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Matter, Motion, Atheism

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(This post is part of a roundrobin reading group on Kojin Karatani’s Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy. I focus here on chapter three; James Stanescu previously discussed the preface and appendix, I covered chapter one, and Joseph Trullinger discussed chapter two.)

It is common in potted histories of philosophy to try to create systems of equivalence between different metaphysical systems or assumptions and political and economic conditions. (Consider all the ink spilled about the liberalism of the Cartesian cogito.) Karatani tries to draw a through-line between Ionia’s materialistic and naturalistic metaphysics and its efforts to preserve egalitarian economic and political relations. In contrast, the Athenians had both the inequality of slavery and a philosophy of super-naturalism: theology and teleology. We are supposed to conclude that naturalism is thus more egalitarian and root out the theological and the teleological where we find it.

Even an avowed atheist like myself finds this kind of defense a bit too neat; much as I might like to pretend that naturalism leads to equality, I don’t see much evidence for that in Karatani or the history of philosophy. And I can readily see Trullinger’s frustration with the assumption.

Hylozoism

In this chapter, Karatani finally breaks the news that the vaunted Ionian naturalist Thales “is purported to have said, ‘All things are full of gods.'” But Karatani does not allow this claim to undermine his reading of Thales as a naturalist: “Thales did not introduce a magical way of thinking. Quite the opposite: it was in order to move away from magical thinking that he conceived the self-moving original substance.” (Isonomia, 59) This is hylozoism; the belief that the forces animating objects are within them, rather than external.

On Karatani’s view, Aristotle’s fourfold theory of causality problematically injects the existence of a God with purposes into the neat efficient causal structure that Anaximander supplied when he claimed that all things are rooted in the four elements. Where Anaximander saw human development in something like evolutionary terms, the Athenian Aristotle found the cause outside of the objects, in a prime mover and a God understood in the image of a craftsman. Of course, though Karatani does not allow himself to delve into the more charitable readings of Aristotle, there is some reason to see Aristotle’s entelecheia (which combines telos and self-movement) as an embrace or complication of hylozoism.

Back to Karatani, an account of self-movement and efficient causation allows us to explain animal and human evolution as either the product of a breeder (natural selection) or the product of random chance (genetic mutation) without ever making reference to aims or projects by an overarching, anthropomorphized deity attempting to make humanity is His image. Aristotle, Karatani charges, could conceive of the breeder as a divine perfecter of living things; but it takes a true materialist to explain growth, development, improvement and variation without reference to a divine cultivator. In a strained effort to make this connection, Karatani puts great stock in Karl Marx’s gift of Das Kapital to Charles Darwin, and to the theme of Marx’s dissertation: a rejection of Aristotle’s biology for the adaptive naturalism of Democritus and especially Epicurus, whose “random atomic swerve” which enables variation without an eye to progress.

Ironically, this echoes a recent debate among analytic philosophers of biology. Check out Jerry Fodor’s “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings,” and his subsequent What Darwin Got Wrong with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. They argued there that the existence of spandrels–and indeed of curly tailed pigs–suggested that we cannot use natural selection to explain all traits: many such traits are the result of selection yet do not contribute directly to fitness, so they’re not selected for. Karatani simplifies this with an argument–which seems to me to be wrong–that selection can only work within a species, perfecting it for its environment, while random mutations are necessary to open up new ecological niches and thus potential capacities. This seems wrong because it ignores large-scale environmental changes, whereby the pressures of the ecosystem might create species variations without fully destroying older species.

System-Building and the Metaphysical Inertness Thesis

The frustrating thing for me in Karatani’s view is that he seems to believe that matter and motion need to be understood as somehow united from the micro-foundations of the sciences to the macro-systems of the social world, from metaphysics to physics and from biology to sociology. If philosophers point to the usefulness of teleology in ecology, in world systems theory, or in neurology, I am betraying his vision of a purified natural science. I suspect that this is a sophisticated form of the “Ant Trap” that continually forces us to try to articulate group behaviors and roles in terms of individualistic drives and goals.

What’s more, I am very much at the end of my patience with this sort of metaphysical overdetermination. I can’t deny that some metaphysical views seem more appealing to me than others, nor can I deny that certain forms of metaphysical pluralism strike me as particularly pernicious and wrong. But it just seems mistaken to claim that there’s one’s metaphysics dictates a politics; the relationships seem much more contingent.

One can imagine a sort of philosophical Mr. Potato Head with mix-and-match ethical, political, epistemological, and metaphysical views, and while there’s probably work to be done figuring out each unique constellation of ideas would fit together, I don’t doubt that there’s some way to get from B-series temporality to Bayesean reliabilism to monarchism to anti-natalism to moral particularism. (Free dissertation topic!) This is different from what I call metaphysical deflation, wherein metaphysical views are crystallized, overweighted experiences; it’s something more like “metaphysical inertness.” But my co-readers of Karatani are likely to push back against this view; Stanescu is a devoted ontological pluralist, while Trullinger has staked his philosophical project on the necessity of theological immortality for both ethics and political emancipation.

You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone

Karatani posits that when economic inequality first reared its head in Ionia it led to crisis of foreign tyranny, which could only be resolved through a social contract among Ionians; a codification of pre-existing norms, with all the subsequent issues that any such codification will necessarily bring. This raises some interesting questions about the real value of the pluralistic republic of free exit that he posited initially: if it wasn’t sustainable, to what extent can it act as a model? For Karatani, apparently, this move to the social contract is a part of his larger story about how political, economic, and religious regimes can grow towards a more perfect and universal form through a simple synthesis.

That’s Karatani’s version of historical teleology: somehow the social contract is the result of this pressure and further pressures will eventually lead us to his “Mode D,” which somehow overcomes all the difficulties of previous arrangements: it “recuperates” earlier virtues while overcoming (magically!) prior restraints. While he doesn’t tell us how, it’s clear this is somehow not a true teleology, but rather an equilibrium of self-moving matter. (And yes, this is sarcasm: he seems to have a lot of this sort of ad hoc special pleading, and I’m frustrated by it. But perhaps in Transcritique there’s a better account?)

I think it’s notable that Karatani accuses the Ionians of having been ignorant of the way their social arrangements were rooted in their norms–when the social arrangements start to break down under pressure, they don’t know which components of their previous epoch of egalitarian exit to try to restore. It takes Thales to rally them–with his atheistic philosophy of gods in everything. Otherwise, Ionian isonomy threatened to fall into tribal or priestly domination under a shared myth or ethnic identity, and this, Karatani argues, inevitably ends in tyranny, as it did in Samos.

Karatani depicts Thales as using his natural philosophy as a cryptic “denunciation of tyranny and class.” Somehow, this cryptic message gets through and Ionia manages to fend off prospective tyrants and preserve itself as a social contract or a covenant federation with hylozoic gods. (Footnote 1) Does the subsequent social contract evolve from these prior conflicts, like the natural selection of the breeder? Or is it the result of random swerve–a social mutation?

Atheism Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

There’s lately been a spate of good articles on the failure of The New Atheists, the group of evangelical atheists that gained fame in the last two decades arguing vociferously that there is no God. I’m most interested in Sam Kriss’s take, “Village Atheists, Village Idiots.” Here comes a lengthy quote, but I promise it’s worth it:

Soren Kierkegaard, the great enemy of all pedants, offers a story that might shed considerable light. In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he describes a psychiatric patient who escapes from the asylum, climbing out a window and running through the gardens to rejoin the world at large. But the madman worries: out in the world, if anyone discovers that he is insane, he will instantly be sent back. So he has to watch what he says, and make sure none of it betrays his inner imbalance—in short, as the not-altogether unmad Danish genius put it, to “convince everyone by the objective truth of what he says that all is in order as far as his sanity is concerned.” Finding a skittle-bowl on the ground and popping it in his pocket, he has an ingenious idea: who could possibly deny that the world is round? So he goes into town and starts endlessly repeating that fact, proffering it over and over again as he wanders about with his small furious paces, the skittle-bowl in his coat clanking, in strict conformity with Newton’s laws, against what Kierkegaard euphemistically refers to as his “a–.” Of course, the poor insistent soul is then sent right back to the asylum […]

Kierkegaard’s villagers saw someone maniacally repeating that the world is round and correctly sent him back to the asylum. We watched [Neil deGrasse] Tyson doing exactly the same thing, and instead of hiding him away from society where nobody would have to hear such pointless nonsense, thousands cheer him on for fighting for truth and objectivity against the forces of backwardness. We do the same when Richard Dawkins valiantly fights for the theory of evolution against the last hopeless stragglers of the creationist movement, with their dinky fiberglass dinosaurs munching leaves in a museum-piece Garden of Eden. We do it when Sam Harris prises deep into the human brain and announces that there’s no little vacuole there containing a soul. (h/t Scott Alexander for pulling the quote)

Scott Alexander’s take in Slate Star Codex runs with this reading, and I think it’s definitely the one to beat. It’s so tempting because it captures my own reaction: the problem with the New Atheists is that they won’t shut up about religion, and one of the pleasures of atheism is being able to be indifferent to religious anxieties. Of course, most of those anxieties get recapitulated as meta issues, anyway: metaphysics, meta-ethics, meta-politics, meta-logic, etc. so we don’t escape them. But the New Atheists won’t let us get down to the business of thinking hard about moral particularism and non-ideal political theory; they keep loudly assuring us there is no God, and it’s distracting not least because some of the people with smart things to say on these topics are theists.

And this is the other, perhaps better explanation: a lot of my colleagues and friends and students are theists and the New Atheists insist on starting fights with them. The New Atheists have found themselves exiled because they’re rude and boorish for insulting my friends, and all the other atheists’ friends, and in a deeper sense for violating the religious tolerance that Europe and the US embraced after the wars of religion. I’m happy to be an atheist, but I’m not happy with the reputation of atheism in their hands.

Of course, if religion really is a main cause of some of the great evils that bear its name, the New Atheists are a bit more explicable. If faith moves some people to extraordinary excellence and extraordinary evil, then my “metaphysical inertness” view looks pretty weak. You can’t fight wars of religion without religion, right? There’s no drive to convert, kill, or exile the pagans, infidels, or goyim without a corresponding conception of how faith or divine right functions to create those categories, is there?

My view is that most religious atrocities are better understood as the result of ordinary motivations, with faith as the excuse: there’s a lot of evidence for the thesis that reason is a slave to the passions, in the sense that we use reason to justify our pre-existing commitments. I think many people of faith see something like my inertness thesis at work when they consider the wrongdoing of their coreligionists. No Christian, Muslim, or Jew looks at the twisted depravities of historical members of their religion and thinks that the shared faith was truly responsible for those actions. No atheist feels responsible for the misdeeds of our fellow atheists, after all! Always, we interpret the misdeeds of those who share our commitments as mistaken theology, or a broken soul prone to misinterpretation or self-justification or demagoguery.

My view merely extends that error theory: just as God deserves no blame for the atrocities that are committed in His name, He deserves no credit for the great works of art and awesome altruism to which His followers are sometimes inspired. It’s meant as a compliment to those great souls who express their commitments religiously: when someone who belongs to a religious community has a commitment to do good in the world, to be honorable, serve the most vulnerable, or look beyond the in-group, then faith and religion will be the means by which you give shape to those commitments.

But this ignores the large scale sociological effects of religion. In recent conversations with colleagues, I’ve been revisiting my inertness thesis with an eye to the empirical literature. The difficulty with the “merely individual” account of religious expression is that there is an entire discipline, sociology, that is founded on the view that membership in religious communities has a kind of weak causal power. Durkheim, Weber, and Du Bois all grounded their sociological theories on the causal power of these religious cultures. If religion can change the suicide rate, the economic growth rate, or underwrite white supremacy, than it is not inert. But the fact that religion can do all of those things suggests that Karatani’s account (and the New Atheists’ vast antipathy) is woefully inadequate for replacing religious cultural institutions or even differentiating these diverse effects.

At the very least religions can act as a sort of attractor, molding attention, shaping behavior, and creating cooperative pressures in particular–usually fruitful–ways. The worst offenses of religious people are the same kinds of in-group loyalty and out-group enmity that we see in all societies: motivated reasoning activating of deep tribal impulses from our evolutionary past. Yet the most extraordinary acts of women and men of faith and conviction seem almost impossible to imagine in a flat world of metaphysical inertness, and allow new forms of life and new sources of solidarity, including cosmopolitan political regimes that are even now working to destroy the notion of tribal in-groups once and for all.

  1. Oddly, Karatani usually depicts social contracts as Hobbesean vertical covenants between the ruler and the ruled, but in Thales’ case the covenant appears to be horizontal, between the citizens. (It’s possible that this terminological confusion is a result of the translation from Japanese.)

What are the ruling ideas today? Is “College For All” among them? (Doubts-that-don’t-change-our-practices edition)

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by flickr user ChrisM70

by flickr user ChrisM70

I’ve just finished an article on higher education and the liberal arts, and it’s full of hope and comes to some definite conclusions about particular ways that an education in the liberal arts is valuable. It’s out for peer review right now, which means that if the reviewer is googling phrases maybe she’ll find this, so I want to say up front: I believe in what I wrote there. But I also have doubts about the progressive push towards education for all, the idea that through education we can all shed the demands of material labor, or that the value (and cost!) of an education should be totally disconnected from its role is securing a job.

Automation v. Education

The Economist recently gave voice to this particular error in its article on how technology will increasingly be automating office workers out of their jobs, which will widen the already broad inequality between those who must compete with machines and computers, and those whose jobs cannot (yet) be reduced to an algorithm. Here’s how they put it:

The main way in which governments can help their people through this dislocation is through education systems. One of the reasons for the improvement in workers’ fortunes in the latter part of the Industrial Revolution was because schools were built to educate them—a dramatic change at the time. Now those schools themselves need to be changed, to foster the creativity that humans will need to set them apart from computers. There should be less rote-learning and more critical thinking.

Technology itself will help, whether through MOOCs (massive open online courses) or even video games that simulate the skills needed for work. The definition of “a state education” may also change. Far more money should be spent on pre-schooling, since the cognitive abilities and social skills that children learn in their first few years define much of their future potential. And adults will need continuous education. State education may well involve a year of study to be taken later in life, perhaps in stages.

Yet however well people are taught, their abilities will remain unequal, and in a world which is increasingly polarised economically, many will find their job prospects dimmed and wages squeezed.

What value, then, is an education, if it won’t prevent the technological obsolescence of our skills? Put simply: if there are going to be ditches (which are required for plumbing, among other things) then there are going to be ditch diggers, or ditch-digging-machine-operators, or ditch-digging-machine-programmers. The move to automation replaces many operators with a few programmers, enriching the educated programmer at the expense of the uneducated operator, and that’s the move that should concern us, since it violates a basic rule of maximin: the people hurt are both more numerous and more needy than the people helped.

The standard economic argument is that lower prices help the poorest the most, and that freedom from unskilled labor allows workers to do something more rewarding, something that requires an education but cannot be imagined under the current political economy that requires so many to dig ditches. It’s like the old joke:

An industrialist is visiting a construction site and watching a newly-invented steamshovel in its first job. The union foreman complains that its job could be done by a dozen men with shovels, each earning a decent wage. The industrialist retorts it could be done by a hundred men with spoons.

Usually I prefer state-level redistribution through a basic income guarantee, but sometimes I think it makes more sense to fight for higher wages for the folks doing the digging than it does to hope that everyone will be able to escape that life if they could only get a Bachelor’s degree or a PhD. That hope in education has an ideological function that exceeds its aspirational and inspirational effects.

Who is the Ruling Class?

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas…”

So wrote Karl Marx in the The German Ideology. I’m not entirely sure that there is a single ruling class in American politics, in the sense Marx articulated it, but if there is one, it’s the folks with Bachelor’s degrees, the modern bourgeoisie. We are often-enough regaled by politicians with solicitations to the “middle-class” or “working Americans” that we might be tempted to identify these groups as the ruling class, but about 60% of the population participates in the workforce, and exactly 60% of the population are in the middle three quintiles of income sometimes identified as the middle class. I would argue that these groups are too large to have conjoined interests or ideas.

On the other hand, we are sometimes assured that the very rich and very few (for instance, the top 1%) are in fact governing the US, and that the masses don’t perceive the truth of this dominance because of ideology. If I’m right about the college educated, then it’s much too convenient to limit the ruling class to bankers and stock brokers and identify neoliberalism as the ruling idea; if the traditional bourgeoisie still exercises a great deal of control, then even the very rich must still win over that larger group in order to maintain their wealth. Arguably the 99% v. 1% language of Occupy was a clever rhetorical strategy for enlisting the support of the larger ruling class with the interests of the proletariat. It may be that billionaires manipulate the agenda, but the baseline agenda the wealthy are trying to steer is set by the merely well-off.

Another possibility is that that larger class really does share class interests with the 1%, so Occupy was unsuccessful because the ruling class’s ideas can’t be moved by rhetoric if its interests are at stake. (As I understand it, this is Marx’s point: ideology is believing that ideas matter more than practices.)

Bourgeois Ideology

So what does that class (to which I and my readers probably belong) have in common?

  • We are college educated.
  • We work in offices, with computers.
  • We are employed, and if we are in relationships we probably cohabitate with our partners who are also employed.
  • We live in cities or “suburbs” which have been adopted by some metropolitan area.
  • We own our own home (though this may be changing.)
  • We often don’t live near where we were born, or in the same city as our families.
  • We are likely to work in education, health-care, technology, management, or the public sector.
  • Our careers tend to benefit from globalization.
  • We are predominantly white.
  • We have very little contact with police, prisons, or the criminal justice system unless we are employed by those institutions (which many of us are.)

If what I’ve described above is correct, then perhaps these would be the ruling ideas:

  • Education is for everyone, and more equal educational access will create a more equal society.
  • Office-work is difficult and valuable, and education ought to prepare us for it.
  • Jobs and workplace regulations are the primary mode by which the state ought to see to the public’s good.
  • Marriage is good for everyone; even homosexuals should marry.
  • Urban life is better than rural life.
  • The American Dream should require (and subsidize) home ownership even if that punishes renters and those too poor to afford a home.
  • Family ties matter less than economic success.
  • Education, health-case, technology, and the public sector are the “best” jobs and ought to be subsidized.
  • Globablization is good.
  • Race is irrelevant.
  • The criminal justice system should supply entertaining plot lines for movies and television, but it is not otherwise relevant. Probably most people in prison belong there.

To be clear, while I’m not advocating these ideas, I believe (or act as if I believe) many of them. If those ideas are fundamentally aligned with my class-interest, it would be more surprising if I didn’t believe them. It’s not simply a coincidence that those with the most power and influence in society never have their fundamental interests questioned in our politics. That’s what makes them ideological, that these aren’t partisan issues: no one contests the value of education or marriage, and very rarely do they contest the important of home ownership.

Another possibility is that the top 20%-30% of Americans are not members of some ruling class, that the class is either much smaller than that or that there really isn’t such a thing as as single ruling class any longer, just a number of different social groups that align themselves in ways that they can succeed and govern on some topics and not others. For instance, none of the possible ruling ideas I mentioned included things that are quite clearly also governing American culture and politics, like support for the elderly through Medicare and Social Security (unless you think the elderly are the true ruling class), or America’s military role in the world (unless you think the military is the ruling class). Ideas like meritocracy and personal responsibility, patriotism and faith are frequently rejected by the richest two quartiles, precisely because they conflict with the values instilled by higher education and urban life.

If those ideas are also “ruling” in some way, then we would expect that those who hold them would be the true ruling class if all ruling ideas must belong to the ruling class. Perhaps instead, ruling ideas come from all the classes. Indeed, other ideas aren’t even “ruling ideas” so much as deeply felt constitutional claims, like the important of markets and prices for mediating our economic interactions, the idea that personal property and capital property should be governed by similar rules, or the assumption that inequality can ever be justified by increased productivity or merit. These ideas no longer have their source in a single class, even if they once did, just as in some sense American’s deep commitment to the idea of democracy and one-person-one-vote is a classless idea, at least in the US.

(It should be pointed out that what I have just written in the last paragraph is almost precisely the position being lampooned by Marx in The German Ideology. Ironic, eh?)

At What Cost?

I worry that the cultural promotion of the value of education is ideological, often, because I both benefit from it and yet also regularly watch how “College For All” seems to be disadvantaging a lot of my students. My fellow progressives who rail against the false equality of opportunity that makes the poor think they will someday be millionaires ought to understand why college can’t be an exit from the working class for everyone. Sure, anyone can be a millionaire or good at college, but everyone can’t. It’s a meritocratic institution, not an equalizer, and very little of the so-called college wage premium goes to those who graduate from community colleges and unselective four year universities. The inequality is built into our political economy!

I mean no disrepect to my students, either. I don’t think it’s disrespectful to appreciate the priorities of those who are actually choosing between homework and subsistence labor, for instance, or attendance and childcare. I’ve only been working at an unselective institution for three years, after seven years at selective universities, and the difference is palpable. I watched one student’s children so she could take exams without leaving them accessible to her abusive ex. She barely passed, and we both called that a victory: she hadn’t had much time to study, and had to read her notes through a hell of a black eye. Was education really the most important thing to do for her? What did she learn that she’ll remember later?

What about the student who I have cried with because she is dying from cancer: her husband just left her because the chemo makes her not want to have sex, and all she wants to do is graduate before she dies? Or the student who discovered she was pregnant and came to me because she didn’t know what to do? Or my student whose brother was shot and broke down in class? Or my student who was followed into class and physically threatened? Or my student who thought she had to be a nursing major until she realized she was really good at philosophy, but is still majoring in nursing to be practical? Or my student who asked me to help him figure out how to transfer when he realized that the only way he’d get a good education in computer science was if he left us? Or my students who are also incarcerated?

Rights and Privileges

I’m not saying that they don’t deserve an education: they do! Those are almost all people who will have college diplomas or already have them. Most of them are women. They won’t dig ditches, but they will work in jobs that only require a college degree nominally, where the skills they’ve often failed to learn are irrelevant. The diploma will prove that they have grit and conscientiousness, and give them a leg up in a job market where signaling such things are necessary, but they, like most people, will not remember what Modus Ponens is or how the the Rawlsian original position is supposed to help us think about justice.

There’s a difference between saying, “Right now, you have more important things to do than your logic homework, and that’s okay,” and saying, “Because you are poor, you don’t deserve a college education.” My students in prison are much better academically than the ones who are free, just because they have the time to focus on their studies, and I think there is a lot of value in the work that we do together. But no Pell Grants means no credit, and a felony record means that the skills they learn may never be put to work.

Maybe there’s a difference between “deserving” and “needing” an education. Most people don’t need a college diploma, certainly not to do their jobs, and probably not to be good citizens. They need a union or a basic income guarantee or a social minimum or a citizen capital grant or workplace democracy. But increasingly the only people who still have unions and political power are the people who also have college degrees, and those of us in that group like to pretend that increasing subsidies for bourgeois students (our kids) will help the ditch-diggers, too. That’s a bit too convenient, isn’t it?

David Harvey on the Tyranny of Exchange Value

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David Harvey, the Marxist geographer, is working on a new book, The Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism.  He has a illuminating interview on this theme in Red Pepper,  the UK political magazine.  Several of his exchanges with the interviewer deal with key concerns of commoners, including the importance of protecting use value over exchange value, and the need for cultivating a “postcapitalist imagination.” 

Read the whole interview, but here are two excerpts

One of the contradictions you focus on is that between the use and exchange value of a commodity. Why is this contradiction so fundamental to capitalism, and why do you use housing to illustrate it?

All commodities have to be understood as having a use value and exchange value. If I have a steak the use value is that I can eat it and the exchange value is how much I had to pay for it.

But housing is very interesting in this way because as a use value you can understand it as shelter, privacy, a world of affective relations with people, a big list of things you use a house for. But then there is the question of how you get the house. At one time houses were built by people themselves and there was no exchange value at all. Then from the 18th century onwards you got speculative house building – Georgian terraces which were built and sold later on. Then houses became exchange values for consumers in the form of saving. If I buy a house and I pay down the mortgage on it, I can end up owning the house. So I have an asset. I therefore become very concerned about the nature of the asset. This generates interesting politics – ‘not in my backyard’, ‘I don’t want people moving in next door who don’t look like me’. So you start to get segregation in housing markets because people want to protect the value of their savings.

read more

Non-Egalitarian Communism (Libertarians Believe in Too Much Government, Part II)

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"Home Brews" by J. Mark Dodd on Flickr.

“Home Brews” by J. Mark Dodd on Flickr.

Or, “not-necessarily-egalitarian communism,” perhaps. Basically, I hate to say it, but the hipsters making home brews and artisinal pickles and knitting socks and whatnot have a lot of it right.

Let me explain/thoroughly confuse the matter.

Lots of people who comment on communism – both those who criticize and those who praise, in my experience – and its practicability or lack thereof focus, understandably, on the famous slogan from the Critique of the Gotha Programme:

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

In a perfect world, it would say “his or her” or “hir,” but, well, it’s not a perfect world.

I can see why there’s a focus on this, but it’s deeply problematic for understanding the communist argument, I think. And especially problematic for understanding what challenge communist and socialist ideas pose in the current US context.

Focusing excessively on this slogan distorts the conversation because it puts our emphasis on consumption. It makes it sound (to many) as if the communist utopia is defined by the second clause, as a world where everyone can have whatever they want. This raises obvious questions about how we secure the first clause – why will I work if I can get everything I want (or at least everything I need) by sitting on my butt all day?

But that concern reflects a concept of human good that is, I think, alien to Marx, and to most who find his ideas attractive. In particular, it assumes that work is essentially onerous, and so to be avoided whenever possible.  Marx had a different perspective, attested to by something he says just before the more famous quote. He claims that the slogan can only be implemented “after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.”

In a nutshell, the argument is that each will contribute “according to his/her abilities” not in the hope of some further reward, but just for the sake of making the contribution. In fact, work that one does not see the point of is characteristic of alienated labor, which Marxists hope will disappear in a well-organized society. In other words, we shirk when we don’t see the point of what we’re doing.

Lots of folks will claim evidence of “human nature” on the side of the view that all we want to do is selfishly consume. But the evidence strikes me as sketchy in the extreme.

First, there’s just the anecdotal. What are your hobbies? Me, I’m sitting here writing a blog post when I take breaks from my paid work. I’m not getting paid for it. All I get to “consume” out of it is the satisfaction of creating something that seems halfway worthwhile. I bet you have similar hobbies. Maybe you make model airplanes, or get really good at a sport, or cook, or garden, or prep each year for NaNoWriMo. Even seemingly “passive” activities, like playing video games and whatnot, are often enjoyable because they provide ersatz accomplishment.  You’re not playing the guitar, or shooting terrorists, or growing food, but it’s almost like that. I mean, this is the answer to the seeming paradox of games like FarmVille – why would someone spend their free time doing a simulation of repetitive labor? Because at least it’s repetitive labor that gives you a sense of creating something, and so many people seem to be desperate for that in their real lives.

As shocking as this sounds, a whole lot of the “guy who failed all of his classes because he was playing WoW all the time” horror stories are really just about a dude who simply didn’t like his classes very much. This was never some dystopian mind control scheme by Blizzard. The games just filled a void. 

In fact, part of the distortion of the whole consumption-focus might be that it’s not at all clear that there’s a such thing as pleasurable consumption on its own. Rather, I think Aristotle got it right – pleasure is part of an activity which develops or exemplifies a human excellence (1174a15-1176a30/X 4-5).  Or, another way to put it, we always take pleasure in production, not consumption – things that seem like consumption (just listening to music, say) are really a kind of production (refinement of our appreciation of music) and treating them as a separate category distorts and degrades them.*

Practical upshot: if we think of consumption as its own thing, we’re going to get human nature very wrong. We’re going to look at the fact that people need certain kinds of material goods to keep their bodies working, and see increasing material goods as a means, rather than an end. We’re going to give people only some kinds of means of production: mp3s and not music education. We’re going to fetishize the product rather than the production: why would anyone want to tell stories around a campfire when the plots are likely to be derivative re-hashes of great works?

It’s not that what we call “consumption” is not production at all – it’s just that it’s a very thin slice of it. But we have a society in which is very easy to mistake that part of pleasure for the whole, and then end up unsatisfied. And it leads to two mistaken ideas about the economy. The first is that people will only produce if you give them the means to consume as an incentive. So, “human nature” means that we have to have gross material inequality. Bzzt. Human nature may well be – probably is – at least moderately self-centered and pleasure-seeking. But it’s a distortion of a world of alienated labor to think that being selfish means seeking only consumption. The pleasures of creating, including creating things that are of value to others because they can build their own creations on them, are very real and powerful.

The second is that, even when we try to help out the less fortunate, we risk conceiving our help very narrowly. Consumption is the slice of production that requires us, the powerful, to cede mostly some food and cheap plastic physical objects, but very little in terms of freedom, control, and respect. It’s a lot easier for me to say, “here’s $10, go buy some mp3s” than it is to say, “let’s democratize this workplace so you get a say in what kinds of things we produce instead of just which products you’re going to buy.”

It’s this misunderstanding that, e.g., leads Yglesias to grossly misunderstand class warfare.** In a nutshell, Yglesias argues that it’s class warfare when Obama wants to redistribute some income towards the poor and the GOP wants to redistribute some income towards the wealthy. Sure, if you’re poor, and those are your only two choices, Team Obama.

But that’s not class war. Maybe it’s an intra-class war, between two factions with different ideas of how to keep control. But the basic power structures remain the same: the means of production are privately owned and subject to more or less unlimited accumulation, concentrating decisions about what kinds of production are to be undertaken in the hands of a relatively small elite. We do call internecine fights among the folks who control those things “class war,” but it’s about as meaningful to do so as if we looked at the African theatre of World War I and called it “decolonization.”

This is where, I think, people tend to get misled by Marx’ slogan. “Communists want to take your hard-earned consumption and give it to the lazy!” That sounds horrible, and that’s how it sounds if you think of a) the point of work to be to gain the means of consumption and b) communism as basically about changing who gets the means of consumption.

But it’s not. In principle, I think, we might have a non-egalitarian communism. What’s central to communism is not the pattern of distribution of consumption, that very narrow kind of human activity going under the name. Rather, what’s central is that decisions about how to deploy the various material necessities for production available to a society are made in a way that involves broad social participation.***

It could be, that if we were all getting together as a society (or a syndicate, or whatever), we would decide to distribute various physical products in an inegalitarian way. Nothing would stop someone from saying, “look, I don’t want any of this stuff, let’s give it to that Bill Gates guy.”

An egalitarian or needs-based (let’s bracket arguments about whether they’re different) way of distributing physical goods isn’t, conceptually speaking, the only way that a social conversation about how to use the means of production might go. But I think Marx is led to his slogan because he thinks we would be stupid to have it go any other way.

If everyone was making the decision together, why would we give someone more power over decisions of what we should produce when he didn’t work any harder than anyone else? If we didn’t see ourselves as in competition for the only kind of production/consumption we were allowed, why would we, as human beings, decide to let someone starve or go without medical attention or dignity, just so we could produce things we don’t even care about very much? I think Marx is optimistic enough to think that we wouldn’t. If we were freed from the antisocial and stunted pursuit of “consumption” by being allowed to be full partners in production, we wouldn’t have to give according to our abilities and take only according to our needs, but we would.****

It’s only a combination of the (maybe true) thought that human nature is eternally somewhat self-centered with the (completely false) thought that self-interest consists in maximum consumption that makes our current way of doing things look free, and something like libertarianism look like an increase in “freedom.” That’s a swindle – the current system employs huge resources on one side in a class war (that’s largely triumphant), securing power in the hands of a pretty small elite and giving them unlimited rights to perpetuate that power. Pretending that more “freedom” lies on the side of your relatively powerless consumption being more determined by your individual worth to those who control the means of production (or, for that matter, lying on the side of your relatively powerless share being a more equal slice and less dependent on that individual worth) and that there’s a big fight over it hides how limited much freedom actually is.

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* This may be related to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “desiring-production,” but I’m not sure I fully understand that, so don’t take my word for it.

** Yglesias, if he gave two shits about what I thought, would probably (sincerely) say something like, “it was kind of a joke, dude.” But I’m not inclined to let him entirely off the hook – he seems to basically have liberal egalitarian intuitions, but be under the impression that you can satisfy them by post hoc redistribution by a welfare state. But Yglesias was a philosophy major, and so he should know that Rawls, father of contemporary liberal egalitarian philosophical thought, realized that laissez-faire capitalism was incompatible with justice, no matter how much redistribution you do after the fact.

*** State vs. non-state communism/socialism arguments, it seems to me, start here. The question is basically whether there could be anything recognizable as a state that reflected broad social participation or not.

**** He’s also maybe sneaky. What’s a need? Some are obvious, but I think he’s smart enough to realize that once everyone’s belly is full and nakedness covered, what you “need” is going to be defined in terms of the social system of value you participate in and help create. The liberties of the ancients and the liberties of the moderns have to be integrated all the way to the base of the system. Or, if that’s impossible, we’ve got a big problem that we need to face head-on instead of pretending it away.