On the new class fundamentalism

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.

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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 Compact, etc., seem very conjunctural.

Within this context, what does it mean to insist that class is fundamental? 

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.

"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.

"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.

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 are 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. 

I want to look at the two aspects of the position in turn, and to point out where I keep getting tripped up.

In what sense, first, are class processes and conflicts the fundamental social processes that drive or explain other conflicts? 

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. 

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 underdetermines 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. 

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. 

Class, in this sense, names the relations of domination and exploitation that are productively necessary for a given society. 

The point of base-superstructure materialism is to underscore this fact, that class relations are themselves a “social technology” of production, and that more productive class relations are more powerful 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…)

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.

In this situation – and it is, I think, our situation, to a greater extent than it has ever been any other society’s situation – class relations remain fundamental, but they are progressively distinct (without being independent) from work 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.

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.

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 the proletariat. 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. 

I think this conflation of capitalist class relations with work relations is an understandable but regrettable feature of the new fundamentalism. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

That belief is not reasonable anymore, about Europe and North America at least – and it was never as correct as it was reasonable. 

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. Around here, 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.

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 tempting 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. 

Towards a brief history of the physics of power

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.

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.

Antifa and Elephants

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Antifa, of course, thinks this is not 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 are the fascists.

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. 

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.

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 and given to indefinite expansion.

I understand 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. 

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 actual, armed Nazis, but much harder to do so with each step on Chait’s slippery slope of inference.

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

Can sucking up make you free?

Daniel Oppenheimer has a very thoughtful essay 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.

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?"

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?

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.

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?

Marx News

The Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) project has gone on-line:

Liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen,
Zum neuen Jahr ist die digitale Ausgabe der MEGA in einer neuen  Version online gegangen. Man findet sie, wie die bisherige Ausgabe  auch schon, unter folgender Adresse:
http://telota.bbaw.de/mega/

There are only a small handful of volumes available as of yet -- Grundrisse, economic notebooks from 1863-67, and volume II of Capital -- 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 Marx-Engels-Werke or the English-language Complete Works.

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.

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 Capital I, and, in due diligence, look at the German Werke version, you find a book divided into 7 Abschnitten and 25 Kapiteln.  But all of the English translations are divided into 8 Parts and 33 Chapters.  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 Werke 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.

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.

What's Left of Liberalism?

Oy, does this thing still work?

So, Matt Yglesias thinks he has no enemies to the left.  I haven't waded through all of the post he is responding to, but...

Issue numero uno: de Boer says of Yglesias that he is "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: 

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.

But you're not being criticized for believing what you say -- you're being criticized for believing what you believe!  The problem is content, not sincerity. 

Issue numero dos: Yglesias avers, "while I’ll cop to being a 'neoliberal' I don’t 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:

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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:

1. More redistribution of money from the top to the bottom.
2. A less paternalistic welfare state that puts more money directly in the hands of the recipients of social services.
3. Macroeconomic stabilization policy that seriously aims for full employment.
4. Curb the regulatory privileges of incumbent landowners.
5. Roll back subsidies implicit in our current automobile/housing-oriented industrial policy.
6. Break the licensing cartels that deny opportunity to the unskilled.
7. Much greater equalization of opportunities in K-12 education.
8. Reduction of the rents assembled by privileged intellectual property owners.
9. Throughout the public sector, concerted reform aimed at ensuring public services are public services and not jobs programs.
10. Taxation of polluters (and resource-extractors more generally) rather than current de facto subsidization of resource extraction.

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.  

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.

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.

So, I say to Yglesias: sorry dude -- there's definitely plenty of room on your Left, and it's populated with enemies -- like me.

Upcoming SSPP Panel

As part of SPEP this year (right here in Montreal!), the Society for Social and Political Philosophy has organized the following panel:

James Scott: Adam Smith or Karl Marx?

I can't escape James Scott right now.  Jacob Levy has contributed his two cents to the discussion of Seeing Like a State over at Cato Unbound.  There's a lot to talk about in Jacob's contribution, but I just want to point to one thing for now.  Jacob writes:

I suspect that Scott has been mildly embarrassed by the libertarian enthusiasm for Seeing Like a State, and since its publication he’s been at pains to be clearer than he was in the book that the market can also be a force of high-modernist social flattening. But he has not (that I’m aware of) pushed the thought very far, or told his readers much about when the market is that kind of force on its own, and when it is so when joined to state power. 

My Marxist self jumps up and down and yells: when have there been extensive markets that were not joined to state power!?!?!?!?!?!

Stuff I'd like to say something about but don't have time to right now...

A back and forth at Crooked Timber and Lenin's Tomb over rational choice theory and Leftist/Marxist political theory.
And another post at CT, this one about James Scott vs. Hayek on markets and the loss of local knowledge. Scott, btw, is speaking here in Montreal this coming Monday, 20 September:

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University announces: Professor JAMES C. SCOTT: "The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia." A lecture on Monday, September 20, 2010, at 7pm; Hall Building (corner of Bishop and de Maisonneuve), room 763.

Aristotle's Politics, A.1-2

...in a translation of my own devising. Notes and thoughts to follow.

Aristotle, Politics [that is: “what is proper to the citizen”]

(1252a1) Since we see that every city is a sort of community and that every community is joined together for the sake of some good – for everyone does everything for the favor of what seems to be good – then clearly, as every community endeavors for some good, doubtless (5) the most sovereign of all will endeavor for the most sovereign of all goods and the one encompassing all the others. And this community is called the city or the political community.

And so those who suppose that what is proper to a citizen and to a king and to the head of a household and to a master are all the same do not speak beautifully. For they hold that each of these is (10) distinguished by being many or few, but not by its form, such that a few would be proper to a master, more to the head of a household, and yet more to a citizen or a king, as if there were no distinction between a large household and a small city. And as for what is proper to a citizen and to a king, whenever one is set above, this is kingly, and whenever, one in part rules and in part is ruled, (15) according to the account of science, this is civic. But none of this is true.

Pessimism and Anti-State Politics

My comments for today's panel at CPSA:

My project is to try to flesh out a neo-Marxian politics using resources from institutional and new institutional economics. I begin from the hypothesis that human beings are evil. I try to be a little deflationary about this; when I say we are evil, I do not mean that we are malicious – though we can be – but only that we are not very good cooperators. This is because we are, at least potentially, a) prudentially rational agents, b) who act independently of one another, but c) who are dependent on one another for realizing our desired outcomes. In other words, we face the persistent threat of coordination problems.

This specter of coordination problems does not always arrive – collective action happens – but it is a real enough threat that we cannot, in principle, rule out the possibility of prudentially rational opportunism (free-riding, defection, rent-seeking, moral hazard, etc.) in our considerations of institutional design. The threat amounts to a divergence between the common good and the good achievable by the independent actions of prudentially rational agents. Any approach to collective action that does not take this threat into account in the structure and working rules it proposes for institutions seems, by that very fact, to convict itself of criminal naiveté by entrusting the entire existence of the proposed institutions to the care of good fortune alone. My essay tests various approaches to collective action by this criterion of naiveté.

Event: After Capitalism? [Updated with reactions]

This Thursday, 29 April, 2010; Salle 422, 2910 Boul. Édouard-Montpetit

• 13 h - 14 h Pierre-Yves Néron, CRÉUM : Public Capitalism

• 14 h - 15 h Pablo Gilabert, Concordia University : Socialism

• 15 h - 15 h 15 : Pause café

• 15 h 15 - 16 h 30 David Casassas, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona : Property-owning Democracy

Info here. Poster here.

UPDATE:

A really nice event. About 20 lightyears from my way of approaching political philosophical problems, though. Whatever -- it's normative political theory. I don't do normative political theory. But it was also -- except, perhaps, for some of Casassas' paper -- ideal political theory. And I just can't get my head to go into that space at all. For me, political theory always departs from some very robust sense of the presently given human condition, and, because of this, I can never make heads nor tails of the leap to talking about a just society in abstraction from the concrete situation.

For example: Does the just society have neighbors? Does it have borders? If so, do these facts have any impact on what it means to be a just society? A just society has citizens; does it also have non-citizen residents? Does a just society engage in foreign trade, or does it produce all it needs? Either way, what does a just society produce? What does it need? Do trade relations or production relations ahve any impact on what it means to be a just society? Are its neighbors friendly or hostile? Does this matter for justice? Does a just society have a history? Is this history a history of justice? Does this history have any impact on the institutions of the basic structure? I just don't know how to bracket these questions in order to consider a just social order "in itself."

(Hell, even Plato didn't bracket these questions; the consideration that really gets the construction of the city in speech undrway in the Republic is the consideration that the city will be one of many, will have neighbors, and must be prepared to defend itself against them.)

Anyway, a very nice event anyway...

An exercise in classification

Regarding and proposing solutions to coordination problems of various sorts (assurance games, prisoners' dilemmas, and the like):

Stalinists believe in the state, not in entrepreneurs.
Libertarians believe in entrepreneurs, not in the state.

Keynesians believe in both.

Communists believe in neither.

G.A. Cohen In Memoriam: A Critical Celebration of His Life and Work

This Friday, 27 November 2009, 10am - 4pm
McGill University, Old McGill Room, Faculty Club

Programme:

• Joseph Carens (Toronto) "Motivation and Equality in Cohen"


• Jurgen De Wispelaere (CRÉUM) "Cohen in the Real World? Equality, Justice and Social Institutions"


• Pablo Gilabert (Concordia) "Cohen on Socialism, Equality, and Community"


• Jacob T. Levy (McGill) "Cohen on the Tasks of Political Philosophy"


• William Clare Roberts (McGill) "Analysis Terminated? Towards a Post-Analytical Marxism"


• Daniel Weinstock (CRÉUM) "Cohen and Cohen on Jokes"

I don't know that this is the actual order in which we'll be speaking* -- an earlier version of the program had Roberts and Levy going first and second. Regardless, come for the whole thing.

By the way, I feel a little odd being the only person who didn't include Cohen's name in the title of his talk, but if it makes a difference, my talk also has an alternate title: "What Bullshit Marxists Can Learn from Cohen." (You can tell, perhaps, why that is not on the program.)

* UPDATE: The "definitive" schedule:

10h/11h30
William Clare Roberts: Analysis Terminated? Toward a Post-Analytical Marxism
Joseph Carens: Motivation and Equality in Cohen

11h45-13h15
Jacob T. Levy: Cohen on the Tasks of Political Philosophy
Jurgen De Wispelaere: Cohen in the Real World? Equality, Justice and Social Institutions

13h15-14h30
Lunch break

14h30-16h
Pablo Gilabert: Cohen on Socialism, Equality, and Community
Daniel Weinstock: Cohen and Cohen on Jokes

From Postmodernity to Aristotle

Here are some thoughts about what it means to live in postmodernity, taken from an essay I'm writing. I claim to identify three problems faced by "we postmoderns" which might motivate a return to the ancients, and especially to Aristotle. Thoughts?


The first problem of postmodernity that I would identify is the eclipse of the rule of law. Despite the resonance this might seem to have with a definitively liberal political discourse generated out of the Bush presidency, I am not referring to any empirical violation of the law, or even to the explicit Hobbesian argument that the chief executive is not bound by the law. Postmodernity is not marked by the return of extra-legal rule – tyranny or dictatorship – which was certainly a familiar-enough phenomenon during the reign of the modern consensus. Rather, to be postmodern is to suspect that the rule of law is, strictly speaking, nonsensical. The problem is conceptual, not empirical, as it were. The landmarks are not Guantanamo Bay and John Yoo, but Wittgenstein’s reductio ad absurdum of the notion of “applying” a rule, or Benjamin’s argument that all law is founded on and enforced by an essentially non-legal recourse to violence. The rule of law seems to be impossible to think, to be a sort of oxymoron. The universality of the law seems incommensurable with the singularity of the scene of its application. Hence, denizens of postmodernity feel the need for something like what Aristotle calls φρονησις, a sort of political wisdom or judgment that proceeds otherwise than by applying rules. This is the first call to return to Aristotle.

Moreover, postmodernity can also be characterized by the eclipse of the modern distinction between public and private. The division proposed by the liberal tradition, according to which the ends of action are private, while the means to those ends become public insofar as they impinge upon one another, seems to have lost its purchase. Again, the problem is not empirical; the liberal paradigm is founded upon diagnoses of and remedies for the empirical tendencies of the state to impose ends on its citizens and of those citizens to trespass on one another’s liberty. The postmodern problem arises when it seems that those very remedies only accelerate the tendencies they are supposed to check. We are forced, repeatedly, to choose between tendencies toward privatization and tendencies towards politicization that are equally merciless and asymptotically totalizing. The market increasingly subsumes not only the non-governmental institutions that are supposed to be the conservative bulwark of civil society – clubs, churches, families, universities – but even the very state functions – policing, soldiering, administering law, and even writing legislation – that are most central to public affairs. On the other hand, since everything seems to affect everyone (as revealed by the very cost-benefit analysis that articulates the calculative logic of privatization), everything seems to fall within the purview of administration and regulation by the state, or at least of political debate. Consequently, we postmoderns feel the need to rediscover some principle that would demarcate and harmonize the arenas of common being and private life. This is the second call to return to Aristotle.

Finally, postmodernity is marked by what I would call the eclipse of autonomy. Modernity was the era of the serene certainty that only those laws or norms were binding for a person which that person could be considered to have authored. We postmoderns, by contrast, experience a profound disquiet about the origin, force, and appropriateness of rules or norms, a disquiet that is not comforted by inquiring into whether we might ourselves have authored the rules and norms we obey. In fact, one lesson that could be drawn from the mid-to-late-20th century conjunction of a) rebellions against and flights from secular organizations of all kinds, and b) the metastatic growth of enthusiastic, fundamentalist, and evangelical churches of all stripes is this: the more we are told that we can, do, and/or should construct our own sets of rules or norms, the more oppressive and paralyzing such norms feel. We no longer trust ourselves with ruling ourselves. In this situation, the old questions – What is it to rule and to be ruled? Where do rules come from? Who should rule? – are questionable and interesting once again. This is the third call to return to Aristotle.

Strauss Contra Neoconservatism

I'm working on a paper that, in part, involves a discussion of Strauss. Hence, I've been reading quite a bit of the fellow of late. I'm also going to be chairing a panel at APSA that will include Nicholas Xenos, Anne Norton, and Shadia B. Drury, all of whom have written anti-Strauss books (all of them, generally, arguing for a connection between Strauss and the Bush-era right in America). Given the repeated attempts to link Strauss to the neoconservative practices of extra-legal executive action, I thought the following passage from On Tyranny--Strauss is responding to Eric Voegelin (p. 180)--was interesting:

To stress the fact that it is just to replace constitutional rule by absolute rule, if the common good requires that change, means to cast doubt on the absolute sanctity of the established constitutional order. It means encouraging dangerous men to confuse the issue by bringing about a state of affairs in which the common good requires the establishment of their absolute rule. The true doctrine of the legitimacy of Caesarism is a dangerous doctrine. The true distinction between Caesarism and tyranny is too subtle for ordinary political use. It is better for the people to remain ignorant of that distinction and to treat the potential Caesar as a potential tyrant. No harm can come from this theoretical error which becomes a practical truth if the people have the mettle to act upon it. No harm can come from the political identification of Caesarism and tyranny: Caesars can take care of themselves.

This passage uses precisely the sort of Straussian argument that his liberal critics find so pernicious--some truths are better kept quiet--in order to defend the sanctity of the rule of law. It is better not to admit that extra-constitutional rule might be necessary and even salutary in certain extraordinary situations because such an admission, while true, makes it more likely that extra-constitutional rule will be exercised in completely non-extraordinary conditions. And such an argument has obvious affinities with a liberal argument against legalizing torture: even if torture would be necessary in the "ticking time bomb" scenario, the torturer-hero of such a situation will be able to break the law to do what is necessary. You can't encode the state of exception in a rule without making the exception the norm.

From a liberal point of view, the problem with neoconservatism is that it makes the state of exception into the normal state of affairs. But that is precisely Strauss's criticism of Voegelin's theory of Caesarism. So, maybe liberals should make peace with Strauss, eh?

UPDATE: I was sloppy in my assimilation of Anne Norton's thesis to those of Drury and Xenos. Norton draws sharp distinctions between Strauss, students of Strauss, and Straussians. She is very critical of Straussian neoconservatism, but does not link Strauss himself to the neoconservative project, and generally casts Strauss as infinitely superior to Straussians and as critical (avant le lettre) of many of their positions and practices.

The Suicidal Animal

I really like Paolo Virno. I've been reading his recent book (Multitude Between Innovation and Negation), and enjoying it immensely. One point he stresses repeatedly in this work intersects in an interesting way with the Hegel I'm teaching right now and with something I always try to insist upon when teaching Aristotle: that human beings are the suicidal animals.

For Hegel, this is explicit and almost axiomatic. I'm teaching the Philosophy of Right, and right away in the Introduction Hegel insists that the will is first and foremost a negation or refusal. As a consequence, any positive choice we make has the form of refusing to refuse. "Yes" is always a "No" to saying "No." Because of this absolute universality of negation for the will, the being with a will--human being--is necessarily capable of suicide, of saying "No" to the whole world and hence to life itself. (Sartre really never gets much beyond these first few pages of Hegel...)

That is an interesting enough piece of philosophical anthropology, if familiar.

Virno makes what seems on its face to be a very similar argument: that, because of the negating power inherent in all language, human beings, as language users, are always confronted with the possibility of negating the humanity of themselves and others. This is what makes us especially dangerous animals for our own kind. Virno's emphasis is on humans as murderous, rather than humans as suicidal, but that difference seems less important than the fact that he locates the power of negation in language rather than in the will. I inadvertently put the entire discussion of willing in Hegel in linguistic terms--saying "Yes" or saying "No"--but I don't think Hegel does this at all. He does draw a link between language use and the ability to commit suicide later in the Philosophy of Right (I'll have to check that--I don't have my copy of the text with me). But it is not so immediate as it is with Virno. This lends Virno's anthropology a post-humanist and post-structuralist hue: Whatever being is captive to language is thereby also murderous and suicidal. This makes the modern attempt to restrain the violence of human willfulness by precisely delineating and enforcing the boundaries between wills (by means of the law and the state as law enforcer) seem less promising.

As an aside, this makes the seemingly recent interest in Hobbes' theory of language much more understandable and interesting to me. Hobbes seems like the one early modern political philosopher who really consistently and rigorously linked the problem of inter-human violence with the question of language.

But I want to skip over Hobbes and go back to Aristotle. When I teach Aristotle, I illustrate the difference between a definition and an attribution of a peculiar property by contrasting the proper definition of the human being--the animal having logos--with "the animal that can commit suicide." I think the latter does pick out human beings from all other animals on Aristotelian terms, but it nonetheless does not define human being. This is because--in part--it follows from the fact that human beings are the animals having logos, and hence does not get at the basic differential of the human form, but only at a consequence of that differential. Despite the commonplace claim that Aristotle defines human being as the political animal, I think the same point applies: we are political because we have language, so our political being does not define us, even if it is peculiarly proper to us.

So, in Aristotle, you have the same linkage of "having language" and "being suicidal." But--and this is where Aristotle differs from both Virno and Hegel, and where Virno suddenly appears quite modern--for Aristotle, the power to commit suicide is identical with the power to value something more highly than one's own life. That is, it is not a power of negation that makes us the suicidal animal, but an ability to see things in terms of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, just and unjust. Seeing something as good contains the possibility that we will see it as better than our own lives, or than the lives of others. According to Aristotle, one always dies (or kills) for something, but Virno and Hegel would have have us believe that one can die (or kill) for nothing. That seems not a small difference.

My Research

In a recent discussion with a colleague, I was asked to articulate my current research interests, and I thought it would be worthwhile to expand and write down what I said.

In the first place, I am motivated by a certain fidelity to particular figures in the history of political philosophy--Marx and Aristotle, primarily--to defend the honor and virtue of their thinking. I believe that most and the most readily accessible interpretations of these thinkers are quite strikingly bad. I find Capital and the Nicomachean Ethics to be incredibly compelling works, but when I turn to the characterizations of these works that are found in much of the secondary literature or that function as shorthand in general discussions of political and ethical philosophy, I find them to be unintelligible or incoherent or banal.

I take this mismatch to be at least in part the consequence of Marx and Aristotle standing not merely outside but in opposition to the main current of modern political philosophy that stretches from Hobbes and Locke to Rawls and Habermas. It is Aristotle and Marx above all others who have served that tradition as enemies the denial of whom defines and cements the community of interlocutors. The refusal of Aristotle's politcal naturalism was just as necessary for early modern theorists of sovereignty, contract, and civil society, as the refusal of Marx has been for 19th and 20th century thinkers of liberalism, proceduralism, and the legal codification of rights.

This refusal comes at a price, since the modern conceptual framework that has grown up around the artifactual state (sovereignty, general will, property, claim rights, mechanisms of enforcement, representation, personality, etc.) functions as a grid of intelligibility, a set of landmarks by which to recognize and respond to theoretical assertions, but it is a grid that is largely alien to the thought of those refused thinkers, Aristotle and Marx.

Therefore, the first aspect of my research is merely to attempt to read Aristotle and Marx on their own terms, and to develop, to the extent that I am capable, a compelling account of their political thought that begins from those points where the modern grid of intelligiblity fails to grasp them. To some extent, this involves a sort of artificial naivite, an approach to their texts that seeks to identify and begin from the phenomena they themselves begin from, instead of taking any contemporary question or recognized problem as a beginning point and then seeking an answer or resolution in Marx or Aristotle. The latter method risks importing precisely the mainstream conceptual framework that I claim makes Marx and Aristotle so difficult to understand. To this extent, then, my method of reading must owe something to a sort of Heideggerian phenomenology that seeks first the pragmata of the text being read, attempting to suspend or bracket the questions and claims of mainstream political theory (basically, contemporary liberalism).

On the other hand, however--and this leads me to the second aspect of my research--the political theories of Marx and Aristotle are not simply outside modern liberalism, they are opposed to it. Therefore, there must be points of critical contact between the mainstream discourse and the discourses produced by Marx and Aristotle. Thus, at some point, the naivite must be put aside and the project of rediscovery must become a project of critique. Once Marx and Aristotle have been rearticulated to a certain level of concreteness, I feel the need to intervene in the contemporary mainstream in order to press on certain perceived weak spots in that discourse: its lingering technocratic flavor, its reduction of politics to the state with its laws and administrative functions, its reduction of all ruling to domination or the right to coerce, its assumption that needs and desires are pre-politically and privately articulated, etc.

As a particularization of this critical project--and this is the third and final aspect of my research--I am especially interested in political violence, both as a phenomenon and as a problem for liberal/modern political theory. You could say that the whole problematic of the modern state has been organized around the hypothesis that violence could be minimized or even eliminated by being concentrated or monopolized. A daring and dubious hypothesis!

Built into the modern political problematic are a host of such daring and dubious hypotheses: that violence is identical with coercion; that violence is therefore fundamentally a problem of the will (rather than of the body, or of life, or of measure, or...); that violence is therefore essentially a problem of the borders between soverign wills; that violence can only be authorized by a prior (necessarily unauthorized) violence; that legitimate (authorized) violence is not really violence at all (so, for example, the criminal wills his or her own punishment); that, therefore, violence as such (the unauthorized--but this is redundant--violation of a will) is always wrong and is to be reduced to an absolute minimum; that the wrongness of violence consists in its injustice (rather than its immoderation, its ugliness, its...). There are surely more.

Even some of the most cogent critics of modern political philosophy--I'm thinking of Arendt here--subscribe to the identificcation of violence with coercion, which seems to me to be entirely without justification (that is, I've never found anyone who even attempts to justify this identification, which is not to say that such a justification could not be given, just that no one seems to feel the need).

I think both Aristotle and Marx (and sundry post-Marx Marxists) approach violence with very different basic assumptions, and that the perspective afforded by these different assumptions might go a long way towards rethinking the place or non-place of violence in politics. I'll try to lay out some of these differnet assumptions in future posts.

Anyway, there we are: my research interests. Any thoughts, questions, pointers, criticisms?

Radical Political Theory

Another draft syllabus for Winter 2009:

POLI 364: Radical Political Thought
The Theory and Practice of Revolution

For the purposes of this course, radical political thought is understood to encompass the three revolutionary and leftist political tendencies of the 19th and 20th Centuries: Marxism, anti-colonialism, and radical feminism. Radical movements are revolutionary in that they seek to break with the liberal and capitalist political order rather than perfect that order. That is, these movements do not want a more inclusive or expansive liberal order, but desire the overturning of that order itself. They are leftist in that they do not seek to recover some pre-liberal, traditional order, but try to create something new: a post-modern politics for a post-modern society.

The particular itinerary of our investigation will follow radical movements as they have attempted to answer three questions: 1) What is revolution, and how is it to be accomplished? 2) What role does violence play in maintaining the present state of society, and what role will it play in the overthrow of that state? 3) What is ideology and how does it function? We will begin with Marx’s discussion of revolution in his mature political writings, then examine a) the revolutionary Marxist tradition, b) its assimilation and critique of Sorel’s theory of mythical violence, c) the anti-colonial appropriations of revolutionary Marxism, d) feminist and post-structuralist rearticulations of the revolutionary project, and e) the strategy of refusal articulated by the Italian Autonomia movement.

Reading Schedule:
January 6-8 Introduction
Marx, Capital, Chapter 6

January 13-15 Marx, Capital, Chapters 26, 31 & 32, and selections from the ‘Grundrisse’

January 20-22 Marx, selections from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
and The Civil War in France

January 27-29 Lenin, selections from What Is To Be Done?

February 3-5 Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution

February 10-12 Sorel, selections from Reflections on Violence
Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”

February 17-19 Fanon, “Concerning Violence”

February 24-26 No Class

March 3-5 Mao, On Contradiction

March 10-12 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”

March 17-19 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, Lectures One and Two

March 24-26 MacKinnon, “Desire and Power”

March 31-April 2 Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto”

April 7-9 Castellano, “Living With Guerilla Warfare”
Conclusions

The Medium Is the Message

Nate Silver has an interesting and fairly convincing post at FiveThirtyEight, arguing that modern American conservatism's dependence upon talk radio has, after almost twenty years of paying real dividends, finally begun to fatally undermine their ability to compete against a resurgent liberalism. I would have liked to analyze Silver's argument by putting it into the context of Marshall McLuhan's (another Canadian!) arguments about the material effects of media. (I once taught McLuhan in a journalism ethics class, and the students just stared blankly at me. I admit it was far from my strongest teaching outing, but I also have a pretty low opinion of journalism majors. Worse even than education majors in my humble opinion.)

Anyway, I was going to do that, but then I got sidetracked by this effort to spin out Silver's argument into a whole series of correspondances between political ideologies and communication media. There I found the following (intentionally) provocative claim:

The libertarian medium is the doctrinaire treatise (or treatise pretending to be a novel). There is no liberal or conservative equivalent to The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. There are, of course, Marxist equivalents. This is one reason why sectarian libertarians and Marxists find arguing with each other more congenial than engaging with viewpoints that have real political importance. The two sides agree on what kind of thing political debate should aim to discover: the right Book.

This seems to grasp a kernal of truth only to lose hold of it as quickly as it has grasped it. I agree that real libertarians (as opposed to glibertarians like Glenn Reynolds, et al) share many characteristics with Marxists--including a propensity to give away books for free on the internet. But I don't think it has much of anything to do with the desire of proponents of either ideology to discover "the right Book." I would say instead that libertarians and Marxists are the most rationalistic of contemporary political ideologies, and those most devoted to a robust notion of truth. Hence, both are frequently given to grand exercises of polemics and are naturally disposed to sectarian schism.

Interestingly, the other ideology most congenial to Marxists is, in my opinion, Straussianism. Interestingly, Straussians tend not to feel the same respect for Marxists. Except for Kojeve, but he was barely a Marxist anyway.