CODA

I cut short my response to Scott's comment about "market abolitionism" because I did not want it to become a full-scale revisiting of thing I have written and published, but there is a good deal more to say about markets and socialism, and in this post I shall say a little bit of it.

As I explained in "The Future of Socialism," the elements of economic planning grow "within the womb of capitalism" because as firms expand and diversify, the market ceases to give unambiguous signals by which capitalist managers may guide their decisions concerning capital allocation, their estimations of profitability, and their choices of such central factors as the proper rate of savings.  It is also true, of course, that such signals as the market does give do not serve to guide the decisions of capitalist firms toward the fulfillment of pressing human needs, but that is no concern of the managers, and it therefore has no effect on their corporate policy.  If money can be made building McMansions while hard-working men and women are unable to find affordable housing, nothing in the logic of capitalism will incline builders toward the production of well-designed low-cost housing.  But of course managers are not averse to satisfying human needs along the way, as it were.  Well-designed mass produced clothing is profitable, at least as long as cheap labor is available in Asia or Africa, so even the poor in America can be stylishly dressed.

Capitalists learned how to manage the periodic crises of overproduction and underconsumption, thanks in part to Lord Keynes, but the explosion of the world-wide financial sector has created new kinds of crises that capitalism has not yet subdued.  It would be a mistake, I think, to expect that failure to lead us toward the replacement of capitalist by socialist relations of production and distribution.  Rather, we can anticipate that capitalism will develop more effective institutions for managing the financial components of capitalism, which is simply another way of saying that the new will continue to grow in the womb of the old.

How, then, if at all, can a transition to a humane socialist economic order come about?  Only through mass mobilization, bottom-up organization, and the use of the collected political power of the great majority to take control of the thoroughly socialized means of production.  This effort, if it is to succeed, must be grounded in the simple ideas set forth in my Credo -- that the vast wealth of modern society is the product of the collective efforts of the all men and women, built on the efforts of past generations, and -- in the evocative words of Edmund Burke -- passed on to generations yet unborn.

After this great transformation, Scott, if ever it should come about, there will still be a role for markets and room for individual entrepreneurs.  Not to worry.

CREDO REDUX CONCLUSION

What is capitalism?  It is not free markets.  Indeed, capitalism as it has developed first in England and Western Europe and then worldwide depends on a variety of state-imposed restraints on absolutely free market interactions, not the least of which of course is the legal enforcement of contracts.  Superficial apologists for capitalism tend to overlook this fact, until someone violates a patent or copyright or tries to weasel out of a bargain to deliver some grain [or until workers unite to form a union.]  As always, when I want to understand capitalism, I look to Karl Marx, who was one of the great theoretical economists of all time, as well as the first, and arguably the best, economic historian.

As Marx had the wit to recognize, capitalism, at its core, is defined and constituted by three interconnected structural characteristics:  First, private ownership of the means of production; Second, wage labor; and third, the production of commodities for the purpose of making a profit rather than the production of goods and services for the purpose of satisfying human needs and desires.  [As I write this, I realize that fully to explain what I have in mind would take several books.  But, as it happens, I have written those books.  They are called Understanding Marx and Moneybags Must Be So Lucky.  So I am going to have to skim the surface here and invite you to read the books if you want a fuller exposition and explanation.  You can also read From Each According To His Ability, Volume Two of my collected published and unpublished papers, available as an e-book on Amazon.com.  Well, so much for what Tom and Ray Magliozzi would call the Shameless Commerce Division of The Philosopher's Stone.]

The key to the development of capitalism, and the secret of its extraordinary profitability, is the historical process by which yeoman farmers and independent craftspeople were separated from and deprived of access to the means of production -- land, mines, forests, lakes and oceans, and also the technology of production -- and were compelled in order to live to become, in the evocative usage of the early capitalist period, servants of those with control over those means of production, to become, as we would say today, wage laborers.  It is this historically determined expropriation of the laboring many that makes it possible for the owners of the means of production to exploit them, which is to say, to make a profit.

"Free" markets play a central role in this process of expropriation and exploitation.  The lifting of all restraints on who can take a job creates the possibility of a permanent surplus of workers looking for jobs -- a reserve army of the unemployed, as Marx called them in a brilliant phrase.  The lifting of restraints on who may produce goods and on where and to whom and for what price they may be sold clears the way for cutthroat competition among capitalists [as those who own and control the means of production are called].  The result is a constant reinvestment of the profits in the expansion of the scope of production, resulting in an explosion of output and ever greater profits.

In the early stages of capitalism, there was a great deal of thoughtful planning, if one can call it that, by individual entrepreneurs [or undertakers, to translate the French term literally and with delicious irony].  But the desperation of the competition placed great obstacles in the way of any sort of wider planning within an industry or between industries.  There was of course widespread collusion or collaboration in restraint of trade, but extensive rational planning was impossible -- not because it violated the ideology of free trade, but because the organizational, informational, and structural arrangements needed for such planning had not yet developed.

It is at this point that Marx's true brilliance shows forth.  Marx understood that socialism -- which is to say, collective ownership of the means of production and production for the satisfaction of human needs rather than for profit -- could not be mandated by the state, or indeed by any other institutional force, in the absence of those required arrangements.  As he put it in his Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, a new economic order must "grow in the womb of the old."  He had in mind the slow, centuries-long development of the pre-conditions for capitalism within the feudal economic order of late medieval Europe, but his insight has wider application.  Until the conditions for the transition to socialism have developed within capitalism, any attempt to impose socialism politically or by force is doomed to failure, as the fates of Russia and China demonstrate.

What are those pre-conditions, and are they in fact now developing within capitalism?  That is the subject of my essay, "The Future of Socialism," archived on box.net, and I urge anyone who really wants an answer to those questions to read that essay.  The brief answer is that the conditions are indeed developing within capitalism, prompted not by the brainwashing of corporate executives by left-wing professors at effete Eastern universities but by the internal imperatives of the management of capitalist enterprises.

NONE OF THIS HAS ANYTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH THE ELIMINATION OF MARKETS.  If you need a metaphor to grasp this truth, think of a socialist economy as a vast rainforest with huge trees soaring above the landscape [the state owned major concentrations of the means of production] and a rich flora of flowers, shrubs, bushes, and weeds below the canopy [the sector of small privately owned and run businesses that form, flourish, or fail just as they do now].

Once it becomes structurally possible to engage in rational planning about the allocation of the major capital accumulations of the society -- a point that we are fast approaching -- and also becomes necessary for some sort of planned allocation to take place, guided by decisions that are structurally political even if they are now taken by private persons for private gain -- a situation that is already upon us [this is the central point of my essay, referenced above] -- then and only then can we talk about socialism as more than a dream.  The argument against the institution of socialism is not the virtues and joys of free markets, but the impossibility of socialism before "the new order has grown in the womb of the old."

But, the "masters of the universe" protest, sitting astride the great accumulations of capital that generate an endless stream of profits, have the rich of this world not earned their wealth by their entrepreneurial skill and daring?  This blog post is too short to deal with that bit of self-congratulatory nonsense as it deserves.  Robert Nozick, in what may well be the stupidest argument ever advanced by a brilliant and thoroughly likeable chap, spends three pages in his engaging folie de jeunesse, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, conjuring a Wilt Chamberlain fantasy that supposedly justifies the inequality in the distribution of income in a capitalist economy [see pages 161-163].

So, in answer to Scott [that is where this all started, you will recall], No, I am not advocating market abolitionism.  I am yearning for socialism, which has nothing to do with the abolition of markets and everything to do with collective control of the means of production.

CREDO REDUX PART ONE

Today I begin a several part essay that may take me a while, so settle down.  These remarks are prompted by a comment [see below] offered by Scott to the original posting of my Credo on November 28, 2010.  [Close readers will note that my Credo thus precedes the famous speech by now-Senator Elizabeth Warren in which she said essentially the same thing, without however the tagline from Marx.]  I shall be alluding to, and at certain points even quoting directly from, my essay "The Future of Socialism," which you can find by clicking on the box.net link at the top of this blog and then searching the archive of my occasional writings.  First the Credo:

Credo

We human beings live in this world by thoughtfully, purposefully, intelligently transforming nature so that it will satisfy our needs and our desires. We call this activity of transforming nature "production," and it is always, everywhere, inescapably a collective human activity. Every moment that we are alive we are relying on what those before us have discovered or invented or devised. There is no technique, however primitive, that is the invention of one person alone. Like it or not, we are all in this life together. Even those giants of industry who think of themselves as self-made men are completely dependent for their empire building upon the collective knowledge and practice of the entire human species.

All of us eat grain we have not grown, fruit we have not planted, meat we have not killed or dressed. We wear clothes made of wool we have not combed and carded, spun or woven. We live in houses we have not built, take medicines we neither discovered nor produced, read books we have not written, sing songs we did not compose. Each of us is completely dependent on the inherited knowledge, skill, labor, and memory of all who have gone before us, and all who share the earth with us now.

We have a choice. We can acknowledge our interdependence, embracing it as the true human condition; or we can deny it, deluding ourselves into thinking that we are related to one another only as parties to a bargain entered into in a marketplace. We can recognize that we need one another, and owe to one another duties of generosity and loyalty. Or we can pretend to need no one save through the intermediation of the cash nexus.

I choose to embrace our interdependence. I choose to acknowledge that the food I eat, the clothes on my back, and the house in which I live are all collective human products, and that when any one of us has no food or clothing or shelter, I am diminished by that lack.

There are two images alive in America, competing for our allegiance. The first is the image of the lone horseman who rides across an empty plain, pausing only fleetingly when he comes to a settlement, a man apparently having no need of others, self-sufficient [so long as someone makes the shells he needs for his rifle or the cloth he needs for his blanket], refusing to acknowledge that he owes anything at all to the human race of which he is, nonetheless, a part.

The other is the image of the community that comes together for a barn-raising, working as a group on a task that no one man can do by himself, eating a communal meal when the day is done, returning to their homes knowing that the next time one of their number needs help, they will all turn out to provide it.

These images are simple, iconic, even primitive, but the choice they present us with remains today, when no one rides the plains any more, and only the Amish have barn-raisings. Today, as I write, there are tens of millions of Americans who cannot put a decent meal on the table in the evening for their families, scores of millions threatened with the loss of their homes. And yet, there are hundreds of thousands lavishing unneeded wealth on themselves, heedless of the suffering of their fellow Americans, on whose productivity, inventiveness, and labor they depend for the food they eat, the clothing they wear, the homes they live in, and also for the luxuries they clutch to their breasts.

The foundation of my politics is the recognition of our collective interdependence. In the complex world that we have inherited from our forebears, it is often difficult to see just how to translate that fundamental interdependence into laws or public policies, but we must always begin from the acknowledgement that we are a community of men and women who must care for one another, work with one another, and treat the needs of each as the concern of all.

If all of this must be rendered in a single expression, let it be: From each of us according to his or her ability; to each of us according to his or her need.

                                                            ---------------------------------

Four days after this originally appear, Scott said:  "But you're not advocating market abolitionism are you? That's just throwing out the baby with the bathwater."  When I asked what market abolitionism is [thus revealing my ignorance], he replied:  "I already mentioned it before on this blog but I'll explain it again. Market abolitionism is the idea that all market functions should be replaced by planning. The most famous proponent of this view is Michael Albert and you can read him here: http://books.google.es/books?id=JfNi7V9WnhYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=michael+albert+parecon&source=bl&ots=KRRhOF5iAu&sig=Y5gNn97YOmeygff2462auqqLmRA&hl=es&ei=1Av4TPvpHceHhQeMy_jFDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

I think that a marketless world based entirely on planning would turn society into a Brazil-type dungeon of bureaucracy and oppression. This is why I keep asking people on the left what exactly their views are of the marketplace. Seeing as how I generally hear nothing but hostility towards them can I really unreasonably assume that the logical conclusion of their views would be supplanting all market functions with planning?"

This provocative comment by Scott [I hope he or she is still reading my blog -- I hate the anonymity of this entire medium] triggered a series of reflections during my walk this morning, and led to my decision to expand the response I had originally planned into a full-scale disquisition. 

 One of the most effective ideological dodges of apologists for capitalism has been their successful substitution of the phrase "free market economy" for "capitalist economy" in our public discourse, as though "capitalism" and "free markets" were synonymous.  So before we can get anywhere in this discussion, we must sort out that confusion. 

A market is a public space in which people meet to exchange goods for goods, goods for money, and money for goods.  [I leave virtual markets and such matters aside for the moment.]  There have certainly been markets for all of recorded history ["Let's go down to the Agora and see whether Socrates is there"] and in all likelihood for a long time before the invention of writing.  One finds markets in slave economies [including slave markets, needless to say] and in feudal economies, as well as in economies that can be described as capitalist.  In many instances, perhaps all in fact, there are traditional, cultural, religious, or legal constraints on the functioning of markets.  To give just one example that is historically significant to this discussion, in the European middle ages, much town or city based craft production was organized into and regulated by guilds --formal organizations of men working in the same craft, such as silver smiths, gold smiths, furniture makers, and so forth.  The guilds maintained elaborate systems of restrictions, enforced by law, on who could ply those trades, under what conditions and for what wages workers could work for them, what objects they could make, where they could sell them, and what prices they were required to charge.  In some cases, these guilds grew quite large and entered into association with other guilds, the Hanseatic League being the most important and well-known.

The phrase "free trade" refers in the first instance to the historically important effort to remove some of those restrictions, so that anyone who wished could enter a sphere of production, using whatever techniques he chose, hiring whomever he chose, selling where he wished and at whatever price he wished.  [ I use the masculine pronouns to convey the fact that at the time we are talking about, the guilds were restricted to men, and most of the early non-guild undertakings, though by no means all, were begun by men.]

But while the removal of legal, customary, and other restrictions on market exchange was an important pre-condition for the development of what we now call capitalism, it was by no means identical with capitalism, and the kind of relatively unfettered market exchange that I am talking about can be found in many economies that were not capitalist in their organization.

So if capitalism is not free trade simpliciter, what is it?  We shall find out tomorrow.

TOMORROW'S POST

One of the irritating and quirky things about this blog form is that every so often someone posts a comment on something I wrote some while ago, and that comment gets lost in the shuffle because it is not easily available to those reading the blog today.  Michael just posted a kind comment on something written long ago, and when I went to look at it in its entirety, I discovered other comments to that post that I had somehow missed.  So tomorrow, I am going to re-post the original post -- my Credo -- and then I am going to undertake to respond in a lengthy and systematic fashion to some of those long ignored comments.  My apologies to those whom I have ignored.  I think I do not entirely have my hands on the blog form yet.

THE MORAL DIMENSIONS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The latest New York Review of Books has a review of a pair of biographies, of Ava Gardner and Barbara Stanwyck [I am going to make a big leap of faith here and simply assume that everyone knows who they are or were.]  In 1988, Gardner asked writer Peter Evans to "work with her as ghostwriter on her autobiography."  Evans quotes her as saying "I'm broke, honey.  Either write the book or sell the jewels ...And I'm kinda sentimental about the jewels."  Which strikes me as authentic Ava Gardner.  As for the accuracy of what she was telling him, Evans quotes her again:  "It's my f***ing life.  I'll remember it the way I want to remember it."

When I first read that, I was appalled.  Speaking as an autobiographer who labored mightily for accuracy in my own 800 page "memoir," checking Google constantly and making late emendations when Charles Parsons, whose memory is much better than mine, wrote with corrections, I felt a moral imperative to hew as closely to the unvarnished truth as I was able.  It was a point of honor with me not to sugar coat the facts or embellish my life to gain the reader's admiration.

But then I thought:  You know, she has a point.  I mean, it is my life.  It is not a life of Aristotle, or Immanuel Kant, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or Sting.  It is my life.  I have lived it.  I have suffered its sorrows and savored its joys.  Why shouldn't I remember my own life the way I want to remember it?  Let some beady-eyed sharp-nosed hack write an accurate account of my life!

Now, let me tell you about the time I climbed Mt. Everest ...

A HUNGRY MAN MEDITATES ON FIRE

Now that I am on a diet, I face the challenge each evening when I make dinner of somehow fooling my stomach into believing that it is eating food.  Last night, I scored a signal success.  I sliced a large Vidalia onion very thin, added to it a large red bell pepper julienned, and with nothing more than a bit of spray olive oil to keep the pan from sticking, sautéed it forever until the onion and the pepper all but melted, giving up their natural [non-fattening] sugars.  It was delicious!  As I lingered over the dish, my mind turned to fire [we have a gas stove].  I began to wonder about the extraordinary range of practical information that is presupposed by the simple act of cooking dinner.  [I have the feeling I am channeling Claude Levi-Strauss, but that is neither here nor there.]

Think about how many different and not at all intuitively obvious bits of knowledge someone must have to get the idea of making a fire and cooking food.  Let us start with fire.  Early humans [and pre-hominids as well, as they are called] "had fire," as the saying goes.  Where did they get it from?  Almost certainly, Jane Neanderthal, as we may refer to her, first saw fire when lightning strikes sparked conflagrations in dry forests or grasslands.  She and her fellow Neanderthal probably noticed four things about this strange phenomenon:  it was hot, it was bright and shiny and flickering, it scared away animals, even large and dangerous animals, and it hurt if you touched it.  How long [and how many times] did it take before someone had the idea of picking up a burning stick and waving it to scare animals?  How much longer before someone discovered that you could bring a burning stick back to your cave or camp and use it to light other sticks, creating a stable fire?  [This simple fact, which is obvious to all of us, actually involves a number of conceptual leaps].  How much longer did it take to discover that in getting a fire going from a glowing ember or a slowly burning bit of wood, you must gather twigs and bark and little bits of wood first before throwing on the logs?  How much longer again to discover that a glowing ember can be carried from campsite to campsite and used to re-created a fire?  And, the very biggest leap thus far, by what act of inventive genius did someone discover that one could create new fire by striking flints against one another?  [Not just any two stones, but flint stones.]  We are not yet anywhere near the idea of cooked food, and already we have an enormous fund of collective knowledge, much of it presumably discovered and rediscovered countless times in countless places over a period of a million years.

It is possible to imagine how the idea of cooking meat was discovered.  [As I talk about the discovery of facts that all of us so much take for granted that we find it hard to conceive of them as having ever been discovered, I am reminded of a lovely moment in the John Travolta film, Michael.  Travolta plays a rather overweight angel come to Earth, where he does this, that, and the other with Andie MacDowell, William Hurt, and Bob Hoskins.  Travolta (the angel Michael) remarks in passing that he invented standing in line.  Up 'til then, everyone just bunched up and crowded around.  The charm of the line lies in our sudden realization that standing in line, like every other social act, must have been invented at some time or other.]  But back to cooking.  An animal laid low by the fire and partially burned would be a tasty bit of food for a hungry band of early humans wandering the savannah, and it might occur to them to take freshly killed prey and put it on the fire.  But how did anyone think up the idea of taking a gourd used to carry water, putting it on the fire, boiling water in it, and then cooking plants and nuts and bits of grain in it to make soup?

Looking backwards, we understand the great advantageous of cooked food.  Cooking breaks plant materials and flesh down, making them digestible.  The advent of cooking enormously expands the range of possible foods, never mind the improved taste.

All of this, and a great deal more, flashed through my mind as I lingered over the onion and pepper dish I had created.  It struck me as a very powerful example of the deep truth set forth in  the first paragraph of the Credo that I wrote and posted on this blog a long time ago:

"We human beings live in this world by thoughtfully, purposefully, intelligently transforming nature so that it will satisfy our needs and our desires. We call this activity of transforming nature "production," and it is always, everywhere, inescapably a collective human activity. Every moment that we are alive we are relying on what those before us have discovered or invented or devised. There is no technique, however primitive, that is the invention of one person alone. Like it or not, we are all in this life together. Even those giants of industry who think of themselves as self-made men are completely dependent for their empire building upon the collective knowledge and practice of the entire human species."

 

I CAN'T SEEM TO RETIRE

Well, the Bennett College gig came to a close, I edited four volumes of my published and unpublished papers, and I brought my quarter-century South African scholarship effort to an end, so I thought I was going to be able to sit back quietly, sip drinks with little umbrellas in them, and complain about the young.  But yesterday I had a visit from my old friend Judith Baker, and it seems that I have volunteered to try to raise money for her African Storybook Project [ASP].  I have talked about Judith several times on this blog.  You can go back to November 18, 2013 to see what I said there, or you can check out this on YouTube to get a quick idea of the ASP.  Once I create a new website with a PayPal button, I am going to ask you to chip in to support this initiative.

The ASP is a sort of precursor to my scholarship effort, although on a vastly larger scale, because it seeks across all of sub-Saharan Africa to help young children to become literate first in their own languages and then in a world language like English.  The idea is to create a vast digital library of children's stories collected from the local communities, to illustrate them, and then "version" or translate them into both English and a wide variety of other local languages.  Version" because cultural variations from community to community may result in a story from one area having elements that are inappropriate or mystifying to the parents, teachers, and children in another area.

What do I mean by story elements inappropriate or mystifying to parents, teachers, or children elsewhere?  Well, Judith recounted an African story she had been told about two sisters walking in the woods who meet a scary old woman suffering from leprosy.  The old woman asks the first sister to help her into her hut, but the little girl recoils at the thought of touching the woman, and refuses.  The old woman asks the second sister, who agrees and helps her.  Good things then happen to the helpful sister.  And the moral of this story, as told to Judith?  "Obey instructions or you will end up in the elephant's mouth."  I think we can all agree that this moral might not strike readers everywhere as natural or appropriate!

Here is one children's story that Judith downloaded from a flash drive onto my computer.  Remember that these stories will be brightly illustrated, and are for very little children:

"Goat, Dog and Cow were great friends.  One day they went on a journey in a taxi.  When they reached their destination, the driver asked them to pay their fares.     Cow paid her fare.  Dog paid a bit extra, because he did not have the correct money.      The driver was about to give Dog his change when Goat ran away without paying anything.  The driver was very annoyed.  He drove away without giving Dog his change.  That is why, even today, Dog runs towards a car to peep inside and find the driver who owes him his change.  Goat runs away from the sound of a car, fearing to be arrested for dishonesty.  And Cow is not bothered when a car is coming. Cow takes her time crossing the road because she knows she paid her fare in full."

 

You can see why I decided to sign on.  This is going to be fun!