Agonistic Liberal

Too many Occupiers would rather redefine than renounce violence. This obstreperous minority has often blocked official condemnations of violence and vandalism by invoking a “diversity of tactics.” They treat shattering storefronts and assaulting the police as matters of “individual conscience.” Holding rioters accountable for their actions is reviled as “imposing a code” that is unjust. Distinctions between “good” and “bad” protesters are derided as betraying the movement.

Now, I can see the prospect of further innovations in both tactics and morality. Charges of terrorism have been brought against the NATO Three and the Cuyahoga Five. No matter the outcome of their trials, these charges are too grave to quietly ignore. Yet Mark Bray, a spokesperson for Occupy, was impatient to explain away these alleged plots as “entrapment.” Bray seemed to conflate any use of informants or infiltration with entrapment. Apparently, these revolutionaries have the power to remake the world in their own image, but their will is broken by the mere presence of a secret agent…

Revolutionaries make their own history, though not in a world of their choosing. As John Gray said in his review of The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents:

The problem faced by those who want to build a new future for humanity is that they have to start in the flawed world that exists at present. Revolutionaries cannot help being compromised by the power structures they aim to overthrow. If they are to pose a challenge to the prevailing order, they need to protect themselves against repression and subversion by the state. When they organise to defend themselves, they soon come to resemble the state in secrecy and ruthlessness. The revolutionaries’ dilemma is clear: either they remain high-mindedly pure and impotent, or they end up as repressive as the regime they are fighting, if not more so.

Nothing illustrates this quandary more clearly than the anarchist movement in the late 19th and early 20th century. “Anarchism’s ultimate aim was to usher in a society of human beings, a heaven on earth in which harmonious coexistence was achieved without coercion or the imposition of distant authority, but rather arose out of each individual’s enlightened recognition of their mutual respect and dependency.” This is the anarchist ideal, as described by Alex Butterworth in one of the most absorbing depictions of the dark underside of radical politics in many years.

The early anarchists looked forward to a stateless, egalitarian society, including all of humankind, in which no one ruled over anyone else. They believed this was what human beings really wanted—a condition of harmony and equality that would exist everywhere, had it not been obstructed by exploitative and manipulative elites. But how to deal with such obstructions, which have in the past so often thwarted humanity’s best impulses?

Those who war against a fallen world through clandestine actions, Gray said, “are bound to view events in conspiratorial terms. But their perceptions often have a basis in reality; conspiracy is part of the territory in which they live.”

The Nechayevian revolutionary can benefit from exploiting public demonstrations. Non-violent protesters provide cover and a source of moral authority. Meanwhile, miniature insurrections by masked and anonymous protesters may provoke government reprisals. If the state punishes the peaceful majority for the crimes of a feral minority, then a crackdown might radicalize their comrades as well as the viewing public. A protest would be a success, for the fanatic, if it were answered with indiscriminate repression.

Consider this eyewitness account by Carl Sack, a Peace Guide (or protest marshal) for last Sunday’s protest against NATO:

Finally we got to the end rally. It took some negotiating to get the cops to let us onto our permitted route on Cermak. As people continued to move in toward the stage, the vets began their moving ceremony, throwing away the medals they were given for serving U.S. imperialism. After the first few speakers, the Block decided to push their way through the crowd and out toward the riot cops stationed on Cermak to the west. This seemed like a fine idea—it drew off the cops and left the rest of us in relative peace for most of the rally.

But rather than keeping the cops away, which would have been a great help, the Block returned right at the tail end of the rally, bringing the riot cops with them and completely plugging up the only exit, as the streets were blocked by cops on all other sides. When the M.C. announced from the loudspeaker that the permitted rally was over and people who wanted to leave should exit to the west, the Block immediately started chanting, “go east, go east!” This completely confused the crowd. To the east was a four-deep line of riot cops, while the Block was totally blocking off the exit to the west.

I and a few other Peace guides on the corner started trying to clear an exit passage by asking respectfully, and eventually pleading with Blockers, to move over enough to open a space for people who wanted to get out of harms’ way to do so. The response from several Blockers was complete refusal to budge. When I waded through the crowd and shouted over the tumult to tell people which way the exit was, Blockers tried to shout me down. They just didn’t care that there were old ladies and immigrants and people with rap sheets who couldn’t afford to get arrested or billy-clubbed there. I even got that exact response a few times—literally, “I don’t care, I do what I want.” What about what the people who came for a peaceful, legal protest wanted? Many Blockers, it seemed, were indifferent.

Fortunately, the police weren’t fooled. The peaceful protesters were eventually able to leave. Nevertheless, Sack concluded: “The Black Block actively chose to prevent people from leaving in an attempt to hijack the protest and turn it into a confrontation.” The police, with whom Sack was hardly enamored, “were forceful and brutal, but only after they were put on edge by the Block’s provocative actions.”

The urban guerrilla wants to lure the authorities into a moral trap. They seek to discredit the American government by recasting it as a police state. Such desperado tactics, Daniel Bell believed, are “never the mark of a coherent social movement, but the guttering last gasps of a romanticism soured by rancor and impotence.”

“The passion for destruction is a creative passion!” has been a revolutionary creed since at least the nineteenth century. For about as long, its adherents have been re-educating “concern trolls.” Emma Goldman, for example, said to the naysayers of her day:

“But his act was mad and cowardly,” says the ruling class. “It was foolish and impractical,” echo all petty reformers, Socialists, and even some Anarchists.

What absurdity! As if an act of this kind can be measured by its usefulness, expediency, or practicability.

The revolutionary was Leon Czolgosz, and his act was the assassination of President William McKinley. After Czolgosz’s arrest, Goldman denounced McKinley as a “modern Caesar.” She said of the assassin and his personal choice of tactic:

Resistance against force is a fact all through nature. Man being part of nature, he, too, is swayed by the same force to defend himself against invasion. Force will continue to be a natural factor just so long as economic slavery, social superiority, inequality, exploitation, and war continue to destroy all that is good and noble in man.

That the economic and political conditions of this country have been pregnant with the embryo of greed and despotism, no one who thinks and has closely watched events can deny. It was, therefore, but a question of time for the first signs of labor pains to begin. And they began when McKinley, more than any other President, had betrayed the trust of the people, and became the tool of the moneyed kings. They began when he and his class had stained the memory of the men who produced the Declaration of Independence, by the blood of the massacred Filipinos. They grew more violent at the recollection of Hazelton, Virden, Idaho, and other places, where capital has waged war on labor; until on the 6th of September the child begotten, nourished and reared by violence, was born.

That violence is not the result of conditions only, but also largely depends upon man’s inner nature, is best proven by the fact that while thousands loath tyranny, but one will strike down a tyrant. What is it that drives him to commit the act, while others pass quietly by? It is because the one is of such a sensitive nature that he will feel a wrong more keenly and with greater intensity than others.

It is, therefore, not cruelty, or a thirst for blood, or any other criminal tendency, that induces such a man to strike a blow at organized power. On the contrary, it is mostly because of a strong social instinct, because of an abundance of love and an overflow of sympathy with the pain and sorrow around us, a love which seeks refuge in the embrace of mankind, a love so strong that it shrinks before no consequence, a love so broad that it can never be wrapped up in one object, as long as thousands perish, a love so all-absorbing that it can neither calculate, reason, investigate, but only dare at all costs.

It is generally believed that men prompted to put the dagger or bullet in the cowardly heart of government, were men conceited enough to think that they will thereby liberate the world from the fetters of despotism. As far as I have studied the psychology of an act of violence, I find that nothing could be further away from the thought of such a man than that if the king were dead, the mob will cease to shout “Long live the king!”

The cause for such an act lies deeper far too deep for the shallow multitude to comprehend. It lies in the fact that the world within the individual, and the world around him, are two antagonistic forces, and, therefore, must clash.

Do I say that Czolgosz is made of that material? No. Neither can I say that he was not. Nor am I in a position to say whether or not he is an Anarchist; I did not know the man; no one as far as I am aware seems to have known him, but from his attitude and behavior so far (I hope that no reader of “Free Society” has believed the newspaper lies), I feel that he was a soul in pain, a soul that could find no abode in this cruel world of ours, a soul “impractical,” inexpedient, lacking in caution (according to the dictum of the wise); but daring just the same, and I cannot help but bow in reverent silence before the power of such a soul, that has broken the narrow walls of its prison, and has taken a daring leap into the unknown.

Having shown that violence is not the result of personal influence, or one particular ideal, I deem it unnecessary to go into a lengthy theoretical discussion as to whether Anarchism contains the element of force or not. The question has been discussed time and again, and it is proven that Anarchism and violence are as far apart from each other as liberty and tyranny. I care not what the rabble says; but to those who are still capable of understanding I would say that Anarchism, being, a philosophy of life, aims to establish a state of society in which man’s inner make-up and the conditions around him, can blend harmoniously, so that he will be able to utilize all the forces to enlarge and beautify the life about him. To those I would also say that I do not advocate violence; government does this, and force begets force. It is a fact which cannot be done away with through the prosecution of a few men and women, or by more stringent laws—this only tends to increase it.

Violence will die a natural death when man will learn to understand that each unit has its place in the universe, and while being closely linked together, it must remain free to grow and expand.

Some people have hastily said that Czolgosz’s act was foolish and will check the growth of progress. Those worthy people are wrong in forming hasty conclusions. What results the act of September 6 will have no one can say; one thing, however, is certain: he has wounded government in its most vital spot. As to stopping the wheel of progress, that is absurd. Ideas cannot be retarded by restraint. And as to petty police persecution, what matter?

In Goldman’s “philosophy of life,” an act of terrorism was transformed into an act of love. The existing order was the root of all violence, and reactions against this despotism were part of its “natural death.” The faint-hearted reformers and the benighted rabble were less attuned to injustice. Unlike Czolgosz, they had failed to “strike down a tyrant.” In their carping about his choice of tactic, the assassin’s critics were complicit in a greater violence. Either you advanced the final deliverance of humanity, or you served its enslavers.

This dance of not-advocating-violence-while-rebuking-everyone-who-condemned-an-assassin was deranged, but I doubt it betrayed Goldman’s ideal. Millenarian revolutionaries are not bound by the moral standards of a fallen society. Their exclusive duty is to hasten the Apocalypse and bring this world to an end.

James Galbraith is one the least appreciated authorities on economic inequalities. Yes, the word should be plural. Galbraith has been insistent on this point for years, and he made it again in a recent essay:

Pay inequality in American manufacturing actually peaked in 1983 and fell back once interest rates dropped and the recession ended. This is easy to miss, partly because income-tax data reflect the changing structure of households, which continued through the 1980s. Pay inequality did not rise again until the recession in 1989, and after 1994 it once again declined quite sharply. By 2000, inequalities in the structure of pay had fallen a lot, which helps account for the very low poverty rates, including for minorities, in those years.

What happened? The answer jumps from a chart: Inequality in the structure of pay, measured as weekly earnings of the manufacturing workers, tracks the unemployment rate. It is a macroeconomic phenomenon, driven largely by the extra hours that low-paid workers are able to work in booms as well as by the short-time they suffer in slumps. It follows that the focus on supply-and-demand forces that are supposed to affect hourly wage rates—such as technology and education—is largely a waste of effort. What matters is the state of the economy and the rules governing wages.

Inequality in incomes rose sharply in the late 1990s, a phenomenon [Timothy] Noah describes as the rise of the “really stinking rich.” And he rightly calls attention to the bankers and fund managers and other denizens of Wall Street. But in thinking about how these incomes rose as they did, a chart can again clarify matters. Clearly it’s another macroeconomic phenomenon, related in this case to the stock market. Pay follows unemployment; incomes followed the NASDAQ right up to the peak in 2000, and beyond.

By distinguishing inequalities, Galbraith teased out the macroeconomics. If you do not understand the macroeconomics, he believes, you cannot understand how inequality rises and falls.

Galbraith’s full argument can be found in the new book Inequality and Instability, about which he was interviewed here (begins at the 6:00 mark). A more academic summary can be found here.

Looking back at the surprising victories of the gay-rights movement, Rep. Barney Frank said:

I believe very strongly that people on the left are too prone to do things that are emotionally satisfying and not politically useful. I have a rule, and it’s true of Occupy, it’s true of the gay-rights movement: If you care deeply about a cause, and you are engaged in an activity on behalf of that cause that is great fun and makes you feel good and warm and enthusiastic, you’re probably not helping, because you’re out there with your friends, and political work is much tougher and harder. And I think it’s now clear that it is the disciplined political work that we’ve been able to do that’s won us victories.

I agree, if “disciplined political work” extends beyond elected offices and if “great fun” includes the less appealing acts of self-indulgence. (Some people may get their jollies from hairshirts or persecution fantasies.) The trouble is not an excess of pleasure but a lack of strategy.

hat tip mistermix

Mr. Freedom, a Mitt Romney surrogate, on what the land of freedom is all about:

Mitt Romney recently lamented the “missed chances and lost opportunities” of the past few years: homes lost, factories closed, college dropouts, etc. So, Romney promised to rebuild an Opportunity Society by repealing ObamaCare, relaxing rules on business, and federal austerity plus more tax cuts. His speech mentioned “opportunity” eleven times. Not once was the word preceded by “equality of,” which he replaced with “freedom and.”

Actual equality of opportunity, as Jonathan Chait said, is “an extremely radical, even utopian proposition.”

It is, alas, a nearly impossible ideal to fulfill, since one of the most valued ways for parents to spend their wealth is to impart greater opportunity to their children. Affluent parents can pass on money or assets to their children. They can finance private education; subsidize internships, travel, or other valuable opportunities; raise their children in safe communities that help impart middle-class values; or simply offer them stable two-parent families. All these things create massive inequality of opportunity.

Just how hard is it to go from poor to rich in the United States? A person born into the poorest fifth of the income distribution who manages to obtain a college degree is less likely to wind up in the top fifth of the income distribution than a person who was born into the top fifth but did not obtain a college degree. That is to say, even after the financial and social deck has been stacked so as to impede the poor child’s educational opportunities and ease the affluent child’s educational opportunities, the overcoming of those odds is still not enough to erase the advantage of a favorable starting position in life.

Creating actual equality of opportunity—that is, a world in which a child of extremely poor parents is just as likely to succeed as an equally talented child of rich parents—is probably an unrealizable goal. Even creating substantially more equality of opportunity would require, at a minimum, confiscatory inheritance taxes and dramatically more egalitarian educational policies.

Economic disadvantages tend to perpetuate themselves, which was once known as Walker’s dictum. Competition can be titled by inequalities of wealth. In the real world, where many do not trade as equals, “the tendency of purely economic forces [...] is continually to aggravate the disadvantages from which any person or class may suffer in the beginning.” But when this tendency is recast as “economic freedom,” then those who oppose it, oppose freedom.

update (April 20, 2012): Romney will not “apologize” for being born into wealth. Question this inequality of opportunity, he said, and you disparage his father’s success. As Jonathan Chait noted, Romney is shifting the standard argument which “makes a sharp distinction between equality of outcome, which is thoroughly evil, and equality of opportunity, which is the highest ideal.” Romney seems to know the distinction is a brittle one. So, he is willing to dispense with it altogether.

Not every economic absurdity on the American right can be explained by “crony capitalism.” In the axiomatic minds of House Republicans, the Chamber of Commerce favors distorting the “free-market system,” at least when it comes to roads, bridges, and export-import lending. As Jonathan Weisman reported in today’s New York Times:

Big business groups like the Chamber of Commerce spent millions of dollars in 2010 to elect Republican candidates running for the House. The return on investment has not always met expectations.

Even though money for major road and bridge projects is set to run out this weekend, House Republican leaders have struggled all week to round up the votes from recalcitrant conservatives simply to extend it for 90 or even 60 days. A longer-term transportation bill that contractors and the chamber say is vital to the recovery of the construction industry appears hopelessly stalled over costs.

At the same time, House conservatives are pressing to allow the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which has financed exports since the Depression, to run out of lending authority within weeks. The bank faces the possibility of shutting its doors completely by the end of May, when its legal authorization expires.

And a host of routine business tax breaks—from wind energy subsidies to research and development tax credits—cannot be passed because of Republican insistence that they be paid for with spending cuts.

There could be real-world consequences to the conservative rebellion. The 90-day extension of the highway trust fund that House Republican leaders say they will pass this week in lieu of a broad highway bill would keep existing projects moving for now. But business groups say few new government-funded infrastructure projects can get under way without longer-range certainty about federal backing.

Exports have been one of the bright spots of the fragile recovery, but without Export-Import Bank financing, companies could struggle to complete contracts with overseas buyers. Those buyers will most likely turn to foreign competitors whose governments have more robust versions of the bank, businesspeople say.

“There’s not a bank in the United States that’s going to loan money to that customer of mine in Argentina to buy my airplane,” said David Ickert, vice president of finance at Air Tractor, which makes crop-dusting and firefighting airplanes in Olney, Tex. “There is not a free-market system that operates like that. It does not exist. We need the Ex-Im Bank, period.”

Conservative groups, including the Club for Growth, are offended by the bank, because it has no place in their “free-market system.” I suspect this schism can be traced back to the cracks in their ideal. The less a “free market” party understands the massive apparatus that enables modern commerce, the more it resembles a cargo cult.

In an argument for fair taxation, Elizabeth Warren said:

I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.” No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own—nobody.

You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory—and hire someone to protect against this—because of the work the rest of us did.

Ernest Gellner went her one further. Gellner turned this argument on the labor theory of value. Undermine that theory, and you undermine Marx.

I was scrounging around old essays by the philosopher and social anthropologist, because I recently read Gellner’s brilliant Nations and Nationalism. In the book, he summarized the preconditions for an industrial society in culture, production, education, and order maintenance. He argued, compellingly, that these preconditions shaped the logic of nationalism.

One of the essays I found was on the labor theory of value, and Gellner actually said something that remains fresh. The following was taken from “The Bourgeois Marx,” a review of three books. In this excerpt, Gellner is responding to Understanding Marx by Robert Paul Wolff. The essay was published in The New Republic on September 2, 1985:

The labor theory of value has long had a dual function. It was meant both to explain prices and to justify or damn them. It all goes back at least as far as the famous justification of private property: a thing legitimately became a man’s [sic, recurs] property when he had mixed his labor with it. This was a striking turn of phrase and it conveys vividly what we do indeed feel: If I clear a virgin bit of forest, it is mine, is it not? If you do not take the bit about “mixing” too literally, all this is in order.

Economists not merely took it literally, however; they tried to make it operational. Precisely how much labor has gone into this, that, or the other product? It may seem easy to measure the work-hours deployed, if what is at issue is the clearance of a virgin bit of forest with one’s bare hands. But what if you used tools, as no doubt you did? You must also measure the work that went into producing those tools, and into the tools that produced them, and so forth. . . . Where will it all end?

The idea was to think of the real objective value of an object as the summation of all the work that had been put into it, directly and indirectly, not only by its immediate producers but also by those who had worked on the tools that they used, and so on. This is a dramatic way of highlighting the dignity of labor, by making it the sole source of value.

But note what is being denied. The necessary causal antecedents of any object that I enjoy include not merely all the work that went into making it and the tools that helped make it, but equally the political and cultural preconditions of production. Had those who used the tools not been able to work in peace, had they been harassed by physical aggression or been obliged to spend time and energy in warding it off, they would not have been able to produce what in fact they did produce. Equally, their work presupposed the collective cognitive equipment of the society within which they were working. So the real labor input of the object produced includes not merely the labor in the narrow sense, but also the contribution of the judges, the policemen, and all the others who helped keep the peace, and of the scholars and teachers who helped erect the cultural base of the society in question, and so forth.

The labor theory of value is not just a bit of metaphysics, but a bit of bad metaphysics, because it enshrines the prejudice of a work-oriented bourgeoisie: they and they alone are truly productive, and those who man the socially ancillary services are really a lot of parasites. Economics was born in a century and a country within which a favorable cultural and political infrastructure could be taken for granted and seem almost invisible. (This remark is no doubt rather unfair to Adam Smith, for instance, who was fully aware of the specific and precarious conditions of good government [PDF], and of an entrepreneurial ethos.) Nonetheless, a state of mind in which men could innovate in productive activities without fear of violent spoliation was widespread, and there was a certain tendency to ascribe it to humanity as such.

Thus the labor theory of value initially expressed the projection of the bourgeois worldview onto mankind as such. By the time Marx came to use the theory, however, it acquired another purpose: that of damning the social order set up by the bourgeoisie and of seeming to measure, to give a precise account of, the particular and unique type of spoliation practiced by it. The fact that the technique ignores the political and cultural preconditions of productive work does not matter for Marx’s viewpoint, precisely because he does not consider these to be essential. Mankind as such does not need the maintenance of political order so as to be able to work; mankind would work anyway, that being its “species-essence.” A coercive political order is required only because there is distortion; it is a sign of social pathology. Likewise, the work ethic, the tendency to seek fulfillment through creative activity, is inherently human and needed no special historic soil; nor did the mental orientation permitting creative innovation and hence the augmentation of resources.

In recognizing the economic role of government, Elizabeth Warren was guilty less of “class warfare” than Gellnerian anthropology.

update (March 28, 2012): Gellner continued with a distinctive critique of Marx:

Wolff’s resuscitation of the labor theory of value as a technical device seems without practical significance, but it has brought home to me how much this rather scholastic bit of Marx is all of a piece with his general vision. He was, at this point as elsewhere, the extreme and exaggerated expression of the bourgeois spirit. The essence of man is work; work being his fulfillment, it is a kind of insult that it should be remunerated, let alone enforced. In proper conditions, neither of these constraints will be necessary. The division of labor will remain, but it will be freed of all compulsion. Work-oriented burghers feel little love for the practitioners of coercion who despoil them, but normally they know that they must accommodate themselves to their existence. Their theorists tell them how, and under what conditions, the virtuosos of violence can themselves be restrained and their intrusion and cost be reduced to a minimum.

It is at this point that Marx goes to extremes. Be not deceived by the appearances of history, he says: it looks as if the swordsmen had dominated it, but that is mere surface. The swordsmen have no real power. It is at the level of production that the secret of history is to be found; coercion is and ought to be the slave of production. The most that violence can really do in history is be the midwife of structural change. Institutionalized, organized violence is simply at the service of an inherently pathological social order, which it can neither initiate nor save nor (on its own) abolish.

There is no reason whatsoever to hold this vision to be true, though it would be extremely nice if it were. It is simply bourgeois wish-fulfillment. It tells those who are work-oriented and hostile to coercion that a social order is possible—and indeed due to appear on the scene—in which their aspirations, which in any case correspond to the deepest essence of humankind, will be realized and will require no institutional protection. It is hard to imagine worse advice to humanity about to embark on the uncharted and perilous enterprise of organizing our social life in the new industrial era.

A society can exist without the state, but it cannot be an industrial society.