therefore request that society finds some
other, better route to realising trans rights, compatible with realising the
rights of women to lives free of harm.” I’m not sure, then, how this is
supposed to foster a public conversation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">13. ‘Feminists have already had the
discussion without you, and established that trans women are women’<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">The authors refuse to “defer
to” recent feminist scholarship. That is their right. I think the objection,
however, is that they do not try to engage with it or to understand what
motivates it. More on this below.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">Section two: bad analogies<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">1. ‘In the past, some people used to think
black women weren’t real women. These days, some people now think that trans
women aren’t real women. But black women are women, and so are
trans women’.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">2. ‘Excluding trans women from women-only
spaces is like excluding black people from whites-only spaces’.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">3. ‘Excluding trans women from women-only
spaces is like excluding refugees or immigrants from the UK’.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">4.‘ Trans women stand to women as adoptive
parents stand to parents’.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">5. ‘Arguing that you can’t be both a trans
woman and a lesbian resembles the historical claim that you can’t be both a
real woman and a lesbian’.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">The arguments presented by the authors here cluster around three sets of
claims. First, the authors claim that trans women’s full moral personhood is
not denied them – either by society at large or, at least, by the “gender
critical” position. Second, the authors deny that the position of trans women
is one of special vulnerability (at least vis-à-vis cis women). Third, the authors
reassert that theirs is not a normative definition of womanhood, but a purely
descriptive definition. I will take these in turn.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">(1) Moral personhood: One of
the most persistent theoretical complaints I have seen about the “gender
critical” position is that it operates with an incredibly simplistic and inadequate
notion of oppression. This complaint seems to be substantiated by these sections
of this essay. The reader is told that, during the era of New World slavery, black
women were denied the status of “womanhood” insofar as “black women weren’t the
sort of female white people should be interested in, or care about, or value.
That is, it was a move which denied black women full moral personhood in the
eyes of white people, and positioned them as undeserving of human rights.” After
the end of slavery, “black people were historically subject to segregation
because white people denied their full and equal humanity.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">But, the authors assure us, the
“gender critical” position is not “that trans women don’t have full moral
personhood. We emphatically and repeatedly assert that they do, emphasising
their full human rights.” “The question is not whether they are human,” the
authors continue, “but whether they are <i>female</i>, and on the basis of
being female should be able to access spaces designed to protect the
comparatively greater vulnerability of female people.” “No one thinks a man is
denied his full and equal humanity merely because women-only spaces exist, and
the same reasoning applies to trans women. Not giving people everything that
they desire is not a denial of their humanity.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">Wow. I don’t think the authors
have thought through what having your full and equal humanity denied might
actually look like. It doesn’t, generally, mean that people deny that you are
actually human. That <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">does</i> happen, of
course, especially in rhetorical or polemical forms. But slaveowners never
doubted for a second that black women were human – otherwise they would not
have raped them systematically in order to breed more slaves. Enslaved black
women could very well be the daughters and granddaughters of their masters.
Their masters knew well enough that they were dealing with human beings. Nonetheless,
“black women weren’t the sort of female white people should be interested in,
or care about, or value.” Their wants, their desires, their interests didn’t
count for anything in white people’s eyes. And nor did they count for anything in
the eyes of the law. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">“Not giving people everything
that they desire is not a denial of their humanity.” True. But not taking
people’s desires seriously, discounting what they say they need, dismissing
their self-reports about what is most important to them – that is exactly what
denying people’s humanity has looked like historically. <br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">(2) Social positioning: The
authors have a fall-back position, though: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">Second, racial segregation
was an exercise of power by a culturally dominant group against a culturally
subordinated group. The dominant used their power to keep the subordinate out.
Women are not a culturally dominant group; rather, they are a culturally
subordinated group. When they act to maintain women-only spaces, we judge that
they act to maintain protections that are important in light of their status.
At best, trans women are a distinct subordinated group; at worst, trans women
are members of the dominant group. At best, exclusion is a lateral move; at
worst, it is an ‘upwards’ move. In neither case is it a ‘downwards’ move, and so
in neither case is it comparable to racial segregation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">The authors use the same sort
of argument to dismiss the analogy between the exclusion of trans women and the
exclusion of refugees and migrants. They shouldn’t, because it is a very bad
argument. They are, of course, right that racial segregation – and the xenophobic
exclusion of migrants – are exercises of power by a dominant group. But notice that
some of the people doing the segregating and border-closing are women (members
of a subordinate group) and some of the people being segregated and excluded
are men (members of a dominant group). Notice, also, that some of the folks in
Britain (and the US) most supportive of a harshly exclusive immigration regime
are poor and working class folks, and that some of the most virulent and
violent opposition to integration in the US came from poor and working class
folks. Just because you are a member of a subordinated group doesn’t mean you
don’t have anything to lose – or anything you think you might lose if you don’t
jealously guard it against newcomers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">Anyone who doesn’t realize
this, I submit, hasn’t thought very much about how systems of social power
work, or about how they cut across and complicate one another. There is even a
bog-standard keyword of recent feminist research that names this incredibly
common phenomenon. You know the one. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">Anyway, for our authors to
deny that trans people – especially trans women, and especially poor trans
women and trans women of color – are “desperately vulnerable, and seek to
access better life chances,” for them to deny that many trans people are
desperate to pass – and go to great lengths to “exaggerate” their femininity or
masculinity in order to avoid being “clocked” as trans – in order to avoid street
harassment, assault, and worse, for them to deny that having a bathroom or a
locker-room where you “belong” and where you are safe from harassment is a valuable
“privilege” – well, yeah, that looks pretty “callous.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">(3) Pure description: Finally,
the authors are at pains to impress upon us that “Our claim is a descriptive
claim about category membership. It isn’t the claim that trans women don’t
match some stereotypical sociocultural norms of womanhood.” Hence, also, “our
arguing that a person can’t be both a trans woman and a lesbian is not done on
the basis of our covertly assenting to some norm or stereotype about womanhood.
Rather, our argument that a person can’t be both a trans woman and a lesbian is
grounded in a claim about descriptive conditions upon the category of lesbians.”
They’re just describing the world, okay?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">In response to the suggestion
that “trans women stand to women as adoptive parents stand to parents,” the authors
respond that this “begs the question against the gender critical position.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">Both adoptive parents and
biological parents have in common that they <i>actually have </i></span><i><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">—</span></i><i><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"> or have had </span></i><i><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">—</span></i><i><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"> children that they parent</span></i><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">. To accept that trans women
are to natal women as adoptive parents are to biological parents suggests then
that there is something essential to womanhood that they both share. But this
is precisely what is at issue between us and our critics, so that the analogy
settles nothing on its own.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;">But I think we haves seen that there may be something “essential to
womanhood” that both trans and cis women – even “gender critical” women – do share
– and I think the authors have shown us this. It is the conjoint desire to
belong to the category “woman” and to escape from the terrible burden of belonging
to that name. This is what Marilyn Frye calls “the double bind.” I am not a
woman. I am not trans. I am not speaking from any experience of my own. But I
have studied and learned from and loved and listened to women and trans people,
and I think I see a pattern. When a person calls herself a woman, and wants to
be seen as a woman, and yet fears the social punishment that comes with being a
woman, and rails against the limits imposed on women – I think that person is a
woman. And I think we should both treat her as a woman and not treat her as a
woman, because women aren’t treated well, and the only thing worse than being
treated as a woman might be being treated as not quite a woman, or a failed
woman. And if the authors can’t see that, well… I’m sorry, but I don’t think
they are going to contribute to “more fruitful discussion from now on.”</span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-8843674763825710222019-04-12T10:16:00.001-04:002019-04-12T10:16:31.420-04:00Free time and free people: on Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom<br />
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">According to
Martin Hägglund, Marx provides us with “the greatest resources for developing a
secular notion of freedom.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> This assessment hinges on two
claims. First, a “commitment to individual freedom” is “the foundation” of
Marx’s work.</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> Second, Marx’s particular development
of the idea of freedom is more fecund for the project of caring for the secular
world than any other. In other words, freedom was central for Marx, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> Marx ought to be central for our
understanding of freedom. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I am very
much in agreement with both of these headline claims, and, therefore, very
sympathetic to Hägglund’s project. But the devil is in the details, and I would
like to specify both what freedom meant for Marx and what Marx might mean for our
freedom struggles in slightly different terms than Hägglund does. To sum it up
in a phrase, I want to prise open a distinction between two interpretations of
Marx: Hägglund’s Marx, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">democratic</i>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">socialist</i>, and my Marx, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">social republican</i>. I then want to ask whether
these two Marxes might be married – or, at least, made to cohabit – without
being conflated. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In order to
do this, I will pursue three interlocking questions: one Marxological, one
conceptual, and one political. (1) Is Marx’s commitment to “the free
development of individualities” identical with his commitment to individual
freedom?</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> (2) Is the socialist critique of
liberalism fully immanent, in the sense that it simply exposes liberalism’s own
self-contradictory attachment to forms of social mediation that thwart the
liberal commitment to individual freedom? (3) Are the political institutions of
socialism best understood as “how we express our priorities and our conception
of value”?</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> I think the answer to each of these
must be “no,” and that this entails some significant – but friendly –
amendments to Hägglund’s democratic socialism. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="page-break-after: avoid; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">1<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">As Hägglund
eloquently argues, the free development of individuals – what Marx called “real
freedom” – depends upon free time, or “how much time we have to lead our lives.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> Free time, as Hägglund also argues,
is not idle time, or time free from work, free from commitment, or free from
the constraints that come with work and commitment. Rather, free time is that
surplus of time in which we can commit ourselves to the work we want to do for
its own sake. Attention to this – the human use of free time – is the beating
heart of Hägglund’s book. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The only
consideration I want to add is this: being subject to a dominating power means that
your time is not your own, and that your time is, therefore, not free. This is
obviously true of the enslaved, who have no free time – even when they have no
work to do – since they are always at the beck and call of the slave holder.
But think also of the time- and attention-consuming maneuvers and activities
women undertake on a daily basis to avoid sexual assault and harassment in our
male-dominated society. Vulnerability to alien power degrades time, eating it
up with anxieties and strategies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I introduce
this consideration in order to stave off an easy misunderstanding of Marx’s
distinction between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. If we ask
how the line between the two realms is drawn, or what might allow people to
move it in one way or the other, there is a temptation to focus on three
factors: technology, labor exploitation, and ethics. From within this
framework, the realm of necessity may be reduced by applying labor-saving technology,
by reducing or eliminating the coercive appropriation of other people’s labor,
and by refusing to treat “all my activities merely as means.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What goes
missing from this reading of the freedom/necessity distinction is Marx’s denial
that the modern ruling class of capitalists enjoys free time, and that this
absence of freedom among the ruling class is not due to insufficient
technology, the exploitation of the capitalists’ labor, or to an ethical lapse
on their part. This class is made up of “rough, half-educated parvenus,”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> as Marx puts it, not the free
persons of antiquity, because capitalists are market-dominated producers,
attentive to the shifting whims of supply and demand, and consequently anxious
to accumulate lest they go under.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Marx wants
to turn this fact to the advantage of the workers’ movement. Labour
organizations should fight for shorter working days in order that the workers
themselves will have the time and resources to educate and develop themselves
politically, but also so as to keep the market pressure on capitalists high.
This will, Marx argues, speed both the development of productive technology, as
competition on productivity heats up, and the concentration of capital, as less
capital-intensive firms go under. This strategy hinges on the capitalists’
domination by the market and consequent lack of free time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Market
domination, therefore, is central to Marx’s understanding of the dynamics and
harms of the capitalist mode of production. His arguments in this regard can,
and should, be extended. If domination by the market corrodes and destroys free
time, this is not because of some special quality of the market but because of
the typical quality of domination. I am dominated wherever I am vulnerable to
uncontrolled interference from another or others, whether or not they exercise
their power of interfering.</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> Being dominated gives agents a
special set of reasons to consider in their actions: how will my dominator(s)
react to what I am doing? Will they use their power against my projects? How?
Regardless of what I want to do, a new sort of uncertainty or anxiety hangs
over my plans, intentions, and desires. Therefore, to Hägglund’s argument that
“anyone who is committed to being an agent is committed to increasing her realm
of freedom and decreasing her realm of necessity,”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> we can add that she is equally
committed to decreasing the domination to which she is subject. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For this
reason, it is not enough for Marx to say, as he does in the manuscript for
Volume Three, that increasing the realm of freedom requires, as a prerequisite,
“socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their
interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of
being ruled by it as by the blind forces of nature; and achieving this with the
least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy
of, their human nature.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
It is crucial to add, as he did in Volume One, that “the shape of the social
life-process, i.e., of the material production process, only strips off its
mystical haze when it becomes the product of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">freely associated</i> human beings, standing under their conscious,
methodical control.</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="DE" style="mso-ansi-language: DE;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="DE" style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: DE; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[12]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What is
really distinctive about Marx’s political project is not his desire for
capacious and equitably distributed free time, or his belief that we should
exercise conscious, methodical control over the material production process.
These are widely held socialist goals. What is distinctive is that he holds <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">free association among producers</i> to be
the fundamental precondition for both of these goals. Marx’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">free association</i> evokes the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">free city</i> of republican thought, an
association of people, insulated from dominating power, who cooperate in
ordering their social and natural world. This is what Marx – following the
working-class militants of 1848 – called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the
social republic</i>, or the republic of labour. It is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">social</i> republic because it extends republican government – “the
republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal
producers”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[13]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> – into the heart of society, the
factories and workshops. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">None of this
contradicts anything in Hägglund’s reconstruction of Marx. But it is absent,
and I worry that its absence betrays an apolitical tendency in Hägglund’s
democratic socialism. Individual freedom, for Marx, was both the freedom to
develop one’s powers and capacities in an open-ended way <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> the freedom from domination that is the prerequisite for free
development. Association free from domination is the political basis of
socialism on Marx’s account. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Hence, my
answer to the first question: individual freedom from domination ought not be
identified with “the free development of individualities,” since it is a
prerequisite of this free development.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="page-break-after: avoid; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">2<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Even with
this amendment, my argument supports Hägglund’s contentions that individual
freedom is of fundamental importance to Marx, and, futher, that this
underscores the proximity between Marxian socialism and liberalism. At several
points in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This Life</i>, Hägglund
portrays this proximity in Hegelian fashion: Marx’s critique of liberalism is
an immanent one that takes liberalism’s own principle – individual freedom –
and shows how this principle is incompatible with liberalism’s commitment to
capitalism. Liberals must choose, then, the true object of their fidelity:
freedom, or capitalism? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I am
resistant to this move, however. It makes liberals out to be either
socialists-who-haven’t-yet-realized-it or bad-faith actors, who <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">talk</i> about freedom, but actually care
only about higher rates of profit. I certainly think there are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">some</i> liberals who fit each of those
descriptions, but I also think that there are liberals who understand freedom
in a genuinely different way. The disagreement between liberals (of this sort)
and socialists (of Hägglund’s sort) is deeper than Hägglund’s presentation lets
on, and, therefore, Hägglund’s critique does not, I think, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">touch</i> these liberals in the way that an immanent critique aspires
to. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Hägglund’s
text betrays what I think is the real fault-line, in Chapter Six, when he claims
that Hayek “reduces <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">freedom</i> to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">liberty</i>.” By this, Hägglund means that
Hayek believes people are free so long as they are not “directly coerced.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[14]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> This distinction between freedom and
liberty, however, appears nowhere else in Hägglund’s book. This passage,
therefore, seems to evince a slight anxiety about how Hayek fits in to the
immanent critique of liberalism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This is
reinforced by the surrounding argument. Hayek comes up in the course of Hägglund’s
argument that “the major liberal thinkers of political economy – Mill, Rawls,
Keynes, and Hayek – unwittingly concede that the capitalist measure of wealth
distorts the values to which they themselves are committed.” According to Hägglund,
the tension (or contradiction) between the capitalist measure of wealth and the
values held dear by liberals is resolved, at the level of theory, by the “dream
of what Mill called ‘the stationary state.’”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[15]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> The stationary state, according to Hägglund,
is the imaginary point at which capitalism and the profit motive will have done
the work they need to do – increasing the technological powers of production
and the wealth of the world – and can be set aside for the sake of living a
more satisfying or fulfilling life, pursuing higher and more noble ends than
making more money. Liberals like Mill, Keynes, and Rawls are compelled to posit
some such end of capital accumulation, according to Hägglund, for it is only
thereby that they can square their actual, substantive values with the
existence of a social system that subordinates all values to the pursuit of
surplus-value. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Hayek,
however, does not dream of a stationary state. And so, when Hägglund come to
Hayek, he is forced to change tack, and he introduces the freedom/liberty
disjunction in place of a discussion of Hayek’s imaginary resolution of the
contradiction. This should make us pause. After all, Hayek is not the only
liberal thinker of political economy that refuses the stationary state. Adam
Smith saw the stationary state – a country that had attained the “full
complement of riches which … its situation … allowed it to acquire” – as a
fateful eventuality, in which “both the wages of labour and the profits of
stock would probably be very low.” For Ricardo, the stationary state was a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">threat</i>, something to be avoided by
liberalizing the economy and increasing the volume of trade. For Herbert
Spencer, social evolution had no upper limit, and liberal policy would ensure
continuous growth and progress. For Chicago School neo-liberalism, the growth
of value is synonymous with innovation, and a steady-state economy is,
therefore, synonymous with a world in which there are no new ideas, or no opportunity
to communicate new ideas. Paul Romer, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in
Economics last year and currently heads the World Bank, has pushed this line of
argument the furthest. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In short,
there is a long tradition of liberal thinkers of political economy – a
tradition of which Hayek is in many respects representative – that do not
evince any of the conflicted feelings about perpetual economic growth that Hägglund
finds in Mill, Keynes, and Rawls. Even if the socialist critique of the
Mill-Keynes-Rawls line of liberalism is wholly immanent, it does not follow
that the socialist critique of the Smith-Spencer-Hayek line will be. I think
this is what lies behind Hägglund’s sudden introduction of the freedom/liberty
distinction: the intuition that the liberal commitment to individual freedom is
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i>, in the case of Hayek, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">et al</i>., at odds with the liberal
commitment to capitalism. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So what is
going on here? If I were to briefly characterize this other liberal tradition,
I would say that it’s center of gravity is a categorical opposition to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">private</i> coercion and violence. It
accepts the need for a central state because centralizing coercive force allows
for its deployment to be regulated by commonly-acknowledged laws. When the
rules for deploying force are simple, universal, and public, and discretionary
coercion is minimized, then two things happen. First, people are compelled to
enter into voluntary exchanges and contracts in order to pursue their aims.
Second, concentrations of power and resources become not only harmless but
salutary, since they allow people to do new and creative things even while they
do not– since the private use of force is off the table – give the wealthy and
powerful the ability to hold sway over the poorer and less powerful. Even
monopoly power, on this view, is not a problem – unless it is over basic
necessities – since, in an otherwise competitive market environment, monopoly
prices spur innovation and the entry of other suppliers into the market. State
capture is a consistent concern, however, since that is where the coercive
power lies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This strand
of liberalism is not obviously touched by Hägglund’s immanent critique, for Hayek
is neither half-hearted in his embrace of the profit motive nor disingenuous in
his commitment to individual freedom. So long as profit-seeking behaviour
remains within the bounds set by the law, Hayek does not think it is
incompatible with any liberal values at all. So long as the state is restricted
to promulgating simple, universal rules and providing basic public goods, Hayek
thinks that the freedom of each is compatible with a similar freedom for every
other. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">To be
absolutely clear: Marx is critical – highly critical – of this sort of
liberalism! But his critical confrontation with it takes place on the grounds
of the historical dynamics of the capitalist economy and of political struggles
over power, not at the level of its adherence to shared principles. Marx and
Hayek disagree about how the world works. This disagreement – and the
conditions under which it might be adjudicated – are obscured, I think, by
focusing on the supposed contradiction between the value of free time and the capitalist
measure of social wealth. And this has consequences for how we think about
socialist politics, consequences to which I will now turn.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="page-break-after: avoid; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">3<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">One of the
most important contributions of Hägglund’s book is that it demonstrates how
central the economy of time is to Marx’s thought. This has been neglected on
the Left, and its neglect has given rise, as Hägglund points out, to the
theoretically and politically disastrous conflation of overcoming capitalism
with overcoming finitude. Adorno is not the only critical theorist to pine for
the utopia of absolute plenitude, or to treat scarcity as the necessary and
sufficient cause of class domination. As Hägglund rightly argues, this
particular species of utopia is not merely unattainable, but “undesirable and
incompatible with the fragile possibility of freedom.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[16]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">An
interesting side-effect of Hägglund’s reading of Marx is that it highlights a
heretofore neglected point of contact between Marx’s critique of political
economy in the 1850s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, and the marginal utility theory that was simultaneously
revolutionizing bourgeois economics. Marginalism, and the neo-liberal economics
that grew out of it, take the scarcity of time to be one of the most
fundamental axioms of economic analysis. Perhaps Marx and the marginalists are
much closer to one another than anyone has appreciated. (Even I.I. Rubin, who
undertook the best examination to date of the relation of Marxism to
marginalism, says nothing about time as a category.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn17" name="_ftnref17" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[17]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>)
I am not in a position to stage this confrontation here, but I do want to
explore a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">political</i> dimension of the
question. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The economy
of time does not work the same way in all contexts. In particular, it matters
whether we are talking about (a) an individual agent prioritizing and pursuing
their own projects, (b) a group of agents agreeing to prioritize and pursue a
set of common projects, or (c) a number of agents, individual and/or
collective, trying to accommodate one another’s various projects <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">without agreeing</i> upon an overarching set
of priorities or a common project. Call these, respectively, the situations of (a)
individual action, (b) collective action, and (c) coordination. My concern is
that Hägglund’s construal of democratic socialism tends to treat the economy as
a problem of collective action, and thereby covers over the special problems of
coordination. In this way, Hägglund’s democratic socialism reproduces, in
inverted form, one of the major shortcomings of neo-liberal theory. Neo-liberals
often act as if coordination can and should crowd out all collective action. Socialists
should not make the opposite error of thinking that collective action can and
should crowd out all coordination. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The basis
for my concern is that Hägglund seems to presume a correspondence between the
purposes pursued by subsystems in the economy and the purpose of the economy as
a whole. So, for example, Hägglund slides from saying that, “under capitalism,
the purpose of our economic production is already decided,” to saying that
“what matters above all is to generate a ‘growth’ of capital in the economy.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn18" name="_ftnref18" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[18]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> However, the purpose of production
at the level of the individual firm is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i>
to generate growth in the economy as a whole, but to secure a profit sufficient
to stay in business for another quarter, or to increase market share, or the
like. The growth of capital in the economy as a whole is supposed to be a by-product
of good institutional design and a free market, not an additive result of
everyone pursuing and attaining profit. Individual producers and firms are just
as profit-motivated during a depression as they are during a boom, but the
depression is marked by a contraction of capital in the economy. Even in a
booming economy, many businesses will fail to make a profit, and many people
will pursue projects that are not even remotely likely to realize a profit.
Macroeconomic policy and performance are not tightly chained to – much less
epiphenomenal of – microeconomic motivations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The
imperative of economic growth is strong, I agree, but it is not due to a isomorphism
between subsystems and system. Rather, it is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">governmental</i> imperative. On the one hand, liberal governance only
seems to work under conditions of economic growth. Recession and stagnation
bring increased social conflict, and, with them, increasingly authoritarian and
conflictual politics. On the other hand, securing the conditions for capital
accumulation are necessary in order to prevent capital flight and the collapse
of both tax revenues and the ability of the government to finance its
operations on the bond market. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">As a
consequence of seeing the macroeconomy as an expression of the microeconomy,
when Hägglund turns to outlining the case for and principles of democratic
socialism, he often writes as if democratic socialism will require both an
ethical transformation on the part of everyone and a single collective
decision-making process about how to structure the economy. Thus, he tells us
that “the first principle of democratic socialism is that we measure our wealth
– both individual and collective – in terms of socially available free time.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn19" name="_ftnref19" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn19;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[19]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> This seems to imply that everyone in
a democratic socialist state must be a democratic socialist, or that every
individual measure their wealth in terms of socially available free time. Similarly,
the second principle of democratic socialism – collective ownership of the
means of production – implies, for Hägglund, that “we cannot have private
property in the abstract sense that transforms property into a commodity that
can be bought and sold for profit.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn20" name="_ftnref20" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn20;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[20]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Hägglund rightly
criticizes Frederic Jameson for excluding “institutions of freedom” from his vision
of socialism.</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn21" name="_ftnref21" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn21;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[21]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> But I would challenge Hägglund to
amplify this insight. Institutions of freedom do not simply decide upon common
purposes, and are not, therefore, exhausted by “collective projects of
self-determination.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn22" name="_ftnref22" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn22;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[22]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> Institutions of freedom also include
processes by which we negotiate <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">to</i> collectively determine our purposes,
and come to terms with one another’s projects without trying to fit them into
some over-arching common pursuit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I believe
that Hägglund would agree with this inclusion of institutions of coordination
among the institutions of freedom. He is explicitly sensitive to the fact that
“our practical identities and their order of priority … must remain at issue
and possible to change.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn23" name="_ftnref23" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn23;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[23]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> He also insists, rightly, that “the
exercise of spiritual freedom must include the possibility of criticizing or
rejecting the established forms of participation.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn24" name="_ftnref24" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn24;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[24]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> Both of these principles imply that
consideration of the public good must be agnostic about certain elements of
individual and collective agents’ pursuits. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But what I
want to push is (a) that this public agnosticism about how people lead their
own lives is going to have to extend to people buying and selling property for
profit, and (b) that this – buying and selling property for profit – should not
be made into the substance of capitalism. There is every difference in the
world between saying that socialism is incompatible with commodities beings the
general form of wealth, and with labour-power being a commodity, on the one
hand, and saying, on the other, that socialism is incompatible with the
existence of commodities, buying and selling, and profit. The former is
compatible with the perspective of spiritual freedom Hägglund defends. The
latter is not – it is too perfectionistic and moralistic in its conception of
what makes capitalism and socialism the systems they are. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">4<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This brings
me, finally, back around to Marx’s relation to liberalism. In the second
section of this paper, I emphasized liberalism’s categorical opposition to
private coercion. Implicit in the third section was another feature of
liberalism: its specification of the public sphere as the sphere in which
divergent projects are accommodated. This is just the flip side of the
abhorrence of private coercion, since it attempts to remove the power of
coercion from any agent or group pursuing any <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">particular</i> project, and to reserve it for the public authorities
who are supposed to ensure <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">only</i> that
everyone can go about their own business. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Marx’s
social republicanism – which I outlined in the first section – relaxes the
liberal stricture against non-state actors using coercive force; it is
hospitable to the collective efforts of the dominated to coercively oppose
their domination. But, for the same reason, it is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">congenial</i> to the liberal notion that the public authority should
not be treated like an enterprise association of the whole population. The
state’s claims to manifest the popular will evince, in Marx’s words, a “cult of
the people” that occludes the forms of social domination that divide the people
against itself.</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn25" name="_ftnref25" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn25;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[25]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In this way,
Marx’s social republicanism pulls <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">against</i>
democratic socialism. We can put it in the form of a dilemma. If the democratic
state exists, with its invocations of popular self-determination, then so does
capitalism, with its particular form of class domination. If, on the other
hand, social life is permeated by democratic decision-making, then the state,
with its fictive unity and its attendant imaginary of the sovereign people, withers
away. The various local communities, and their federation under higher national
and international elected bodies, will differ from one another in what they
want to pursue, and these local, national, and international authorities will
also come into conflict with the various democratically managed workplaces.
There will be no single, unitary forum in which these conflicts will get ironed
out, by democratic deliberation, into one plan for the economy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This, to me,
is the blind-spot of all democratic socialism, a blind-spot it shares with much
democratic theory. Neither before nor after the construction of socialism is
there a single forum in which “we” would take definitive decisions about “the
form of our life together” or about “the purpose and practice of our economy.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn26" name="_ftnref26" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn26;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[26]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> Institutions of coordination –
markets, constitutions, electoral parties, contestatory elections, bargaining
fora – will have to knit together the various collective and individual agents.
Democracy, from this perspective, is critically important as a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">check</i> on these institutions of
coordination, to keep them from dominating the forms of life that they are
supposed to enable, just as it is crucial within the various collective
projects. But democracy cannot constitute a single collective agent,
“responsible for organizing and legislating the form of our life together.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn27" name="_ftnref27" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn27;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[27]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">At its best,
political democracy allows the organized masses to control what political
office-holders can or cannot do with their institutional power. This is a
wonderful thing, for it frees the organized masses from the political
domination of the state, “replacing the haughty masters of the people by always
removable servants.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftn28" name="_ftnref28" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn28;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[28]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> But democracy always remains a way
of checking and controlling power; it is never a mode of collective
self-legislation or self-expression.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:
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314.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:11.0pt'><span
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;"> </span><!--[if supportFields]><span
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224.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:11.0pt'><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;"> </span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='font-size:11.0pt'><span style='mso-element:field-begin'></span></span><span
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222.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:11.0pt'><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;"> </span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='font-size:11.0pt'><span style='mso-element:field-begin'></span></span><span
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> See </span><!--[if supportFields]><span
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<span style='mso-element:field-separator'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Hägglund, <i>This Life</i>, 258–59;
Roberts, <i>Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital</i>.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='font-size:11.0pt'><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn9" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:
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\\uc0\\u8220{}Structural Domination and Structural Freedom: A Feminist
Perspective\\uc0\\u8221{}; Memmi, {\\i{}The Colonizer and the Colonized};
Pettit, {\\i{}On the People\\uc0\\u8217{}s Terms}; Scott, {\\i{}Domination and
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Power}.","plainCitation":"Einspahr, “Structural Domination
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Power.","noteIndex":9},"citationItems":[{"id":859,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/1022048/items/5AXPCFGC"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/1022048/items/5AXPCFGC"],"itemData":{"id":859,"type":"article-journal","title":"Structural
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against subjection in the exercise of basic liberties. But there is no public
protection without a coercive state. And doesn't state coercion necessarily
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<span style='mso-element:field-separator'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Einspahr, “Structural
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Colonizer and the Colonized</i>; Pettit, <i>On the People’s Terms</i>; Scott, <i>Domination
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style='font-size:11.0pt'><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:
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style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION
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<span style='mso-element:field-separator'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Hägglund, <i>This Life</i>, 224–25.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='font-size:11.0pt'><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:
11.0pt'><span style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
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<span style='mso-element:field-separator'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Marx, <i>MEW</i>, 828.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='font-size:11.0pt'><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;">Marx: “der vergesellschaftete Mensch, die assoziierten
Produzenten, diesen ihren Stoffwechsel mit der Natur rationell regeln, unter
ihre gemeinschaftliche Kontrolle bringen, statt von ihm als von einer blinden
Macht beherrscht zu werden; ihn mit dem geringsten Kraftaufwand und unter den
ihrer menschlichen Natur würdigsten und adäquatesten Bedingungen vollziehn.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[12]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span><!--[if supportFields]><span lang=DE
style='font-size:11.0pt;mso-ansi-language:DE'><span style='mso-element:field-begin'></span></span><span
style='font-size:11.0pt'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>ADDIN
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</span><span lang=DE style='font-size:11.0pt;mso-ansi-language:DE'><span
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[13]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:
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<span style='mso-element:field-separator'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Marx, <i>Political Writings</i>,
2010, 3:90.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:11.0pt'><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[14]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:
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<span style='mso-element:field-separator'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Hägglund, <i>This Life</i>,
299.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:11.0pt'><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[15]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:
11.0pt'><span style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
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<span style='mso-element:field-separator'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Hägglund, 279.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='font-size:11.0pt'><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[16]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:
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<span style='mso-element:field-separator'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Hägglund, 325.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='font-size:11.0pt'><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn17" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[17]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> See the essays collected in </span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='font-size:11.0pt'><span style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
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<span style='mso-element:field-separator'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Day and Gaido, <i>Responses to
Marx’s Capital</i>.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:11.0pt'><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn18" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Hasana/Dropbox/Will's%20Writing/Commentaries/Hagglund/Comments%20on%20Martin%20Hagglund.docx#_ftnref18" name="_ftn18" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[18]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:
11.0pt'><span style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
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<span style='mso-element:field-separator'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Hägglund, <i>This Life</i>,
217.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:11.0pt'><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<br />William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-55516861756770800152019-02-20T12:58:00.000-05:002019-02-20T12:58:34.109-05:00Towards a brief history of the physics of power<span style="font-family: inherit;">Prior to Galileo and Newton’s experiments, gravity was thought to be a property of the objects affected by it, a property by which heavier objects accelerate more rapidly towards the center than lighter objects. After Newton, but prior to Einstein’s formulation of general relativity, gravitation was understood to be a force exerted by massive objects, operating at a distance on any other massive object. Since Einstein, gravitation is hypothesized to be a local perturbation in the space-time continuum, a distortion of space-time by mass. Objects in motion are not affected by gravitation directly; rather, the space-time though which they move is affected, and the curvature of space-time by mass registers with the observer as a pull upon the object, a curve in its trajectory. <br /><br />An analogy can be drawn to the theory of social power. On one, very old account, the power held and exercised by a few is a property inherent in their souls, a self-mastery by which they are as stable and unmoving as the earth beneath our feet. The less powerful are both attracted to this stable center and liable to wander, like the planets, as a consequence of their own, internal variability and lack of moral weight. According to another theory – almost equally venerable – power is a force exercised by the mighty, which bends the less powerful to their will, securing obedience, consent, and even adoration. Power is a force of attraction, exercised by all to some extent, and affecting all equally. According to a third theory, however, power is neither a force nor a property of people, but a massive social fact, a curvature of social space. People act differently in proximity to power, not because they are forced to by the powerful, and not because they have weak souls, but because the path to what they want is bent by the presence of power. </span>William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-76142381252652172462018-08-07T12:09:00.003-04:002018-08-07T12:25:27.874-04:00On BDS and saying no to nice things<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In June, I received a very generous -- and very flattering -- invitation: </span><div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />"In the coming academic year we would like to organise in our department a mini-symposium to discuss new advances in Marx scholarship. We suggest that this mini-symposium includes three panellists: Gareth Stedman Jones, Shlomo Avineri and you. The symposium would also be an occasion to mark the opening of the Political Theory MA research programme in our department." </span><div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Academia is a peer-to-peer prestige business. We professors don't bring in the big bucks -- though many of us do very well -- and, generally speaking, no one outside the academy knows our names. What drives us, for the most part, is desire for respect and recognition from our fellow academics. Knowing this does not make me immune. So being asked to be one of three panellists, alongside very distinguished professors thirty and forty years senior to me is exciting, to say the least.</span><div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The only problem? The invitation was extended by professors at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.</span><div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I am a supporter of BDS, a campaign to boycott, divest from, and impose sanctions upon Israel (and businesses and institutions that cooperate with or profit from Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands). The <a href="https://bdsmovement.net/what-is-bds">goals of BDS</a> are to compel Israel to: (1) end its occupation and colonization of Arab lands, (2) recognize the equal rights of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and (3) respect, protect, and promote the right of displaced Palestinians to return to land now controlled by Israel. </span><div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Whether BDS can achieve all of these goals is uncertain, but it is clear that the Israeli government sees the BDS movement as a real threat to <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/final-text-of-jewish-nation-state-bill-set-to-become-law/">its policy of entrenching and extending its conception of Israel as an ethno-state</a>. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu -- the ego-ideal of the Trump administration -- has <a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/01/07/bds-movement-groups-advocating-boycott-of-israel-denied-entry.html">banned members of 20 organizations that support BDS from entering Israel</a>. <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-bars-entry-to-south-african-model-on-bds-organized-re-education-trip/">A South African model was barred entry</a> because she was visiting Israel on "a program sponsored by the prominent South African Israel-boycott organizations SACC (South African Council of Churches) and SAJP (South African Jews for a Free Palestine)." <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/ifnotnow-co-founder-simone-zimmerman-detained-in-israel.html">Advocates for Palestinian causes and critics of Israeli policy are detained and questioned aggressively</a> by Israeli security services when they travel to Israel -- even when they are Israeli themselves. Ariel Gold, the co-director of Code Pink, <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/prominent-jewish-bds-activist-denied-entry-to-israel/">was denied entry to Israel</a> -- where she meant to pursue a program in Jewish studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem -- and had her student visa revoked because of her BDS advocacy. Israeli Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan proclaimed on Twitter that "Whoever acts for a boycott of Israel and comes here to cause damage, will not enter the country." Given these facts, I could not accept the invitation, no matter how exciting it was from a professional and intellectual point of view. My response follows: </span><div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span><i><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Dear Professors,</span><br /><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Thank you for your invitation. I am honoured that you would wish to include me in a symposium on Marx’s writings, especially alongside such respected senior scholars as Professors Stedman Jones and Avineri. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Unfortunately, I cannot accept your invitation. This is not a decision I take lightly, but I am committed to honouring the call by our Palestinian colleagues not to engage in collaborative work with Israeli institutions implicated in the occupation. Taking this decision, I am mindful of Ariel Gold, an incoming student at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who was refused entry to Israel just on Sunday, and whose student visa was revoked, because of her BDS advocacy. I am mindful of my own status as an immigrant scholar in Canada, and of the fact that it is easier for me to participate in academic exchange in Israel than it is for our Palestinian colleagues. And I am mindful that Marx was sent into exile, unable to live and write in his homeland because the authorities considered his words too dangerous. I cannot afford myself such a wonderful opportunity when similar opportunities for academic exchange and conversation are so unjustly denied to both the people of Palestine and Jewish and Israeli advocates of BDS. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I regret that we won’t have a chance to meet and discuss Marx in this context, but I cling to the hope that a new political situation will arise, and that we will get another chance to work together.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Sincerely, Will Roberts</span></i><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I want to make my response public because I know that I am not alone in turning down invitations to Israeli universities. I also know that most people do not know how many such invitations are refused. We know about organized attempts to declare institutional support for BDS, but we do not realize how many individual academics are postponing the opportunity for academic exchange and intellectual conversation in the hope that a new and better political situation will arise. Without knowing how many of us are waiting and hoping, the waiting can only be longer and the hoping more desperate. So I make my decision public, and I encourage others to do the same.</span></div>
</div>
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William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-11037934233924695262017-09-27T15:23:00.004-04:002017-09-27T15:28:44.962-04:00#TakeAKnee and the Conditions of Peace<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2XQwqIQppnEdfTlFbAIl9Iw0Z9eSGx8pEro76NpXfBW604ipPX14b-xf7Y1CCW0gjo2f33SUThdedctXVFFE9qzc8Tyx2AANh2aUyHikXAuZ-0zOplpeQhNxw1E_sY7BDDe8_WuQyXMQ/s1600/DKdeTAvVoAA8OHE.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="838" data-original-width="1600" height="167" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2XQwqIQppnEdfTlFbAIl9Iw0Z9eSGx8pEro76NpXfBW604ipPX14b-xf7Y1CCW0gjo2f33SUThdedctXVFFE9qzc8Tyx2AANh2aUyHikXAuZ-0zOplpeQhNxw1E_sY7BDDe8_WuQyXMQ/s320/DKdeTAvVoAA8OHE.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Why <a class="_58cn" data-ft="{"tn":"*N","type":104}" href="https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/takeaknee?source=feed_text&story_id=10159376676370243" style="color: #365899; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="_5afx" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit;"><span aria-label="hashtag" class="_58cl _5afz" style="color: #4267b2; font-family: inherit; unicode-bidi: isolate;">#</span><span class="_58cm" style="font-family: inherit;">TakeAKnee</span></span></a> upsets people is why antifa upsets people. Bear with me.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
The national anthem at the beginning of NFL games means, arguably, that the fight on the field, and the partisanship in the stands, is bracketed within an allegiance to national unity, so LA and Denver don't take their rivalry too far, and don't forget that "We're all Americans." So when Kap sat during the anthem, he was saying, "nope, I'm not one of you -- Black folks in this country aren't 'Americans' and fellow citizens, because they don't enjoy the protection of the law." In other words, Kap was denying the performative myth of the anthem, that "we" are united as Americans. Black Americans are subjects, not citizens, and the American state is a conquering force, not a civitas. (This is why all the "unity" bullshit this last weekend is bullshit. "Unity" is just the national anthem again. Kap was denying that there is unity.)</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
Antifa make the same move, and signify something analogous: they deny that they are fellow citizens with fascists, capable of tolerating their abhorrent opinions so long as everyone agrees that the state is the arbiter of any disputes that get physical. Liberals like Jonathan Chait consistently think that the Antifa are claiming that "either the government or violent street fighters" have "the right to silence opponents of the left." But this is not the Antifa claim at all. They are claiming that they *are right* to fight white supremacists, not that they (much less the police!) *have a right* to fight white supremacists. They are denying that the state is a legitimate arbiter between opposed groups of citizens making incompatible claims. That doesn't mean they are claiming the mantle of legitimate arbiter, but that they do not think a legitimate arbiter is a possibility in this situation. In other words, like Kap, they are denying that the invocation of corporate unity is capacious enough to encompass them -- so long as it also encompasses people organizing themselves to make the US a white "ethno-state."</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
Both of these claims are genuinely upsetting if you think the constitutional and legal framework of the US is a legitimate one, one that imposes upon people the duty to work through its established institutions and legal mechanisms. But the claim to legitimacy is also -- and always has been -- a claim to have established the conditions of peace. Whether or not a polity has established the conditions of peace is not a moral question. It must, to some important extent, accept the people *as they are.* If people are not, in fact, pacified, you do not have the conditions of peace. You can argue that people ought to be pacified, but they are not under any sort of prior constraint to accept your argument, and you sure as hell cannot presuppose that they are bound to accept it before you have even offered it.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-top: 6px;">
You want peace? You want people to stand for the anthem? You want people to acknowledge their citizenship in the same country, and under the same laws, as you? Fine. Then make the country and its laws fit for their acknowledgement. Make the law and its agents treat them as citizens. Give them a good reason to lay down their arms in the faith that no asshole who thinks they are less than human will be able to subject them to inhuman treatment. Otherwise, admit that they are a subject population, at war with your polity, and get on with it.</div>
William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-76494306263591832972017-08-18T13:45:00.000-04:002017-08-18T13:47:23.173-04:00Antifa and Elephants<div class="MsoNormal">
In the wake of
Charlottesville, the question of how best to respond to a growing and
emboldened fascist movement is pressing. People, by and large, take one of two
lines. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Antifa line is: punch Nazis. That is, confront fascists whenever and
wherever possible, show them that their public presence will not be tolerated,
and try to make them scurry back to their holes to hide in the dark. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
liberal line is: sunlight kills more Nazis than punches. That is, speak out and
hold demonstrations, if necessary, but don’t respond with violence, which will
only spread and encourage the fascists to become more radical and dangerous. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
By
and large, people taking one line don’t have any patience for those taking the
other. Liberals think Antifa play into fascists’ hands, and escalate social
upheaval. Antifa think liberals give cover for fascists, and roll over in the
face of the growing threat. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’m not going to take
sides on this question of tactics. Not because I don’t have an opinion (my
opinion: the Antifa are usually right about the present situation in the US),
but because I want instead to call attention to certain features of both
arguments, features that (a) are endemic to arguments about political tactics,
and that (b) make it very hard to even imagine settling those arguments in the
same time-scale in which they are made and are salient as motivational and
justificatory frameworks for action. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
First of all, both
sides in this non-debate rely on a privileged stock of historical examples. The
Antifa think, especially, of the Battle of Cable Street, when rioting Londoners
stopped Mosley’s British Union of Fascists; the BUF never recovered. The
liberals think, especially, of Weimar Germany, where they see escalating street
battles between fascists and communists preparing the ground for Hitler’s rise.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
These different
historical lodestones derive from different analyses of the social dynamics of
fascism. Liberals tend to see the fascist seizure of the state as a backlash
phenomenon: increasingly violent social struggle stokes the demand for “law and
order,” which the authoritarian far-Right is able to capitalize on. The thought
is that most people are basically apolitical, and just want to go about their
day-to-day lives. The more political disorder – of whatever sort – intrudes
upon that day-to-day, the more likely this mass of people is to become reactionary,
to demand that someone, anyone, put an end to the protests, the fighting, the
disruption. If this is right, then keeping the political temperature down, and
keeping the state’s monopoly of violence intact, seems like the safest path. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Antifa, of course,
thinks this is <u>not</u> right. For the Antifa Left, the state is not a third
party mediating social conflicts; it is on the side of the dominant party in
those conflicts. If you expect the cops to handle the fascists, you’re going to
be disappointed to find out that too many of the cops <b>are</b> the fascists. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To be sure, there are
plenty of far-Left analyses that stress the danger of backlash. Gramsci, for instance, advised communist partisans not to mimic the fascists’
militia units lest the symmetry of the opposed civil warriors license the
state’s suppression of “all sides” – a suppression which would inevitably be
led by the military and police elements that also support or even comprise the
far-Right’s militia cadres. Precisely because the Left sees the state as on the
side of the dominant, it has always worried about provoking the “legitimate
monopolists” of violence. This is why the Left ought to always prefer (and
does, in fact, usually prefer) public, mass struggle to clandestine and
small-cell operations. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
However, it is also
why the Antifa do sometimes embrace tactics that especially rile liberals.
Because Antifa expect the police to be on the side of the fascists, they are
especially wary of being identified. Hence, they are especially wary of being
filmed. Hence, they sometimes attack reporters covering protests. This seems to
have happened twice in Charlottesville, and it has Jake Tapper and Jonathan
Chait especially up in arms. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Fundamentally,
liberals don’t want private individuals making judgment calls about when
physical violence is appropriate. And they don’t want this because they think
such private judgments are both unaccountable <b>and</b> given to indefinite expansion. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2U1gpSszw0h0mm4UlrucpjMfeJKhnPYZfWApVC7OGzue0ZmwucnmxWIxAPuYzOs1xIXfVsIdpnH2aEHbT1vz_6dTIZBETc3qRJOLcyVTKwZY0N14wNbCgxiPqcY77HZfAIqhT-BjqXYk/s1600/Chait+antifa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="955" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2U1gpSszw0h0mm4UlrucpjMfeJKhnPYZfWApVC7OGzue0ZmwucnmxWIxAPuYzOs1xIXfVsIdpnH2aEHbT1vz_6dTIZBETc3qRJOLcyVTKwZY0N14wNbCgxiPqcY77HZfAIqhT-BjqXYk/s400/Chait+antifa.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I <b>understand</b> this liberal perspective. I don’t want unaccountable
people making decisions about the meting out of physical violence, either. But
I also think that liberals (a) overestimate how accountable the public authorities
are for the violence they mete out, and (b) underestimate the checks that Antifa
ideology and organization place on Antifa violence. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Leaving the policing of
violence to the authorities is not, in the world we actually live in, leaving
it in democratically accountable hands. And whatever tendency there might be
for political justifications of violence to expand their mandate, this tendency
runs up against certain counter-tendencies. It is easier to maintain the discipline,
fervor, and group-cohesion necessary for mounting effective street battles in the
face of <b>actual, armed Nazis</b>, but
much harder to do so with each step on Chait’s slippery slope of inference. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
More importantly, for
me, is that the liberal opposition to Antifa tactics – like the justification
of Antifa tactics themselves – relies upon a predictive model of social and
political dynamics that operates on a timescale a thousand times larger than
that of the Twitter controversy cycle. To be frank, we cannot know whether the
Antifa opposition to the brown shirts of Charlottesville helps or hurts the
struggle against fascist resurgence in America. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At some point in the future,
perhaps we will be able to retrospectively ascertain this, but even this is
unlikely. Certainly liberals do not look at the Battle of Cable Street and say,
well, in that case Antifa tactics worked. Rather, they will explain the failure
of fascism in Britain by pointing to the stability and good order of the
British government, the elite consensus around the rule of law, or some such.
And the Antifa will certainly not grant that communist battles with Nazis in
Weimar Germany drove the electorate into the arms of the Right. Even if each
side granted the other its preferred historical case, there would be no basis
for generalizing the conclusion.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the end, we all
want to act as if the deeds of a discrete set of addressable agents are
consequential and variable, even as we treat the actions and reactions of everyone else as predictable constants. Liberals
want to hold Antifa responsible for any reactionary backlash. Antifa want to
hold those who stand by and do nothing responsible for the belligerence of the
far Right. And we may not have the conceptual tools to do otherwise, to knit
together our ethical discourses of individual responsibility and our social
scientific discourses of large-scale movement and change. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The long-term and
large-scale dynamics of history are always the elephant in the room. If there
is no agreement about those, I don’t see how there could ever be any rational
argument about political tactics. <o:p></o:p></div>
William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-31306296765857895112017-05-19T13:43:00.002-04:002017-05-19T13:43:40.778-04:00Why I am not a fan of “the radical Enlightenment”<div class="MsoNormal">
Invocations of Enlightenment, Reason, and Universalism too
often substitute the name for the thing. Trumpeting Reason is too often a substitute
for offering reasoned arguments. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Take, for instance, the <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/130774/bernie-left-need-now-radical-enlightenment">recent
</a>claim by Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim that “core Enlightenment principles”
are “the original basis for modern political emancipation,” and that the
contemporary Left should “ground” its politics in these principles once again. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
According to Fluss and Frim, the “Enlightenment worldview” comprises
five essential principles: rationalism, materialism, humanism, hedonism, and
perfectionism. I am immediately suspicious. Materialism and humanism are not
obviously harmonious, insofar as humanism so often relies upon an implicit spiritualism.
Why wouldn’t a rigorous materialism undermine any strict species distinction
between humans and non-human animals, for instance? (On this, see the work of
Hasana Sharp.) Perfectionism is just as
awkward a fit. Most versions of perfectionism rely upon a teleological
conception of human nature that runs afoul of both materialism about causality
and rationalism about the order of nature. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Are these doubts just a consequence of the rough-and-ready
form of a popular presentation? Maybe this “Enlightenment worldview” just needs
to be more fully fleshed out.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Perhaps, but I also have concerns rooted in what Fluss and
Frim actually say about the implications of these principles. They claim, for
instance, that “the overriding principle of rationalism implies that people
ought to have conscious control over the greater part of their lives, the
perfection of their talents, the ways they contribute to society, and how they
cooperate with others.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No, it doesn’t. Rationalism is, according to Fluss and Frim,
the thesis “that the universe is essentially knowable and that all limits to
knowledge are merely provisional.” The knowability of the universe does not imply
that people ought to have conscious control over their lives. The universe
remains knowable whether or not its is actually known, and whether or not that
knowledge gives any individuals actual control over their lives. The rational
explicability of all phenomena does not even secure the possibility of
conscious control. Knowledge may just as well reveal the limits of our power as
extend that power. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Fluss and Frim also claim that “Since all people are
conditioned by common, natural laws, then there can be no stark separation
between different peoples, sexes, races, etc.” As mentioned above, this claim
can just as easily undermine the stark separation between different species,
and so does not guarantee humanism. But if it proves too much, it also proves
too little, since the common conditioning of all human beings by natural laws
does not in any way entail a set of common interests. We can affirm that all
human beings are equally human and then turn around and wage war on other human
beings over scarce resources or ideological disagreements. That “diverse needs,
desires, and conditions of flourishing are ultimately translatable across all
parochial boundaries” does not mean that our needs, desires, and conditions of
flourishing are compatible. I can understand you and still want to kill you.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As Fluss and Frim would have it, “it is only a movement
steeped in Radical Enlightenment principles that will develop ever more
coherent political demands.” I don’t think this is right, and I think my
arguments above show why. Adherence to abstract principles does not produce
political demands. Politics is not derived from principles. Principles are not
foundational, but guiding. If you are committed to rationalism, then you should
keep that commitment in mind as you make your arguments, not try to make your
arguments follow from your rationalism. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
My inclination is to say that the Left needs more and better
arguments, not more rationalism. It needs more and better explanations, not
more materialism. It needs more and better organizational and institutional
ties, not more humanism. <o:p></o:p></div>
William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-91418416542957783852017-04-05T22:47:00.002-04:002017-04-05T22:47:53.300-04:00Comments on Ngugi<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">I guess I am supposed to say something about Professor Ngugi's influence upon my field of political theory. I will speak prospectively, instead, about the influence I hope he has some day.</span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">I.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">In 1893, Friedrich
Engels addressed the Italian readership of the newly-translated <i>Communist Manifesto</i>. “The close of the
feudal Middle Ages,” he wrote, “and the opening of the modern capitalist era
are marked by a colossal figure: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the
Middle Ages and the first poet of modern times. Today, as in 1300, a new historical
era is approaching. Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of
the birth of this new, proletarian era?” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">Engels had a
remarkable historical sense, but his guess was far off in this case. Dante,
possessing all the wealth of the imperial, Latin tradition, left behind that
language of popes and emperors and wealthy elites in order to write his
greatest works in the vernacular dialect of Tuscany, a region torn by civil
wars and invasions. In so doing, he helped to set the path taken by the European
renaissance, and helped to create Italian literature. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">It is impossible
that an Italian could perform this role again, for the modern era has also been
the era of European colonialism and imperialism, which have subjugated the
peoples of the world. Italy was hardly one of the foremost colonial powers,
but, even so, there is no way that any author writing in any European language could
signal the postcolonial rebirth of the globe, the renaissance of the invaded
and colonized cultures of the global proletariat. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">Engels did not
live long enough to see the beginnings of the postcolonial transformation. He did
not foresee that the watershed moment of cultural rebirth would be when authors
of the colonized peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas abandoned the
English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese of the conquerors and colonial
administrators in order to tell their stories again in the “vulgar” tongues of
the people. He did not foresee that the new Dante might write in Gĩkũyũ. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">II.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">The relationship
of language and conquest, language and domination, has been at the center of
Ngugi’s political theory and political practice. If Dante was primarily
concerned to insist upon and demonstrate the <i>eloquence</i> of the common tongue, Ngugi has been concerned to demonstrate
its <i>power</i>. The “civilizing” mission
of the colonial powers has always entailed spreading the masters’ word. To be
civilized is to be cultured, to be cultured is to be educated, and to be
educated is to learn to read and write and speak the language of civilization
and culture – the language of the powerful.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">This resonates
here, in Québec. And “here” is also unceded Kanien’kehá:ka land, where it
resonates again. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">An old article
from <i>The Spectator</i> can give us the
flavor of history. In the midst of curious incomprehension at the phenomenon of
Quebecois nationalism, the author notes that, while Montreal was (in 1963) 65%
francophone, “only 22% of its economic activity” was run by members of the
francophone majority. “Among the more uncouth of the members of the richer
race,” he continues, “an exceptionally offensive phrase is not infrequently
heard … when a French-speaker is brutally told to ‘talk white.’” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">Bosses can no
longer issue this command to workers in Québec, thankfully. But this does not
mean that the compulsion to use the language of the powerful disappeared. When
the conquerors control the wealth, they don’t have to command explicitly the
use of their tongue. Speaking the language of the powerful just makes economic
sense, as they say. Thus, forty years after the Charter of the French Language,
pressure is mounting on Québec to improve and expand English-language
education, and <i>de facto</i> anglophone
workplaces are on the rise. The imperative is no longer a personal command. It
issues from “the way things are.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">Marx called this
sort of phenomenon “the fetishism of commodities.” In a society in which goods
and services move to the music of market-prices, our “social movement has for
[us] the form of a movement of things, and instead of us controlling this
movement, [we] are controlled by it.” We bow, of necessity, to the impersonal
power of prices. Is our labor-power worth more if we speak English? Then we
must speak English. No one has to tell us to do so. We don’t need a weatherman
to know which way the wind blows. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">But the wind blows
bitter for the smaller communities of the world. Its howling drowns out the
small voices of history. The extinction of languages has, by most accounts,
accelerated to the point that 60-80% of the languages spoken in the world today
will likely not be spoken by any children within a century. The French fact in
Québec is not endangered to this extent. The language of the Mohawk people is
much more precarious. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">There is an irony
of history here, though, and a lesson. Kanien’kehá was probably in a more
precarious position in the mid- to late-‘70s. Over the prior half-century, most
Mohawk families, impelled by their integration into the anglophone labor
market, had come to speak English at home. The passage of Bill 101 in 1977
posed an existential crisis for the language, since it introduced new
restrictions on instruction in languages other than French. The response among
the Mohawk community in Kahnawà:ke was to establish an immersion program for
young children. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">In other words, it
took a political threat to the language to provoke a political effort to
safeguard and strengthen it. The open, avowed enemy is easy to recognize. Being
easily recognized, it is easily emblazoned on the banners of political
resistance. The economic threat is harder to counter, since it seems to operate
from nowhere and everywhere all at once. Because the domination of the market
is impersonal, it may not evoke the protest that a law or a command evokes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">III.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">The project Ngugi
has called “decolonizing the mind” is not an idealist “revolution in the mind.”
Decolonizing the mind is a political and material project. It means
decolonizing the hand, decolonizing the tongue, decolonizing the classroom, and
– thereby – decolonizing the imagination. It means destroying the colonial and
collaborationist project of mastering the world by mastering the masters’
language. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">Ngugi is best
known for his work decolonizing literature, orature, and theatre. But
decolonizing the mind is also a political practice of theory, and a practice of
political theory. Ngugi noted long ago that, while the anticolonial and
postcolonial intellectuals “were busy haranguing the ruling circles in a
language” – English – “which
automatically excluded the participation of the peasantry and the working
class,” “the most reactionary African politician, the one who believes in
selling Africa to Europe, is often a master of African languages,” and “the
European missionary believed too much in his mission of conquest not to
communicate it in the language most readily available to the people.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">This is still a
problem everywhere. The most sincere devotees of universal liberation couch
their arguments in language that is incomprehensible outside the seminar rooms
of elite universities, or address themselves – plaintively or legalistically –
to those who hold the levers of government. This is not an argument for “dumbing theory down,” or for forgetting that
“common sense” is often common nonsense. But Ngugi provokes me to wonder what
is gained by speaking the language of power, and what is lost. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">Do we believe
enough in the mission of emancipation to communicate it in the language most readily
available to the people? As Ngugi insists, the alternative to sharing and
enriching the common tongue is abandoning it to the most reactionary forces. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-88318067966528604002017-03-17T16:40:00.003-04:002017-03-17T16:40:51.988-04:00Response to Harvey, part 3: Socialisms, then and now<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The part of my book that Harvey most appreciates is my discussion of “Marx’s
relation to Proudhon, Fourier, Saint-Simon and Robert Owen.” Harvey is
convinced by my argument against G.A. Cohen, who (along with many others)
stressed the continuity between this socialist tradition, with its emphasis on “equality
and social justice.” My challenge to Cohen insists that Marx was decisively
opposed to much of this tradition, which he regarded as moralistic and mistaken
about the operations of the capitalist economy. Although Harvey is appreciative
of this aspect of my argument, I am left a bit puzzled by his response to it,
for three reasons.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">First, Harvey seems to skip right over the point of my argument. In his
words, I argue that Marx “reached back into an older aristocratic tradition of
republican governance as non-domination,” which “transformed by the experience
of capitalist industrialism, produced a unique Marxist political vision.”
Harvey asks, “If inequality and social justice are insufficient to the task of
defining a socialist alternative then what might replace it?” He then goes on
to talk about Owen and Saint-Simon on industrial administration, without even
pausing to consider the answer my book proposes (and that I think Marx
proposed): <i>freedom</i>. The “older
aristocratic tradition of republican governance” was not just older and not
just aristocratic. The republican concern with freedom from servitude and
domination ran through much of the radical, popular, and plebian politics of
the nineteenth century. It ran alongside the Rousseauvian concern with popular
sovereignty and the utilitarian concern with rational administration, even as
it clashed with these. It preached resistance to concentrations of power, and cooperative
and deliberative association. My book argues that Marx’s entire argument in <i>Capital</i> is oriented by this republican desire
for freedom from domination. And so I find it disconcerting that Harvey only
mentions freedom once in his entire review, and then only to ask why I don’t
talk more about the Jacobin tradition of republicanism, “which is very
different.” I will return to the Jacobins below. For now, let me just indicate
that my reconstruction of Marx’s republicanism resonates with some analyses on
the contemporary Left. Alex Gourevitch has argued – in Jacobin and elsewhere –
both for <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/02/wage-slavery-and-republican-liberty/" target="_blank">the historical credentials</a> and <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/trump-gop-democrats-protests-marches-social-movement/" target="_blank">the contemporary salience of “a vision of a society of equal freedom.”</a> Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has made <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/778-from-blacklivesmatter-to-black-liberation" target="_blank">a powerful argument</a> for reviving the movement for Black liberation. Corey Robin has, for
several years now, called on the American Left to <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/reclaiming-politics-freedom/" target="_blank">re-appropriate the politics of freedom</a> from the Right. On my reading, Marx would agree with these calls. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Given that this is the orientation of my book, I am, therefore, also
puzzled by Harvey’s apparent attempt to rehabilitate the Saint-Simonians. Harvey
rightly claims that “Marx was reluctant to let go of the obvious enhancements
in labor productivity achieved under industrial capitalism.” He also rightly
notes that this reluctance was part of the basis for Marx’s appreciation of
Robert Owen. However, he then uses one of Engels’s footnotes in Volume Three to
bring in Saint-Simon, whom he reads as a harbinger of the joint-stock company,
which has the potential – “when democratized to include the <i>ouvriers</i> as well” – to provide “modes of
collective governance and administration” for the socialist future. I am
extremely skeptical that there is anything of value for the Left in the thought
of Saint-Simon. And, Engels’s footnote notwithstanding, there is no credible
evidence that Marx thought much of Saint-Simon’s schemes either. Engels always
had a soft spot for Saint-Simon, as I point out in my book, but Marx left no
record of sharing his friend’s high estimation. That Engels assures us, after
Marx’s death, that his friend had come around to Engels’s opinion is not very
credible evidence that Marx was “attracted” to Saint-Simon’s “mode of thought.”
For one thing, Saint-Simon was an authoritarian rationalist who dreamed only of
benevolent hierarchy and orderly improvement. Therefore, he was utterly allergic
to anything so disorderly as popular political movements or majoritarian
democracy or government from below. When Harvey seemingly identifies the
question of the socialist alternative with the question of how “to devise a
form of governance that will be consistent with the objective of the principle
of association [and] with the need to organize the macro-economy in productive
and constructive ways,” he frames the issue is a way that is very congenial to
Saint-Simon. I don’t see how it is congenial to a project of building a
political movement for universal emancipation, though.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Finally, there is the matter of the Jacobins. Harvey notes that my book “ignores
the Jacobin element” in the socialism of Marx’s day. This is basically right.
(The only caveat I will offer is that the British Jacobinism of Bronterre O’Brien
does appear in my story, if rather on the margins.) It is certainly right that
Auguste Blanqui and his followers play no role in my account of the argument of
<i>Capital</i>. On the one hand, Blanqui
produced almost nothing by way of theory, and what he did produce was not very
distinctive. Marx was concerned to close down Proudhonism and Saint-Simoneanism
within the socialist movement, since these were the two substantial bodies of
theory. Second, Blanquism was not a force to be reckoned with in the International
Working Men’s Association, which – I argue in the book – is the most relevant
context for situating <i>Capital</i>. There
was a migration of Blanquists into the IWMA after the Commune, but Marx hated
their conspiratorial methods and worked with his allies to shut them out. Third,
Marx’s relation to Blanquism has been exhaustively and authoritatively treated
in Richard N. Hunt's <i>The Political Ideas
of Marx and Engels</i> (an underappreciated and hard-to-find classic,
unfortunately); I saw no value in retreading that ground. Most importantly,
however, the French republican tradition, of which Blanqui is one offshoot, is,
as Harvey realizes, “very different” from the republican tradition that I think
influenced Marx. Rousseau had a massive influence on the French tradition, but
almost none on Marx (as David Leopold has shown). I simply see no signs of
Jacobin or Blanquist influence in <i>Capital</i>,
and Harvey does not point to any, either. If anyone else does, I would, of
course, be happy to revisit the question. But, in the absence of any such
indication, I am a bit baffled by the suggestion that I cannot pursue the
evidence that <i>is</i> in the text “without
first opening up the question of Jacobin republicanism.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">And so, to conclude, we seem to have come full circle. Harvey’s
overwhelming objection to my book is that it is a reading of Volume One. He
does not think that I can establish my interpretation of Volume One on the
basis of Volume One. And he argues against my interpretation, but not, for the
most part, on the basis of Volume One. This result suggests to me that I am onto
something. As I write in the introduction to <i>Marx’s Inferno</i>, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Marx undoubtedly thought of <i>Capital</i>
as his chef d’oeuvre. Throughout the twentieth century it was relatively
neglected, for it was supposed to be the seat of the Marx we already knew from the
proclamations of the Marxist parties. Hence, people who were attracted to Marx
but repelled by the parties went looking for one “unknown Marx” or another, as
new manuscripts became available. This process has certainly enriched our
knowledge of Marx’s thought, but it has also produced the rather perverse
situation in which Marx is better known for his unpublished jottings than for
his major public intervention. Ironically, we never actually knew the Marx of <i>Capital</i> very well. It is a long and
difficult book, lacking the programmatic clarity and generality of Engels’s
late works. … Volume one of <i>Capital</i>—Marx’s
only fully elaborated and published work of theory—ended up being largely
neglected. And, so, I think it is important to go back to it, to read it
carefully from beginning to end, and to do so without presuming that we know
what we will find. (pp. 15-16)</span></blockquote>
My hope is that my book might provoke exactly this sort of reading. If it does, then I am sure that people will encounter things that push against my interpretations, that suggest other interpretations, that open up onto other interlocutors. Until then, I am grateful to Professor Harvey for taking the time to read and respond to my book, but I remain unmoved by his objections.William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-68519673213574149632017-03-14T22:14:00.005-04:002017-03-15T12:10:04.053-04:00Response to Harvey, part 2: <div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
The obvious response to the preceding part (<a href="http://acceleratethecontradictions.blogspot.ca/2017/03/response-to-harvey-part-1.html" target="_blank">here</a>) is that, while I am arguing that
Volume One of <i>Capital</i> can be read and
understood on its own, Harvey is arguing that capitalism cannot be understood
on the basis of Volume One alone. I suspect that that is indeed Harvey’s
position. I am not opposed to it. I admit in the Introduction to <i>Marx’s Inferno</i><span lang="EN-CA">
that “volumes two and three may deepen our understanding of how, according to
Marx, capitalism works” (p. 16). However, Harvey’s review of my book does not
differentiate between understanding <i>Capital</i>
and understanding capitalism. It simply proceeds as if the inability to
understand Fordism or consumer society on the basis of Volume One invalidates
my claim that Volume One can be read and understood on its own. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-CA"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">I am confident
that we have to read much that Marx never wrote in order to understand the
vagaries and varieties of twentieth century and contemporary capitalism. Nonetheless,
I also think that Marx, in Volume One of <i>Capital</i>,
does a better job than those who came before or after at getting at what is
wrong with capitalism (of whatever vintage). He is able to do so because (a) he
has a better grasp of the fundamental dynamics of the market, the workplace, the
pattern of capitalist development, and the role of the capitalist state than most
of his competitors, and (b) he shows how all of these offend against the all-too-human
desire for freedom from dominating power. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-CA"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-CA">Contra Harvey, the
republican inclinations I detect in <i>Capital</i>
are not evidence that “Marx went far beyond [the utopian socialist] tradition
and reached back to an older tradition of republicanism.” The republican
concern for freedom from domination was all over the place in the socialisms of
Marx’s day. Marx married this concern for freedom to a systematic dissection of
capital. He shows how and why the market dominates the producers, the
capitalist and the factory dominate the wage-laborer, and capital comes to
dominate the state. <i>Capital</i> doesn’t
merely show us how capitalist production works; it shows us why we would, for
the sake of freedom, want to get out from under the regime of capitalist
production.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-CA"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
This argument prompts Harvey to claim that, while I have rightly drawn
attention “to the political in Marx,” I have gone too far in the direction of “dismissing
the economic.” I disagree. What I have tried to do, on the contrary, is to show
that Marx had a better understanding of economics than Proudhon, the Owenites,
or the St-Simonians, precisely because he saw what was political in the
economy, and in arguments about the economy. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
Take Harvey’s claim, already encountered, that, in Volume One, Marx
assumed, contrary to his considered position, that commodities exchange at
their values. According to Harvey, Marx did so “in order to make the value
theory more palatable to his audience.” This badly misrepresents the political intention
and stakes of Marx’s argument. The default position among socialists in Marx’s
day was that the suffering and exploitation of workers was attributable to the
fact that their labor and their goods were unable to command their fair value
on the market. Marx’s insistence on treating prices as if they reflected value
would have made his value theory more controversial, not more palatable. Marx
was cutting against the grain here, picking a fight. Why? Because the
prevailing diagnosis, by harping on the divergence between price and value,
missed both the dynamics of the market (by which prices converge on value) and the
distinctiveness of capital, which can accumulate without extracting rents, as a
form of economic power. Far from soft-pedaling the complexities of his theory,
Marx is concerned to confront head-on the weak points of existing socialist
theory.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
On the same theme, Harvey claims that, by assuming that all commodities
exchange at their values, Marx is able to “avoid” the problem of effective
demand, and thereby – “on the basis of these assumptions” – to construct “a
model of capitalist activity that reflects ‘the hell’ of the laborer.” But, as
I argue in Chapter 3, Marx does not “avoid” this problem at all in Volume One.
Rather than assuming away the issue, Marx builds it into his accounts of the
commodity, of exchange, and of money. (Ironically, Harvey himself points us to
two places in Volume One where Marx raises this issue; in neither place does he
say, “I will be treating this in Volume Two.”) That “the course of true love
never did run smooth” is one of the reasons that using the market to mediate
the social division of labor produces anxiety, uncertainty, and slavish
watchfulness among those dependent upon the market for their livelihoods. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
If every commodity found effective demand awaiting it with open arms,
Proudhon’s scheme to “republicanize specie” would work (but would also be
unnecessary). If effective demand was assumed into existence by Marx, he could
not have produced his account of the production of relative surplus value,
since the ratchetting up of productivity could not operate unless more
productive firms could gain market share. Finally, if Harvey were right that
Marx assumes away the problem of effective demand in Volume One, and that he is
only thereby enabled to model capitalist production so as to reflect the hell
of the laborer, this would be a damning indictment of Marx’s book. It would
mean that Marx’s theory of exploitation, development, and accumulation rests on
a premise “simplified even to the point of falsification.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
I happily admit that my reading of Marx’s economic arguments in Volume
One is not the standard reading. Nonetheless, it is far from sui generis: it accords
with some of the theses advanced by value-form theorists, for one thing. These approaches
to Marx situates him as a proto-Austrian rather than a post-Ricardian (yes, I
know that will be a controversial claim!), and they transform the reading of
both Marx’s value theory and his account of exploitation. These are fundamental
<i>economic</i> matters. What my book brings
to the table is the additional claim that the political context and intent of
Marx’s argument is crucial for understanding the true content of Marx’s position.
When you appreciate Marx’s opposition to all the labor-money schemes, and you see
what was motivating those schemes to begin with, you are better positioned to
understand Marx’s arguments in Part I. When you recognize the contrast between
Marx’s approach to exploitation and all of the St-Simonian-inspired accounts of
exploitation-as-extortion, you are better able to appreciate the force of Marx’s
argument in Part III. That is my gamble, at least: Marx’s political context
animates his economic arguments. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
In the final part of this reply, I will turn squarely to the relation
between Marx’s political context and our own. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
[Addendum: I forgot to include a discussion of primitive accumulation!<br />
<br />
Finally, there is the matter of primitive accumulation, which Harvey
ties into the same issue of Marx’s simplifying assumptions. According to him,
there is a “dramatic shift of assumptions” at the beginning of Part VIII, and “the
figures of the usurer, the banker, the merchant, the landlord, the state (and
its debt) flood back into the narrative, as does the power of effective demand
in the market.” I agree that the landlords and the state are centrally
important to Marx’s account of primitive accumulation, and say so in Chapter 6 of
my book. Our real disagreement regards the importance of usurers, bankers, and
merchants. According to Harvey, it is the autonomous spread of these “antediluvian”
forms of capital that drives primitive accumulation: “the spread of
commodification and monetization from Europe,” he tells us, “played a necessary
even if not sufficient role in the rise of industrial capitalism in Britain,”
for it “engendered the demand for wool that led to Britain being overrun by
sheep farming.” “Land, labor and money were commodities way before industrial
capital came upon the scene,” he continues. “The problem for Marx is to show
how these pre-capitalist forms were transformed and adapted to work within the
framework of industrial capital.”<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
There are at least two problems here. First, Harvey claims that, while
my reading of primitive accumulation “may be historically true,” it “is not
what Marx says.” However, Harvey does not – and cannot – point to anywhere in
Part VIII where Marx actually stresses the role of merchants or usurers. Harvey
points to the <i>Manifesto</i>, to Volume
Three, to the <i>Grundrisse</i>, and
complains that I “ignore all of these,” but he fails to show how Marx’s
argument in Part VIII depends upon or reproduces Marx’s claims in these other
places. In fact, there are only two places in Part VIII where the antediluvian forms
of capital play a role in Marx’s presentation, and in both cases it is a
distinctly secondary one. First, in Chapter 26, Marx says that the demand for
wool in Flanders motivated lords to clear their estates and turn them into
sheep pastures. This episode is integral to my own account, so I can’t see what
Harvey’s complaint is on this score. Second, in Chapter 31, Marx claims that “The
money capital formed by means of usury and commerce was prevented from turning
into industrial capital, in the country by the feudal constitution, in the
towns by the guild organisation. These fetters vanished with the dissolution of
feudal society, with the expropriation and partial eviction of the country
population.” In other words, primitive accumulation empowers money capital to
begin functioning as industrial capital. Money capital does not, by its own
action, dissolve the feudal constitution of society. Marx’s claim here is the very
opposite of Harvey’s. If we are talking about what Marx says in Volume One,
then I don’t see any justice in Harvey’s criticisms.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
More importantly, I think Harvey’s reading of primitive accumulation
erases one of the most important aspects of Marx’s argument: the sharp, epochal
break between the feudal constitution and the capitalist mode of production. Harvey
seems to take me for a Brennerite, who thinks capitalism sprang up in the
British countryside and then spread around the globe. This is far from the
truth; settler colonialism and slavery and empire were essential to the
constitution of capitalism from the very beginning. I will say, though, that
what Brenner and his followers get right is that the capital relation that
structures production – the relation between wage-labor and capital – is irreducible
to either the antediluvian forms of capital or the directly coercive relations
of production experienced by serfs, peasants, and slaves. Only once the
capital-relation has seized on the production of basic commodities – in the
British context, it was corn – can “the spread of commodification and monetization”
really take hold. Commodification and monetization are not, according to Marx,
autonomous processes. They do not spread by contagion. A revolution in the
relations of production is necessary. Yes, Marx does claim that “the circulation
of commodities is the starting point of capital.” But, as I argue, he also
begins each major section of Volume One with a new origin story for capital: in
the circulation of commodities, in the exploitation of labor, in large-scale production,
and in the primitive accumulation of the factors of production. Harvey’s
reading, by stressing only the first origin, risks making the market into the
root cause of evil, and Marx into another socialist moralizer, inveighing
against money and commodities, merchants and usurers, cheating and gouging.] <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-15063272076721686862017-03-13T13:12:00.002-04:002017-03-13T14:41:54.771-04:00Response to Harvey, part 1<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">David
Harvey has done me a great honor by reviewing my book, <i>Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital</i>, <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/david-harvey-marxs-inferno-review-capital-grundrisse/" target="_blank">for <i>Jacobin</i></a>. To have the first review of my
first book penned by the most famous living teacher of <i>Capital</i></span> is a boon. Professor Harvey’s wide-ranging response
highlights a number of disagreements of broad significance, not only for academic
Marxologists, but for the political Left. He claims that my book will be “a first
salvo in what promises to be a grand battle to redefine Marx’s legacy, both
intellectual and political.” I certainly hope that he is right. At present, the
Left is weak but energized. Young people are widely disenchanted with capitalism
and the post-Cold War global order, and are open-minded about socialism. At the
same time, the political and economic organizations of the Left are in
shambles, and there is no theoretical or tactical center of gravity. I think
this is precisely the moment to reread the history of Left theory, to return to
and to rework first principles. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No one is more important, in this respect, than Marx. The
question is, which Marx? My book defends the dignity of the first volume of <i>Capital</i>, and argues that it contains the
Marx we need to recover today. Harvey disagrees, arguing that “taking Volume 1
as a standalone treatise is deeply problematic.” This disagreement, which he
calls his “most serious objection” to my book, reflects three deeper but less
apparent divisions. One concerns the sort of theory Marx provides. The second
concerns the actual content of Marx’s arguments in Volume One. The third
concerns what is needed now, in our present. Each of these deep disagreements should
be brought into the open, for wide-ranging debate on these matters is of the
utmost importance. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US">1.<span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"> Part 1: </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US">What sort of book is <i>Capital</i>?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The
research question that my book poses and tries to answer is the old question of
Marx’s “method of presentation” in <i>Capital</i>.
Why does Volume One take the form it does? Because Marx himself addresses this
question – howsoever elliptically – in the course of rebutting the claim that
he is applying a Hegelian method to the study of political economy, the scholarship
on this question is dominated by efforts to find a Hegelian or quasi-Hegelian method
of presentation in Volume One. This has had mixed results. Everyone
acknowledges that parts of the text <i>look</i>
rather Hegelian. On the other hand, major chunks of the book don’t look
Hegelian at all: much of Parts Three, Four, and Eight, together adding up to about
40% of the book. These are the “historical” parts. Hegelian Marxists tend to be
embarrassed by these parts, since they don’t add to much to the development of
the concepts. Social historians, like Gareth Stedman Jones, think they are the
only valuable part of <i>Capital</i>. The
two halves are never knit together, though. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">My
idiosyncratic answer to this problem is that Marx’s structured Volume One on
the model of Dante’s <i>Inferno</i>. This is
not so weird as it might sound. Metaphorical descents into Hell were widespread
in the socialist literature of the nineteenth century. Marx’s bête noir,
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, did the most with the trope. Moreover, the moral
categories that structure Dante’s Hell – incontinence, force, fraud, and treachery
– were pervasive in the moral economy of early socialism, for the simple reason
that the Christian-Aristotelian heritage permeated popular morality. Marx, I
argue, wrote <i>Capital</i> as a descent
into the social Hell of modern capitalism. He wanted to acquaint his readers
with the inner workings of the capitalist mode of production, while displacing
the categories of socialist moral judgment onto “the ensemble of social
relations.” As my book shows, reading Volume One in this way allows us to make
sense of its arguments in a connected and holistic way, and as a carefully
constructed intervention into the socialist movement of Marx’s day, without
excising half the book as “digressions” or “illustrations” or “beside the point.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">David
Harvey objects, however, that this “builds a singular and exclusive account
that pushes other readings to one side,” and that it rests “on the shallow but
convenient grounds” that only Volume One was seen through to publication by
Marx. According to Harvey, “if we only read Volume 1 of Capital, … we will also
misunderstand the point of Volume 1.” We will do so because “the assumption
throughout Volume 1 is that all commodities exchange at their value.” This
allows Marx to construct “a model of capitalist activity that reflects ‘the
hell’ of the laborer,” but it does not allow him to consider the “alienation” of “the ‘affluent worker’ who is protected by
a trade union, lives in a suburban house, has a car in the driveway, a TV in
the living room, and a laptop in the kitchen, and vacations in Spain or the
Caribbean.” Nor does it allow him to explain how “capital accumulation … rests
on [the] ‘rational consumption’” of the working class, which must be enabled by
the capitalist class. Harvey claims that these issues can come to the fore and
receive their proper explanation only once Marx’s drops the assumption that
prices equal values, which he does in Volumes Two and Three. Hence, Volume One,
on its own, gives us a partial, and hence false, picture of capitalism. My
book, by arguing that Volume One can stand on its own, does Marx and my readers
a disservice.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-US">The basic
presupposition of Harvey’s interpretation is that, when Marx wrote and
published Volume One, he was “presenting his findings,” and that, in the
service of presenting them in a “persuasive” and “palatable” way to a
readership of “self-educated artisans and laborers,” he “simplified” those
findings, “even to the point of falsification.” If this is true, then only his
unpublished works – the <i>Grundrisse</i>,
Volumes Two and Three, the various preparatory drafts – can give us a true
picture of Marx’s “findings.” In short, Harvey’s Marx is an <i>explainer</i>. He has a grand, unified
theory, but knows that it is too difficult to communicate to “self-educated
artisans and laborers,” so he simplifies it, and dresses it up with “literary
and cultural references,” so as “to make sure his audience would get what he
was talking about.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">My Marx, by
contrast, is an <i>arguer</i>. He doesn’t
have a fully-worked out theory in his back pocket. Instead, he is oriented by a
set of disagreements with the classical political economists, and with his
fellow socialists, and is working out, in <i>Capital</i>,
as full-fledged a response to those disagreements as he can. The literary form
of his intervention is not a costume he dresses his theory up in; it is the
form of the theory itself. His audience knows very well what he is talking
about, because he is not descending upon them from the mountaintop, but
responding to on-going arguments and controversies within the socialist and workers’
movements. The metaphorics of Marx’s text – the vampires and werewolves, Lazarus
and Moses and the prophets, machine-gods and automata – are <i>commonplaces</i>. They show up again and
again in socialist tracts from both sides of the Channel. What is unique to
Marx is the use to which these commonplaces are put, and the elaborate
interconnections among them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
I think my
picture of Marx, and of <i>Capital</i>, is
more accurate that Harvey’s. After all, it is strange to say that you miss the
point of Volume One if you read it on its own. Marx did, after all, publish
Volume One, on its own. In fact, he did so three times – twice in German and
once in French! He was preparing to publish it again – on its own – when he
died. And he approved a Russian translation of Volume One – on its own – in 1872. Whatever
aspiration he had for Volumes Two and Three, he clearly thought that Volume One
could be read and understood “as a standalone treatise.” That I try to read the
book this way does not mean that everyone should just ignore Marx’s unpublished
writings. My reading does not exclude those efforts, or push them to the side,
simply because it does not engage in that sort of work. There are many
excellent scholars who have shed much light on Marx’s unpublished writings.
There is next to nothing on Volume One of <i>Capital</i>
as a published work. I think, frankly, that we are more comfortable with Marx
if we picture him as a scholar unable to communicate the complexity of his
truth in a mere 900 pages, instead of as an engaged political thinker, working
out his ideas in the scrum of debate.William Clare Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947695998569261863noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-53678937549606957862017-02-03T11:33:00.000-05:002017-02-03T11:33:28.972-05:00Can sucking up make you free?<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
Daniel Oppenheimer has <a href="http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/02/02/not-yet-falling-apart/" target="_blank">a very thoughtful essay</a> on Mark Lilla and Corey Robin in the Washington Monthly. Among his observations is this: "Modern secular liberal society, of the sort Lilla prefers, will survive and flourish only if it’s able to reckon with the insights of those who critique and reject its premises. In fact it’s one of the necessary virtues of liberal society, for Lilla, that it’s capable of reckoning and sometimes even reconciling with its critics and haters. It’s also one of the responsibilities of liberal intellectuals to act as facilitators of this process." I think this really does get at the self-conception of many liberal intellectuals.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
But then there is also this: "From this perspective an intellectual like Robin, who conspicuously rejects that conciliatory role, makes sense as a villain. And yet by this standard of villainy, many of the reactionary intellectuals whom Lilla respects and even admires would count as villains. These were people who had no interest in serving modernity, or contributing to its stability, because they saw it as hollow or rotten at its core, not worth serving or shoring up. They were not, in other words, liberal intellectuals, and had no desire to be. I would guess that Robin would say the same of himself, though from a very different ideological vantage point than most of Lilla’s subjects. So why not extend to him, and to the class of left-wing intellectuals of whom he’s fairly representative, the same intellectual courtesy, the same kind of sensitive, nuanced, historically informed and emotionally reserved critical treatment that Lilla is able to give to the subjects of his book, from whom he has more distance, either in time, space or ideology?"</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
Yes, why not? Why are many liberal intellectuals more understanding and sympathetic -- and astute -- readers of the anti-liberal Right than of the anti-liberal Left?</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
This has me thinking of an argument Philip Pettit makes in "On the People's Terms." Arguing against Isaiah Berlin's conception of freedom as non-interference, Pettit subjects it to what he thinks is a reductio ad absurdum. He argues that, if we are free so long as we are not being coerced or threatened, then this entails "that ingratiation -- toadying, kowtowing, and cosying up to the powerful -- can give you freedom of choice." It is not a very charitable or sympathetic thought, I admit, but I wonder if what Pettit thinks an absurdity is not actually a sincerely held belief of many liberal intellectuals: that getting cosy with the powerful can make you free.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-top: 6px;">
When Lilla attacks Robin, when Jonathan Chait attacks young leftists, the animating intuition is that if the outsiders, rebels, and radicals of the world would just be nice to those in positions of power, their complaints would, if not evaporate, at least be significantly ameliorated. They can put themselves easily in the shoes of those who rule and govern, and can appreciate that ruling is hard. They also think that large differentials of power and wealth are inescapable, and so we ought to mitigate their dangers by attending to the resentments and complaints of the wealthy and powerful, to keep them in good humour lest they desire to employ their wealth and power more intrusively and despotically. And, from where they stand, why would they think otherwise?</div>
Will Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08526758278565458289noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-46074318814159477102012-05-18T09:46:00.001-04:002012-05-18T09:46:26.080-04:00Back from the dead?Facebook killed the casual blogger.<br />
<br />
But there is a lot going on that I would sort of like to make note of. And there are a lot of texts that I would like to preserve in a more public way. So...<br />
<br />
1. The Quebec "special law" (i.e., dictate) regarding the student strike, now under debate: <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/357492-quebec-education-special-law.html">https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/357492-quebec-education-special-law.html</a><br />
<br />
More to come?Will Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08526758278565458289noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-81027394873727064982011-04-03T14:18:00.000-04:002011-04-03T14:18:16.767-04:00CFP: Hegel and CapitalismCALL FOR PAPERS<br />
<br />
Hegel and Capitalism<br />
<br />
For the 22nd Biennial Meeting of the Hegel Society of America<br />
<br />
To be held at DePaul University, Chicago, IL, Friday afternoon, October 5, to Sunday Mid-day, October 7, 2012<br />
<br />
Deadline for submission of papers: January 31, 2012<br />
<br />
The conference will cover all aspects of the theme “Hegel and Capitalism,” broadly understood. We invite papers that address this theme historically, systematically, or with reference to current questions and issues. Papers that interpret, engage, or apply Hegel are welcome. Papers that investigate the conference topic in new ways are encouraged.<br />
<br />
Submitted papers are limited to 6,000 words, and should be formatted for blind review and accompanied by an abstract of no more than 300 words. Papers must be submitted at this length and later adjustments must remain within this limit. Papers submitted must be complete essays; proposals are not acceptable. All papers should be in English. Although papers presented at meetings of the Hegel Society of America are usually published as a collection of essays, publication cannot be guaranteed. By submitting a paper, however, an author of a paper accepted for the program agrees to reserve publication for the HSA proceedings. Final decision as to publication remains dependent on the results of peer and publisher review.<br />
<br />
Please send papers to: Andrew Buchwalter, Program Chair (abuchwal@unf.edu)Will Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08526758278565458289noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-23095701853110522412011-02-09T10:28:00.001-05:002011-02-09T10:31:35.933-05:00Marx NewsThe <i>Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe</i> (MEGA) project has gone on-line:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: monospace; font-size: 13px;">Liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen,</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: monospace; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: monospace; font-size: 13px;">Zum neuen Jahr ist die digitale Ausgabe der MEGA in einer neuen </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: monospace; font-size: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: monospace; font-size: 13px;">Version online gegangen. Man findet sie, wie die bisherige Ausgabe </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: monospace; font-size: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: monospace; font-size: 13px;">auch schon, unter folgender Adresse:</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: monospace; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: monospace; font-size: 13px;"><a href="https://excas.campus.mcgill.ca/owa/redir.aspx?C=fffcd95962ad47ab9accfd1dfb4a1191&URL=http%3a%2f%2ftelota.bbaw.de%2fmega%2f" target="_blank">http://telota.bbaw.de/mega/</a></span></blockquote>There are only a small handful of volumes available as of yet -- <i>Grundrisse</i>, economic notebooks from 1863-67, and volume II of <i>Capital </i>-- but this is the material condition for a wave of new, high-quality Marx scholarship. The bound volumes of the MEGA are insanely expensive, and full collections (not that MEGA is yet complete by any measure) are only available at a very few libraries in the world. Most people who want to do serious work on Marx are forced to rely upon the old and inadequate <i>Marx-Engels-Werke</i> or the English-language <i>Complete Works</i>. <br />
<br />
I was able to use the MEGA for my dissertation work, luckily, and it made a huge difference. The mass of Marx's lifework was left in manuscript or notebook form when he died, and the editions of this material that eventually emerged did not do a very good job of carrying over the actual form and history of the manuscripts. <br />
<br />
Even the published works suffer from this editorial erasure of history. The most egregious example I know of is this: if you are working on <i>Capital</i> I, and, in due diligence, look at the German <i>Werke</i> version, you find a book divided into <a href="http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me23/me23_000.htm">7 <i>Abschnitten </i>and 25 </a><i><a href="http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me23/me23_000.htm">Kapiteln</a>.</i> But all of the English translations are divided into <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index.htm">8 Parts and 33 Chapters</a>. You might be led thereby to think that this difference is some artifact of the translation, or of Engels' postmortem editorial tampering. You'd be wrong. For completely mysterious reasons, the MEW folks took the text of the 4th German edition of the book (1890), but divided it according to the 2nd German edition (1873). The 8 Parts/33 Chapters arrangement came on the scene with the French edition of the book (1875, the last edition overseen to completion by Marx himself), and was incorporated, on Marx's instructions, into the 3rd German edition (1883), and then into the English edition (1886). Why the editors of the <i>Werke</i> decided to undo this authorial decision is beyond me. Only by looking at MEGA, which published each of these editions of the book as separate volumes, can you see what happened.<br />
<br />
I have no reason to doubt that there are many, many, many other examples of this sort of thing. The more widely available the MEGA becomes, the easier it will be for students of Marx to discover and correct these sorts of errors.Will Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08526758278565458289noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-57285734610328341612011-01-19T10:52:00.000-05:002011-01-19T10:52:08.720-05:00What's Left of Liberalism?<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Oy, does this thing still work?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">So, Matt Yglesias thinks he has <a href="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/01/pas-dennemi-a-gauche/?wpmp_switcher=desktop">no enemies to the left</a>. I haven't waded through all of the <a href="http://lhote.blogspot.com/2011/01/blindspot.html">post </a>he is responding to, but...</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Issue numero uno: de Boer says of Yglesias that he is<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">one of the most vocal of the neoliberal scolds, forever ready to define the 'neoliberal consensus' as the truth of man and to ignore left-wing criticism." To this, Yglesias responds: </span></span></div><blockquote>I don’t really know what it means to criticize a writer for holding that his own views are “the truth of man.” Obviously, I agree with my political opinions and disagree with those who disagree with me. If I didn’t agree I’d change my mind.</blockquote><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">But you're not being criticized for believing what you <i>say </i>-- you're being criticized for believing what you <i>believe</i>! The problem is content, not sincerity. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Issue numero dos: Yglesias avers, "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">while I’ll cop to being a 'neoliberal' I</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><em>don’t </em></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">acknowledge that I have critics to the 'left' of me." He then rattles off a list of his primary policy concerns (to which I'll return), before saying:</span></span></div><blockquote>I recognize that many people disagree with this agenda, and that many of those who disagree with it think of themselves as "to the left" of my view. But I simply deny that there are positions that are more genuinely egalitarian than my own. I really and sincerely believe that liberalism is the best way to advance the interests of the underprivileged and to make the world a better place.</blockquote><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The unspoken assumption throughout is that Left = egalitarianism. No one is more egalitarian than Yglesias, hence no one is further to the Left than he. Now this assumption has a long history. In academic circles it certainly runs back to the 80s, when the Marxists stopped calling themselves Marxists and started calling themselves egalitarians, when historical materialism went out the window, to be replaced by neo-Kantian moral theory. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">If this assumption is taken on board, then those who thinks of themselves as being to the Left of liberalism are actually just sentimentalists and wishful thinkers -- they will the end of equality without willing the means of liberal government, which is the only mechanism for achieving equality. Genuine egalitarianism is liberal egalitarianism.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">As someone who thinks of himself as to the Left of liberalism, and who has never hoisted the banner of Equality!, I'd like to register an objection.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Equality always has to be specified. Equality unmodified means nothing; we must answer the question: Equality of what? For Yglesias, it is equality of economic freedom, greater equality of economic outcome (wealth), and equality of respect and recognition -- pretty much the standard Rawlsian package. Thus, look at the specific issues that concern him:</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"></div><blockquote><ol><li>More redistribution of money from the top to the bottom.</li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">A less paternalistic welfare state that puts more money directly in the hands of the recipients of social services.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Macroeconomic stabilization policy that seriously aims for full employment.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Curb the regulatory privileges of incumbent landowners.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Roll back subsidies implicit in our current automobile/housing-oriented industrial policy.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Break the licensing cartels that deny opportunity to the unskilled.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Much greater equalization of opportunities in K-12 education.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Reduction of the rents assembled by privileged intellectual property owners.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Throughout the public sector, concerted reform aimed at ensuring public services are public services and not jobs programs.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Taxation of polluters (and resource-extractors more generally) rather than current de facto subsidization of resource extraction.</span></li>
</ol></blockquote><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Most of these -- 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 -- are nothing more than efforts to extend and perfect the market. They internalize externalities, eliminate rents, etc. Now I don't necessarily disagree with all of these things, but every one of them implies that we need more and better markets. The remaining concerns -- 1, 3, and 7 -- aim to establish the non-market prerequisites of these more and better markets. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Nowhere is there even a hint of the thought that an increase in market freedom might lead to a decrease in other sorts of freedom, or to less happiness, or to any other bad outcome. Nowhere is there any mention of something like a guaranteed basic income, or of any other policy that would reduce the need for people to rely upon wage labor to live. Nowhere is there any attention to global macroeconomic dynamics like the swelling of the global surplus population -- the hundreds of millions of people who do not participate in any meaningful economic activity whatsoever. Nowhere is there any reference to tax competition. Nowhere is there any hint that all these wonderful markets might depend upon the existence of a labor market, including a market for bare subsistence wage-labor, with all the poverty and desperation that market implies.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">In short, nowhere does Yglesias hint that more and better markets might themselves be problematic. That's not to say that the Left is or ought to be in favor of fewer and worse markets, but to say that the Left, since Marx, has been centrally opposed to the notions of freedom and equality that find their ground in "the market" -- the surface appearance of capitalism.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">So, I say to Yglesias: sorry dude -- there's definitely plenty of room on your Left, and it's populated with enemies -- like me.</div>Will Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08526758278565458289noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-64482982433585641472010-10-20T13:18:00.000-04:002010-10-20T13:18:00.502-04:00Upcoming SSPP PanelAs part of <a href="http://www.spep.org/content.php?_p_=5">SPEP </a>this year (right here in Montreal!), the <a href="http://socialpolitical.wordpress.com/">Society for Social and Political Philosophy</a> has organized the following panel:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3F32Gze4HHKhyApwq9UvzcfS1-UXbH1i-go4kjbEhKFv_6V6gEBRSkJ9P1C5RFUZQIG3kmd0S0Ea4eF78hn5Be5MCfs712JDkTQkTwKRIZgLejxIj21zr4OMYDFOrZWuOXh_AV5BwVU0/s1600/Announcement.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3F32Gze4HHKhyApwq9UvzcfS1-UXbH1i-go4kjbEhKFv_6V6gEBRSkJ9P1C5RFUZQIG3kmd0S0Ea4eF78hn5Be5MCfs712JDkTQkTwKRIZgLejxIj21zr4OMYDFOrZWuOXh_AV5BwVU0/s320/Announcement.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Will Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08526758278565458289noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-31452778424135388562010-10-18T13:53:00.006-04:002010-10-18T14:06:37.410-04:00Moralism vs. Meliorism<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Sandy Levinson, at Balkinization, <a href="http://balkin.blogspot.com/2010/10/would-eric-cantor-or-paul-ryan-let.html">asks </a>how libertarians might respond to the recent rescue of miners in Chile, which was largely funded by the Chilean state. Levinson thinks the Chilean state was right to step in and ensure that the rescue effort was made, but thinks this stepping in by the state does not sit well with libertarian notions about legitimate state action, since the state was not protecting anyone against a violation of their rights. That is, the Chilean state was acting as an insurer, not as a police force. If one admits that the Chilean state was right to act as an insurer in this case, then Levinson thinks one will be hard pressed not to endorse a welfare state, which acts as insurer in lots of cases. So, libertarians are supposedly caught between a) admitting that the state rightfully serves a welfare function, and b) looking like hard-hearted bastards who think it was wrong for the miners to be rescued.<br />
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<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: small;">Jacob Levy responds by </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: small;"><a href="http://jacobtlevy.blogspot.com/2010/10/responding-to-sandy-levinson-levinson.html">saying </a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: small;">-- these are my terms, not his -- that there's a difference between legitimacy and justification. The Chilean state, like all states, has way more power than is legitimate. This is, in large part, because actual states are never the outcome of social contracts:</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><a name='more'></a></span></span><br />
<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">States did not come about by individualist contractualist consent; they are not the institutional form of morally foundational nations; religious, hereditary, and customary forms of legitimation may remain sociologically credible in some places but are surely not morally well-grounded accounts of the justifications for the organized use of violence. </span></span></blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Nonetheless, states exist, and have a mass of de facto power. The question is, how should this power be used? Jacob thinks -- rightly, I say -- that the illegitimacy of state power has no immediate bearing on the question of how that power might be justifiably used now that it exists. The libertarian is committed to saying that the Chilean state has amassed illegitimate power -- power that cannot be "morally well-grounded" -- but that, nonetheless, it is justified in using that power to rescue the miners, since "capacity and proximity can generate outcome-responsibility." It might be wrong for the Chilean state to have the power to rescue the miners, but it might still be right for the Chilean state to use its power to rescue the miners.<br />
<br />
So far, so good. I am myself fond of drawing this same distinction between legitimacy and justification, and I think it does get Jacob's special version of libertarianism out of the dilemma Levinson is pushing.<br />
<br />
Where I think there might be a problem is here:</span></span><br />
<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The state’s first duty, the prevention of interpersonal violence, follows more or less straightforwardly from the kind of social organization that the state is: the agency that is able to claim and enforce a local monopoly on the legitimate initiation of force.</span></span></blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Notice that word, "legitimate"? Now, I know Jacob is using that in a purely Weberian way -- the local monopoly on legitimate initiation of force is the local monopoly on de facto accepted initiation of force. But this points, nonetheless, to the ideological underpinnings of state power. The state is only the state if it seems to people to be a legitimate power. I would hazard that a state that goes about rescuing miners is, other things being equal, more likely to seem legitimate to the people it governs than is a state that does not undertake such insurance and welfare tasks.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">If this supposition is true, at least in the normal run of things, then Jacobite libertarians (as opposed to the Jacobin libertarians caught in Levinson's dilemma) seem caught in another dilemma, more psychological than logical. Since the state that uses its illegitimate power in justifiable ways thereby secures that power -- after all, people are not in a habit of differentiating between legitimacy and justification -- there is some tension between a) the hope that what power there is will be well-used, regardless of its source, and b) the desire that justice will be done by stripping illegitimate power from its holders. If the usurpers use their ill-gotten power well, and placate the people with bread and circuses, what hope is there that we will ever be rid of usurpers? There is some psychological difficulty in saying: "I hope that thief uses what s/he has stolen in such a way that it's harder to convince people s/he should give what s/he has stolen back to its legitimate owners."</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This psychological dilemma between stringent moralism ("Let justice be done, tho' the heavens fall!") and soft-hearted meliorism ("What's done is done, so let's make the best of things") is not restricted to libertarians, of course. It is analogous (but only analogous) to the tensions in Marxism that give rise to "accelerating the contradictions" as a tactic -- trying to ensure that the usurpers aren't able to or won't do anything with their power that might incline people to forget that they are usurpers. Now, it's not surprising to me that Jacob tends to the soft-hearted meliorism side of things, but I don't think anyone can go very far in that direction without jeopardizing their commitment to the notion that the usurpers have what they have illegitimately. If strict determinations of right are to have any purchase at all, they have to have that purchase against the good outcomes that might come about at the expense of strict determinations of right.</span></span></div>Will Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08526758278565458289noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8105708755061237897.post-42213547407266794002010-10-18T10:01:00.002-04:002010-10-24T01:15:46.782-04:00CFP: Rethinking Reification<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">RETHINKING REIFICATION <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
</span></span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Panel to be held at the 2011 meeting of the Society for Existential and Phe-nomenological Theory and Culture, May 31–June 3, at the University of New Brunswick and St. Thomas University, in conjunction with the Congress of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">For much of the twentieth century, the concept of reification was a powerful tool in the intellectual arsenal of Marxist social critique. Beginning with Georg Lukács, and continuing through the work of figures such as Horkheimer, Ador-no, and Marcuse, the concept provided critical social theory with an incisive analytical capacity that also lent normative support to emancipatory goals. Along with much of the conceptual apparatus of Marxism, however, during the latter decades of the twentieth century the idea of reification grew increasingly marginalized within humanistic and social-scientific disciplines. With the new century, though, there are signs of renewed interest in the concept—for exam-ple, Timothy Bewes’ Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism (2002), Axel Honneth’s Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (2008), and Kevin Floyd’s The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (2009). While such contribu-tions differ considerably in terms of their disciplinary foci and underlying theo-retical commitments, they nonetheless jointly attest to the idea that there may be an important place for a renewed concept of reification within contempo-rary critical social theory. The aim of this panel is to explore — from phenome-nological and existential perspectives — the potential value and feasibility of such a conceptual retrieval. Papers may address any aspect of reification, al-though those with a contemporary focus and/or interdisciplinary approach are especially welcome. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Paper proposals should be sent to Bryan Smyth (basmyth@memphis.edu) by December 1, 2010. Proposals should include the title, author’s name, institu-tional affiliation, and a detailed abstract of approximately 250 words. Propos-als will be initially reviewed by the panel organizers, and acceptance will be conditional upon the author’s ability to submit a complete paper (not more than 4000 words) by February 1, 2011 for anonymous review.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">For further information, contact Bryan Smyth (basmyth@memphis.edu).</span></span>Will Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08526758278565458289noreply@blogger.com