A RESPONSE TO MICHAEL KATES

In response to my post about Rawls, Michael Kates writes:  “Isn’t the implication of your critique, then, that Rawls’ theory of justice is far more egalitarian than most people assume it to be? After all, if no one needs a monetary incentive to take such a job since it’s already inherently desirable, then doesn’t that mean that the Difference Principle wouldn’t license such an inequality in the first place?”

The simple answer is:  Yes.  But that is not the end of it.  Indeed, the comment opens up a large and, at least to me, fascinating field of inquiry.  In this post I will try to sketch some of the lineaments of that inquiry.  By the way, Mr. [Prof?] Kates’ observation is not original, I believe, although none the less important.   I am also reminded of the fact that despite Hegel’s reactionary celebration of the Prussian monarchy, there were young students in the 1830’s and 40’s who found revolutionary inspiration in his writings – the Left Hegelians, as they were sometimes called.  I believe there are also Left Rawlsians [among whom one can even find the later Rawls himself in some of his incarnations.]

To begin my response to this pregnant question, let me go back [as I so often do] to the situation confronting Marx when he undertook his anatomy of capitalism.  There had long been a hierarchical social and economic structure in Western Europe, with the landed aristocracy and the rich Catholic Church dominating a terrain on which one found very large numbers of poor peasants, guilds of craftsmen living in the walled cities [or bourgs, hence bourgeois], merchants and traders, lawyers, and of course royal courts presided over by more [or in some cases less] wealthy and powerful kings.  In the early days of the development of what would become capitalism, small-scale enterprises sprang up using legally free laborers to produce goods to be sold in the market for a profit.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the landed aristocracy was in retreat, and larger and larger profit-making enterprises were beginning to emerge from the welter of small businesses.  On the basis of what he saw happening before his eyes, Marx was convinced that over time, large capitals would gobble up small capitals, and wage labor would displace traditional craft labor.  The world would more and more become a bi-polar confrontation of Capital and Labor with the ever-greater rationalization of the means of production in conflict with, or in contradiction with, the irrationality of private ownership of those means of production, leading eventually to a world-wide economic crises and a seizure by the now-organized workers of the means of production – in short, to socialism.

Marx got some big things right, and he got some big things wrong.  Marx predicted the progressive centralization of capital, leading even to internationalization of capital.  He got that right.  He also anticipated the progressive homogenization of the labor force, facilitating ever more extensive labor mobilization and ever greater solidarity of the working class.  He got that wrong.  A century and a half after the publication of Das Kapital, we see vast, almost unimaginable concentrations of capital, but also a steep hierarchy of jobs and wages that has fatally undermined any possibility of genuine working class solidarity.

Generations of economists, sociologists, political scientists, have devoted their considerable talents to justifying this steep pyramid of jobs and compensations.  It would be tedious yet again to expose the absurdity of the notion of marginal product, or to anatomize Gary Becker’s Nobel Prize winning concept of human capital.  Rawls’ Bargaining Game/Difference Principle rationalization of broad wage disparities, with its concomitant failure to confront the private ownership of the socially produced means of production, is simply the philosophically most sophisticated contribution to a long tradition of intellectual rationalization.  What makes Michael Kates’ comment especially valuable is that it confronts us with the unsustainability of the central thesis of that tradition, even in its most elegant version.