A REPLY TO CHRISTOPHER WALSH

Christopher Walsh posts the following interesting question in the comments section of this blog: 

dear professor wolff

the fact of primitive accumulation seems a particularly telling criticism of Nozick style justifications of capitalism because it hoists them on their own petard - what is primitive accumulation but a particularly egregious form of coercive property rights violation i.e. theft. I sometimes wonder whether capitalism could be justified if there had been no primitive accumulation and everyone started out with equal shares of resources. Perhaps the appropriate response is that capitalism could never have come into being in such circumstances. What do you think?

 

I have had my say about Nozick's book in the article archived at box.net [follow the link at the top of this page], so I shan't repeat myself here.  But the larger question about the conditions under which capitalism came into existence, or could come into existence, is worth some discussion, because it is an opportunity to expose a fundamental defect in the style of thinking characteristic of those of all political complexions who defend capitalism.

It is of course obvious that in some sense everyone did start with equal shares of resources, if we go back far enough to a time when there were no property rights at all, no law, no organized society, indeed perhaps no homo sapiens sapiens, but just bands of homo neanderthalensis.  But let us for a moment engage in the kind of "thought experiment" that anarcho-capitalists, libertarians, and other such-like lovers of capitalism so favor, and which is Bob Nozick's stock in trade.  Imagine a society of men and women in which everyone farms a plot of land or plies a trade, and in which, on market day, they all gather in the town square to exchange what they have produced for what they need:  potatoes for shoes, cloth for chickens, hats for strawberries, and so forth.  How might capitalism as we know it emerge out of this idyllic starting point?  Well, one imaginative chap who had read a little Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman on a rainy day, might step forth in the town square and in a loud voice announce that he is prepared to hire some sturdy lads and lasses to work a good plot of land he has located.  The land should yield a thousand bushels of wheat a year, he says, and he is prepared to give the ten farmers he seeks to hire fifty bushels of wheat a piece for their labor [numbers for illustration only -- I am a philosopher, so I haven't a clue how much wheat one farmer can grow in a year].  Everyone looks at him as though he had lost his senses.  "Why on earth should we give you half of the crop we raise with the sweat of our brows and the pain of our backs?" they want to know.  "Well" he says, I had the idea first, and besides I found the land, so I have decided to take half the crop for myself."  The poor sap gets no takers, and goes back to the library [they do have libraries] to see whether he can find another book that will give him the clue to becoming a capitalist.

First he tries some old Puritans, who preach the virtues of discipline, self-sacrifice, and the deferral of gratification.  Apparently the secret to becoming a capitalist is to live a life of self-denial and carefully put to one side a part of every year's crop, or a portion of every year's pile of shoes -- whatever happens to be one's way of making a living.  So he tries this, and sure enough it seems to work.  After a year of hard farming labor, he sets aside ten of the one hundred bushels of wheat he has grown, which he exchanges for some additional tools and better seed.  Year after year, he keeps at it, and he does indeed prosper, so much so that he is visibly better off than those of his fellows who are less able or willing to engage in disciplined self-denial.  But he still does not have anyone working for him, because whenever he tries to hire some chaps to farm his land, he finds that he must either offer them the full product of their labor, which doesn't do him any good whatsoever, or he must offer them less than the product of their labor, in which case they laugh at him and go back to their own land.

Well, twenty years go by, and our aspiring capitalist is getting on in life, so he decides to go back to the library for one last search of the available books.  There he stumbles on a copy of Capital, and after he has plowed through the mysterious and quite unhelpful discussions of the fetishism of commodities and the working day [what, he wonders, are factories], he comes upon Part VIII "The So-Called Primitive Accumulation."  The heavens open, the angels sing, and he realizes that he has found the Promised Land.  Off he goes back to his village, where he proceeds to use the little bit extra he has saved by his rigorous self-denial to hire a few bully boys who prefer beating up farmers to working the land.  They pretty quickly drive the hard-working farmers from the good land, and stand ready to guard it for its new owner, our capitalist hero.  Now, when he goes to the square and offers to pay fifty bushels of wheat for enough work to produce one hundred bushels of wheat, the dispossessed farmers, driven from their land, have no choice but to accept his offer.  Agricultural capitalism has arrived.  Can financial capitalism be far behind?

Modern-day apologists for capitalism simply assume without explanation that a few people will own the means of production -- the state standing behind them to protect that ownership with the full force of law and police -- while the many have nothing but their labor and are therefore forced to sell that labor to the owners of the means of production for a wage.  These apologists focus all their attention on the wage bargain struck in the labor market, worrying endlessly about whether it is a bargain "freely arrived at," without ever really asking themselves how the participants in the wage bargain came to be in the situation that defines their relative bargaining power.

To answer Christopher Walsh's question simply, capitalism never develops out of a situation in which everyone has an equal share of the resources, unless first a process of expropriation and primitive accumulation has taken place.

IT ALL COMES OUT IN THE WASH

The French Laundry is an extremely expensive upscale Napa Valley restaurant considered by many to be the best restaurant in America.  Some while ago it opened a Manhattan satellite called Per Se, an equally expensive restaurant also considered top of the heap in haute cuisine land.  [The Tasting Menu, a series of dishes chosen by the chef, costs $310 per person!]  Today the news broke that the health inspectors recently found so many health violations in Per Se during one of their periodic visits that its health rating is "pending."  After a full-scale indulgence in a bout of schadenfreude, I decided to tell you all about my own personal triumphant experience with The French Laundry.

Twelve years ago, my older son, Patrick, married a wonderful woman, Diana Schneider [quite the most brilliant accomplishment of his long and distinguished life].  Since they both lived in San Francisco, they decided to hold the wedding at a winery in Napa Valley [on Bastille Day, by the way, though I think maybe they did not choose the date for its historic revolutionary significance.]  I rented a tux [the fourth time I had ever worn one, counting the time I wore Susie's father's tux to a country club dance when I was a teenager], and went off to California.  Since this was an event of transcendent importance in my life, I decided to throw prudence to the winds and host a dinner party for Susie and me, Patrick, Diana, and my younger son Tobias at The French Laundry.  Tobias generously offered to pick up the tab for the wine.

We all chose the restaurant's tasting menu, figuring that it would give us a range of outstanding gustatory experiences.  There were seven or eight dishes in all, including an amuse bouche to start and a dessert at the end.  Each course was brought with a flourish by impeccably schooled waitpersons on elegant bone china.

Now, here's the thing.  I feel about food the way I feel about music.  I do not care at all for the wrapping or the presentation or the elegance.  All I care about is how it tastes [or sounds, in the case of music.]  And the dishes, although a delight to the eye, were quite undistinguished in taste.  They looked gorgeous, but they did not burst on the taste buds with brilliance.  Mind you, they were o.k.  Nothing was actually bad.  But I have had many meals much better than that one, in restaurants that could not hope to secure a single Michelin star, let along the coveted three stars that had been awarded to The French Laundry.  The bill, as I recall, was somewhere north of $800 -- no doubt, from the management's point of view, a steal.

I was really bummed out.  This was to be daddy's signature night, my one and only splash as a Big Spender, and the meal was a manifest flop.  By the time we were in the plane on the way back to Massachusetts, I was really getting steamed, so when I got home, I wrote a letter to the management of the restaurant.  I did not just say that I had been disappointed with the meal.  I went through it course by course and described exactly how each dish had failed to come up to snuff.  As it happens, I have an especially good memory for what I eat.  I did not complain.  I did not ask for some compensation,  I just told them that they had been a profound disappointment.

Well, back came a letter of apology with a statement that the charge for the meal would be removed from my credit card, as indeed it was.  A small victory, heaven knows, but there are precious few of them in this world.  I tell you all this just in case you should have a similar experience.  A word to the wise.

 

A REPLY TO CHRIS

Those of you who read the comments posted on this blog will have noticed that Chris, who is among the most of the regular commentators, can be counted on to call me to account for my lapses from radical Marxist purity.  I welcome Chris' comments, which I find intelligent and stimulating and provocative.  I figure if I am not willing to have people take swings at me, I ought not to hang myself up in cyberspace as a piñata.  Chris' latest animadversion was provoked by my recommendation that readers take a look at Paul Krugman's blog.  He and I had the following exchange:

 

Chris:  I don't mean this in a hostile sense, but I cannot fathom how one can appreciate a Keynesian blog, when one is a Marxist in economics. Marx shows in Vol II and III that consumer consumption is the pinnacle of economic health.

Me:  Oh come on ! I admire Smith and Ricardo, I think Keynes' insights were valuable, I read and enjoyed Michael Oakeshott, as well as Max Weber and Emile Durkheim and Karl Mannheim, none of whom was a Marxist. I do not think Marx would have considered Krugman a "vulgar economist," his term for the time-servers who made lousy arguments offering ideological rationalizations of capitalism [not ever a term he applied to Smith and Ricardo, by the way.]

Chris: I think that analogy is not quite correct. Or, at the very least, It's not addressing what I meant. I'll confess I was not clear, so I shall clarify.   I too enjoy many of the authors you've mentioned, and appreciate their insights, but so far as I can tell, those authors were developing theory, whereas - the few times I've read Krugman's blog and the MANY times I've read his NYTimes op-eds - Krugman is applying an already developed theory to particular problems. And it's in that regard that I can't quite fathom why one would enjoy his writing. In the same sense that if one applied Lamarckianism every few weeks to breakthroughs in biological science, the insights would be unfulfilling and incorrect, albeit reading about the development of Lamarckian theory is quite fascinating.  On the off chance you've never read it, Michael Roberts has a fan[ta]stic Marxist economics blog, that wrestles with current events. As does Richard Wolff.

 

This exchange raises some interesting and important questions, I think, for all that it may sound to many like really inside baseball.  The first question is political, the second intellectual or theoretical.  I think Chris is mostly interested in the latter, but since a number of his previous comments have raised the former, I will discuss them both.

The political question is this:  In our efforts to change our corner of the world, to push it in a more progressive direction, even in a truly transformative direction, should we or should we not make on-going alliances with all those who are, generally speaking, more to the left than to the right in American politics?  I believe we should, indeed that we must if we want to accomplish anything at all.  I sense, though he has never said so, that Chris would disagree.  [Look back at his repeated excoriation of me for supporting Obama.]  My belief has two roots or sources.  The first is my pained awareness, reinforced by a long life of disappointments, that in this country there are precious few people who share my view of the world to such a degree that I can comfortably call them comrades.  Since I do not for a moment believe that a transformation in America can be carried out by a "vanguard," a cabal, a tightly knit band of political warriors [nor does Chris, I suspect], I am left to look for alliances, however hedged round with contradictions, that number in the scores of millions, not in the scores. 

The second source of my willingness to make alliances with those who do not share many, if any, of my deeply held convictions is my awareness that I have led and still lead a privileged life far removed from the material want and social, political, and police threats that make the lives of so many in this country miserable.  I believe that it would be inappropriate, indeed intolerable, for me, from my perch of privilege, to judge that incremental improvements in the lives of others are not worth fighting for because they do not constitute genuine revolution.  So I supported Obama, because he was clearly, in my view, superior to McCain and Romney.  So, too, I supported Gore, and if it comes to that, I will support Hilary Clinton.  Is it really for me to say "a pox on both their houses" and to tell those who have just lost their unemployment insurance that they must make do to preserve my ideological purity?  I think not.

The second question raised by the exchange between Chris and me is theoretical or intellectual.  How can I find anything of interest in Paul Krugman's blog when he interprets the world from a theoretical perspective that I think is mistaken?  That is a really interesting question, and it deserves a longer answer than I can provide here, but let me sketch my response.  The analogy to Lamarck, though witty, is, I think, not apt.  By the way, with this post, you might take a look at the piece called "Envy versus Anger" that Krugman posted yesterday.

Perhaps I can make my point succinctly [and in a way that Chris might find sympatico] by a reference to the famous Allegory of the Cave in Plato's Republic.  You will recall that Socrates asks us to imagine a cave in which there sit, chained to the floor, a number of people who stare at a wall illuminated by the light from a fire.  A parapet obscures the lower part of the wall, and behind the parapet, between the fire and the wall, servants carry objects, whose shadows are thrown on the wall as they are moved from one side of the cave to the other.  These shadows are all that the chained observers see, and they devote an inordinate amount of time to trying to guess which shadows will appear next.  We may call these shadow guessers economists.  Over time, some of them become quite skilled at anticipating which sequence of shadows.  We may think of these especially expert trackers of shadows as neo-classical economists, among whom are disciples of one of the best guessers ever to come along, an old shadow guesser named John Maynard Keynes.  One of the chained shadow watchers grows suspicious of this endless show.  He manages to free himself from his chains and laboriously makes his way out of the cave into the where he discovers, brightly illuminated by the light of reason, the real objects that lie behind the shadows.  He rushes back into the cave to tell his fellows what he has seen, but despite the eloquence of his reports, they laugh at him and go back to their shadow guessing, for which they have become famous and well remunerated.  We may call this dissenter from the regime of the shadows Karl Marx.

If one has listened to Marx, why on earth spend one's time listening to Krugman?  Why read the writings of even the best of the shadow guessers?

Well, this is a bit complicated, and it is here that the analogy with Lamarck breaks down.  Marx insisted that we must understand "the laws of motion of capitalist economy" not only in order the better to predict their supercession by the laws of socialism, but also because we live, unavoidably, in the realm of appearances in which those laws rule, at least for the present.  Unlike Lamarck, who was just wrong about the inheritance of acquired characteristics, economists like Krugman really are quite good at figuring out what makes things tick in a capitalist economy.  They may not think that capitalism ought to be replaced by socialism.  They might not even think that is possible [I cannot quite tell about Krugman, by the way].  But they can provide a useful guide to such matters as the probable effect on the economy of regulation of the financial sector or a higher minimum wage. And -- this is the important point -- if you agree with my answer to the first question discussed above, if you choose to try to make incremental changes in the world as it presents itself to us, then the insights of a Krugman are extremely useful.  Plato, you will recall, with a sorrowful irony, acknowledges that the lone escapee from the regimen of the cave may, when he returns, be a less accurate guide to the succession of the shadows than those who still believe they are the only reality.

So, Chris, that is how I can appreciate a Keynesian blog when I am a Marxist in economics.

MORE ABOUT CRIMEA

I think Putin [and the Russian oligarchs] may pay a heavy price for the move into Ukraine.  But if he is willing to pay that price, there is little or nothing either we or the EU can do about it.  Huffing and puffing and calling on Obama to be "tough" is pointless.  We can inflict economic punishment on Russia, we can [though it will be interesting to see whether we do] freeze the billions that the Russian oligarchs have parked in Western banks, we can cancel the G8 meeting and even exclude Russia from it -- we can probably not stop them from selling their oil, the world market for oil being what it is.   But it would be madness to launch a military strike against the one country in the world that could actually retaliate devastatingly against us.  My guess is that Obama and his advisers know all this.  Indeed, I would imagine that everyone but some silly neo-con hawks and Republicans facing primary challenges know this.  [Lindsey Graham is despicable in so many different ways that it is difficult to get worked up about his foolishness in this particular case.]

Fifty odd years ago, when I taught at the University of Chicago, I became friendly with Hans Morgenthau, a grand old European emigre who had a cold-eyed view of Central European realpolitik.  He helped me to look past the moralizing and posturing to the objective facts on the ground of power and national interest, which had shaped the basic story of Europe for four centuries.

It remains to be seen whether Putin has sufficient control over his oligarchs to force them to accept whatever economic punishment the EU decides to inflict.  Who knows?  He may be overplaying his hand, although I would not want to bet on it.

UKRAINE

Speaking as a complete novice on all matters Russian and Eastern European, I find the events in Ukraine very troubling indeed.  It looks to me very much as though Putin is embarked on an effort to reconstitute as much of the Soviet Union as he can.  It is clearly not in our national interest to launch a war to stop him, and there seems not to be any other forced that could pose an obstacle to the effort.  Will he move on Belarus?  Does he have his eye on Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan?  I think it very unlikely he will make a move against Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

The United States has an airbase in Kyrgyzstan which must close in July of this year, and the Air Force is talking about moving it to Kazakhstan, at least for as long as it is needed to support military operations in Afghanistan.  I would guess Putin will be patient enough to wait until we pull out of Central Asia.

Russia's imperial expansion has always been limited to areas contiguous with its central territory, in much the same way as that of China, making it extremely difficult to challenge geopolitically.  [Contrast that with the imperial expansions of France, Great Britain, Germany, Holland, Spain, Italy, and the United States, or with ancient Rome and Athens, for that matter.]

I suspect economic sanctions, which could be quite costly for Russia, will have not the slightest impact on any imperial aspirations Putin may have.

This is serious business, folks, but despite the inevitable tough talk from neo-cons and attacks on Obama as a gutless wimp, my guess is that no one is actually going to make a serious effort to take America into a ground war with Russia.  There is very little for us to do save wait and see how it plays out in Eastern Europe.

A GOOD READ

I may be the last person on earth to discover that Paul Krugman's blog is well worth reading on a regular basis, but if any of you who visit me here do not know that, you can find Krugman at this link. 

A REPLY TO JERRY FRESIA

In a long comment to the conclusion of my two-part post, Jerry Fresia asks a deep and important question to which there are no easy answers.  Here is his entire comment:

 

"“This effort, if it is to succeed, must be grounded in the simple ideas set forth in my Credo….” You probably mean more than “ground in ideas,” but it is “ideas” -as abstractions - that get all the credit. This sole emphasis on ideas generally troubles me.   One of the nice thing about your analyses is that you regularly make reference to non-ideas as having revolutionary import. Let’s call these non-ideas “simple pleasures;” simple, much like the ideas in your Credo, in that they are available to everyone and fundamental to the living of a just life in a just society.  For example, I loved the distinction you made between “hearing a sound” and “making a sound.” The latter issues in a “special pleasure,” you say – and here I infer that that special pleasure cannot be available to the listener in the same way.  You have shown to us the Marcusean argument “that the great works of art, literature, philosophy and music of our cultural tradition play an essential and unexpectedly subversive role….these works keep alive, in powerful and covert ways, the fantasies of gratification, the promise of happiness, the anger at necessary repression, on which radical political action feeds,” and which awakens “the unquenchable thirst for liberation from which social progress must come.” And then there’s the story of Archimedes whose chief concern is that the Roman soldiers do not disturb “his circles.”  Can we say, then, that “this effort” will spring not just from the ideas of your Credo but also, and necessarily, from the simple pleasures that each of us come to cherish all the while living within the womb of capitalism?"

 

Let me broaden Jerry's question in a way that does not, I think, do violence to it:  To what motivations, what sources of psychic energy, can we appeal in seeking to move men and women to truly transformative social action?  [I refrain from using the more familiar adjective "revolutionary" because of its complex associations in Western political discussions.]  There are two such sources with which I am familiar, and which have again and again served as the motivating springs for great and rapid social change:  The first is religious fervor, which surely has, in its various forms, brought larger social change more rapidly than any other single force unleashed on the world.  The second is powerful, deep-rooted emotions, whether anger and hatred stemming from ressentiment, or hope springing from the dream of liberation.  We saw the first at work in the rise of Nazism and the second in the French Revolution.

It is almost certainly not the case that rational self-interest can serve that purpose.  Men and women guided by calculations of gain and loss tend to make small, cautions moves.  As I remarked in my mini-tutorial on Marcuse, "Workers of the World, Unite!  You have nothing to lose but your IRAs.  You have an incremental improvement in your standard of living to gain!" is not a rallying cry likely to draw many thousands to its banner.

Marcuse argues, persuasively in my judgment, that art keeps alive fantasies of liberation and omnipotence, by virtue of their form [not their content!] that fuel revolutionary action.  It is more generally true that music, dance, theater, poetry, novels, and the visual arts play an essential role in mobilizing and sustaining the non-rational sources of effective social action.  That old familiar boast from the '60s -- We have all the good songs -- expresses an important truth.  Where are the folk songs of the Tea Party, of the anti-abortion forces, of the neo-con celebration of endless imperial war?  No general truth of this sort is without its exceptions.  I will give the imperialists Rudyard Kipling.  But the fact remains that Rational Choice Theory in any of its guises cannot explain why  men and women risk their lives on picket lines or at the barricades.

That is a brief reply to Jerry Fresia.