Category: Democracy

Direct Ways to Combat Economic Inequality

Social democrats are spurned by hard-core leftists because the former do not espouse the complete overthrow of the market. Rather, the social democrat accepts that market economies have various things to recommend them, including efficient production of goods and provision of economic well-being to large numbers. That economic well-being is also a crucial source of countervailing power against the potential tyranny of the state.

The point is decidedly not some claim that the market is perfect. Far from it. Like all sublunary things, it is very imperfect (hence its efficiencies are far from ideal, but are still a real thing given that we do not live in a frictionless world). But non-market processes and institutions are far from perfect as well. The idea is 1) to have checks and balances so that the worst tendencies of any and all human arrangements (from the family to the market to the state) are prevented, and 2) to use what powers we have to move from the negative goal of preventing harm to the positive goal of promoting well-being (or “flourishing” to use the term Martha Nussbaum has appropriated from Aristotle).

Central to this debate on the left is a kind of fatalism adopted by the non-social-democratic left, a fatalism that echoes the fatalism of the market fundamentalists on the right. Right-wing fatalists, famously in Margaret Thatcher’s words, tell us that there is no alternative. We are doomed to the market—and the market just means one thing. Any tampering with that market, any regulation or interference, sets us on the road to serfdom. Everything—from the EPA to state ownership of the steel factories—gets tarred with the same brush. In Hayek’s bracing, macho, vision, there isn’t even much pretense that the market enables good lives. It gives us freedom—and Hayekian freedom is about as conducive to happiness as Sartrean freedom. It’s a grim world and you should just take your medicine like a man.

On the left, this becomes the doctrine that any form of capitalism is disastrous—with no distinction of any merit to be made between 1850 Manchester and 1950 Pittsburgh. Both are equally evil, equally soul and body destroying, equally to be consigned to the dustbins of history. No remedial action is worth a damn; it all must be torn down.

Under current conditions, this view underwrites the assumption that capitalism inevitably leads to extreme inequalities in income and wealth. Yet, as Dean Baker argues in this superb piece, such a claim flies in the face of historical and contemporary evidence. The extreme inequalities of the Anglo-Saxon world are both only recent (ramping up since 1970) and are not found in non-Anglo-Saxon capitalist economies.

Which means that are various things the state can do in order to follow Robert Kuttner’s injunction (discussed in the last post) to use politics to tame the market. Yes, left to itself, capitalist markets tend toward inequality (that is the major point of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century). But markets needn’t be left to themselves. In fact, Baker’s point (and one that Karl Polanyi always insisted on) is that markets are never left to themselves. There is no such thing as “the free market.” The market is always structured, always a political and legal creation. The issue is whether it will be structured such as to benefit the wealthy or to benefit the many.

Baker, then, admirably lists a series of ways to counteract the current movement toward increasing inequality. He advocates for a Financial Transaction Tax; for a revamping of the current patent and copyright laws; for direct intervention in the ways that doctors, lawyers, and dentists are compensated; and a number of other measures. And these are separate from more aggressively progressive tax rates and the kind of wealth tax that Piketty advocates.

Hardt and Negri declare themselves sympathetic to such proposals, but are also pretty clear that they consider them only half-measures, not likely to cure what ails us. My own position is to be suspicious of any search for cures. The struggle between rich and poor for control over resources and wealth is not going to be ended by an entrance into the utopia of the perfect social arrangements. I think the left needs to abandon its dream that some permanent solution to social and economic conflict is on offer. I think the left’s addiction to theory stems from this idea that we can think our way to justice. I don’t think we lack the right ideas, the right formula. We have just been getting beat. The other side has out-organized, out-spent, and out-flanked us. And what is true now has been what is always true. They have the money and the power, we have the numbers. Our organizational challenge is much greater than theirs—but so should be our passion because we are the ones being trashed.

Thinking about that passion issue will be the next post.

Democracy and Capitalism

Lots of backlog of things to write about. But let’s start with Robert Kuttner’s superb article on Karl Polanyi in the most recent New York Review of Books. (Behind a paywall.)

Here’s Kuttner’s first paragraph:

“What a splendid era this was going to be, with one remaining superpower spreading capitalism and liberal democracy around the world. Instead, democracy and capitalism seem increasingly incompatible. Global capitalism has escaped the bounds of the postwar mixed economy that had reconciled dynamism with security through the regulation of finance, the empowerment of labor, a welfare state, and elements of public ownership. Wealth has crowded out citizenship, producing greater concentrations of extreme inequality and instability, organized less for the many than for the few.”

All to true. As various commentators have said, at least Stalin and Hitler claimed to have an ideology that justified their murderous ways. For Trump, it’s just power. Take that you underlings—and like it! It’s just power. Who, after all, is going to stop them?

And here’s Kuttner’s last paragraph:

“Democracy cannot survive an excessively free market; and containing the market is the task of politics. To ignore that is to court fascism. Polanyi wrote that fascism solved the problem of the rampant market by destroying democracy. But unlike the fascists of the inter-war period, today’s far-right leaders are not even bothering to contain market turbulence or to provide decent jobs through public works. Brexit, a spasm of anger by the dispossessed, will do nothing for the British working class; and Donald Trump’s program is a mash-up of nationalist rhetoric and even deeper government alliance with predatory capitalism. Assuming democracy holds, there could be a counter-mobilization more in the spirit of Polanyi’s feasible socialism. The pessimistic Polanyi would say that capitalism has won and democracy has lost. The optimist in him would look to resurgent popular politics.”

The first point is that Hitler was a Keynesian. Economic growth and stability insured by massive government spending. Profits to the manufacturers, sure. But jobs for the masses as well.

The second point is that Kuttner is a social democrat of my stripe. Market and state must be balanced, each one working to tame the potential abuse of power by the other. The time is out of wack because that balance has been destroyed.

This doesn’t mean a blind commitment to current political institutions—or to the state as currently configured. But it does mean seeing politics, as Kuttner puts it, as fundamentally required to tame the market. (My next post will feature some wonderful suggestions from Dean Baker about how to do jus that.)

Against this social democratic vision can stand the work of various leftists who say social democracy is a dead letter, a form that no longer fits the reality of our times. Such is the position of Hardt and Negri. I am working through their most recent book, Assembly, right now and it will be the subject of subsequent posts.

Protest in an Unjust Society

Not just Micah White’s The End of Protest, but also the essays of Martin Luther King, to which I have been sent by a wonderful essay by Alex Livingston, a political theorist at Cornell, and Livingston’s own book on William James [Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism (Oxford UP, 2016)], have pushed me to this question: if the mechanisms of democratic accountability are broken, then what forms should protest take?

Let’s frame this question in Martin Luther King’s terms. “The American racial revolution has been a revolution to ‘get in’ rather than to overthrow. We want a share in the American economy, the housing market, the educational system and the social opportunities. This goal itself indicates that a social change in America must be nonviolent. If one is in search of a better job, it does not help to burn down the factory. . . . The nonviolent strategy has been to dramatize the evils of our society in such a way that pressure is brought to bear against those evils by the forces of good will in the community and change is produced” (“Nonviolence: The Only Road to Freedom [1966].)

But what is the appeal to “the forces of good will” does not work? Even King realizes that things seldom happen because that is the right, the moral, the non-evil, thing to do. He is quite realistic that other pressures—especially economic pressures through boycotts and political pressure through disruptive non-cooperation—must also be applied. The bigger point, it would seem, is that these other pressures cannot be effective if the moral high ground is lost. The social movement must be on the side of justice, must be seen as appealing to the community’s best self, in order for its other tactics to bear fruit.

Success in the rhetorical battle over right and wrong is, thus, necessary for success, but not sufficient. At issue right now is what other ingredients are needed to complete the circle, to give us the magical combination that is gives us the necessary and the sufficient.

A big obstacle here is a fundamental asymmetry. Protestors almost always lose the high ground if they resort to violence. The use of violence is also tantamount (it would seem; I am on shaky ground here) to seeing overthrow of the existing power and social relations as the movement’s goal. If you want in (as King puts it), if the goal is fuller inclusion—and inclusion along more egalitarian lines–, then it seems as if violence is ruled out.

Yet—and here is the asymmetry—the forces opposing change get to use violence without undermining their cause. This is not a blanket statement. There are many ways the state—and other established power centers—can lose legitimacy and popular support by resorting to violence. But there are also many cases where state violence is not condemned, or is even applauded. Thus, incarceration of those deemed criminals rarely generates any dissent. Similarly, police actions against “rioters” are most often applauded and almost universally tolerated. The present of gun-toting policeman on the streets of our cities and villages is taken for granted.

Similarly, various forms of surveillance of employees is mostly accepted and the summary firing of employees deemed trouble-makers is also immune from protest or legal redress.

In short, we have a double standard. Violence—both direct and indirect—establishes inequality and differential treatment of citizens—and is used to uphold that unequal state of affairs. Such violence is often unremarked, and is seldom condemned, and even more seldom openly contested. But if those who would contest this “maintenance violence” (to coin a phrase) resort to violence, they jeopardize their whole cause. But in a battle so unequally joined, how can the contenders, the protestors, ever hope to win.

There are, by now, both historical examples and theoretical accounts, of non-violence winning this apparently hopeless contest between established violence/inequality and those who would hope to transform prevailing conditions. SO: never say never.

One way the civil rights movement did win some successes was by pitting some laws against other laws. The legal system—especially on the federal level—did provide some protection against, and even the ability to annul or override, injustices legally established at the state level. Even if democratically elected politicians were unresponsive to the protest movements, the courts were another site of possible progress. And, of course, with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the1965 Voting Rights Act, even the politicians were responsive.

The contrast to the anti-Vietnam war movement is instructive here. There was never any avenue of legal redress to pursue. Swaying politicians was the only way to get the government to change course. And that never happened. The New Left could not win enough elections to advance its cause; it couldn’t even scare enough politicians in the ways that the conservative movement since 1980 has been able to do. (The “no new taxes” pledge is one example of frightening politicians into compliance; enforced attitudes toward legal abortion and gun control are another example.) The only thing the anti-war movement accomplished was the end of the draft. The politicians decided they could wage war so long as they didn’t force any citizen to actually fight in those wars.

As matters currently stand, conservatives—through wealthy donors and strong single issue groups—can influence politicians to a degree that the left cannot. Although, it must be said, the conservative control only works for negative action: no gun control, no new taxes, no expansion of legal abortion rights. Conservatives are not able to accomplish anything positive. And now—with the failure to repeal ObamaCare and the probable failure to pass new tax cuts—their ability to do anything at all in Congress is in serious doubt. The Trump administration, of course, can do considerable damage on its own, starting with the sabotage of ObamaCare and moving on to destructive dismantling of environmental and financial industry regulations.

More troubling is that we have now have minority government—and that minority is doing everything it can to retain its hold on power. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, and allowing big money to dominate politics are all designed to keep a Republican Party that gets a minority of votes in power. The dysfunctional rules of the electoral game in America are being exploited in a straight-forwardly undemocratic fashion.

Most troubling is that this Republican gaming of the system has extended to a quite deliberate—and frighteningly successful—take-over of the judiciary at every level. The cherished path of using legal recourse to undermine the system’s inequities and injustices is being taken off the table. In other words, where violence was, legality is about to rein. The Republicans have done nothing illegal—as they love to keep shouting from the mountaintops, even as they gerrymander, and refuse to ratify court appointments that are put forward by Democrats. They are, they insist, playing by the rules—even as, naturally, they use the rules to further their own interests. That’s what winning is. You play the game to win. Both sides do. And you don’t cheat.

The upshot is that an undemocratic political system and an increasingly unequal economic system is now being fully legalized. Recourse within the system is now deeply endangered because even winning a majority of votes in an election does not give you any leverage over government, while the legal system is packed with judges who will not countenance any challenges to the electoral system or to the rights of corporations.

So: what is a protest movement to do? I am fully willing to believe (even though I think leftists are often deluded on this score) that a majority of our fellow citizens in these united states of America do not want what our current government is delivering. But—and this seems to me the crux—I also believe that a vast majority of those citizens are not willing to step outside the bounds of legality to challenge what is going down. Either things have just not gotten bad enough—or do not touch them personally enough—or there is a deep in-grown habit of legality. Whatever the explanation, this is where asymmetry hurts. A social movement that acts outside the bounds of legality will lose any chance of mass support. Yet the structures of legality are tightening to the point where action within their limits has less and less chance of being effective.

Massive civil disobedience is one possibility. The classic tactic of non-cooperation. But no suitable target immediately offers itself. The rush to airports after the first Muslim ban was the most hopeful—and useful—response to the Trump administration to date. The problem here is the site of noncooperation. Civil rights activists had two obvious sites: segregated public places and voting registration offices. In each place, they could dramatically stage their attempts to overcome unjust laws.

No such obvious sites are on offer right now. Occupy went to Wall Street, which makes sense. But they didn’t actually confront the financiers who were responsible for the mortgage crisis. And they didn’t have any rhetorically effective way to force such a confrontation.

I am going to stop here. But the search for answers will continue—not that I have any on the tip of my tongue. Subsequent posts will keep worrying this topic. I don’t promise any solutions.

Micah White’s The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution

Micah White was one of the people who inspired (?)/initiated(?) Occupy Wall Street. He certainly can’t be said to have organized it since he did nothing beyond publicizing the idea and setting a date for its occurrence. He never visited the site and made no effort to direct how it unfolded or what it demanded. He thinks the Occupy movement was a “constructive failure.”

I was drawn to his book The End of Protest (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2016) because White is adamant that “change won’t happen through the old models of activism. Western democracies will not be swayed by public spectacles and mass media frenzy. Protests [especially marches and other mass demonstrations] have become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual. Western governments are not susceptible to international pressure to heed the protests of their citizens” (27). That last statement is a little odd, but is explained (somewhat) a bit further on.

“We have been acting as if people have sovereignty over their governments when they act collectively. Now it is clear that the people’s sovereignty has been lost. We were wrong to believe that bigger and bigger street protests could force prime ministers and presidents to heed the wishes of the people. . . . [T]ese ritualized spectacles of tens of thousands in the streets are only effective when applied against autocratic regimes that are vulnerable to international pressure. It seems that popular protest functions only when it is aligned with the pre-existing Western geopolitical agenda” (36). We must recognize that we live a “precarious historical moment of broken democracy and the rule of the wealthy” (43) Having lost “faith in the legitimacy of representative democracy” (38), an entirely new set of tactics must be developed to ferment change in our plutocratic and oligarchic condition.

There is a lot here to unpack—and I will be doing that work over the next few posts. But, today, I just want to hone in on White’s commitment to revolution. “[R]evolution’s chief characteristic,” he tells us, is “the transfer of sovereignty and the establishment of a new legal regime” (60). But those two things are not the same at all. “Revolutionary activism,” he asserts, “is any attempt to make the illegal legal or the legal illegal” (60). I like that claim a lot. I have nothing at stake as to whether one instance of political activism is deemed revolutionary while another is not. Worrying about whether something is reformist or revolutionary does not interest me.

But I do think it very useful to focus in on this question of legality. Segregation was legal, was the law, in the Jim Crow South. The civil rights movement worked to change that. Domestic abuse was not specifically illegal, and was almost entirely deemed outside the law’s purview, until feminism changed laws and attitudes toward violence in the home. We know, of course, that reforming the law is only half the battle; cultural change—a change in attitudes—is also required to have fully successful social transformation. But pinpointing the legal change that is desired gives social movements a focused goal, a clear message, and a benchmark for progress, even for success.

Hypothesis #1: Where social movements do not have an unjust law to focus upon, they have much more trouble gaining traction.

The second point for today is to think about transfer of sovereignty. Only very fringe social movements in today’s US imagine overthrowing the government. So it is not clear to me what a “transfer of sovereignty” means in our context right now. It is absolutely true that power has been concentrated in the hands of the few—and that it strains credulity to call the US a functioning democracy at the present moment. But the concentration of power is very different than the legal apparatus of sovereignty. It does not appear that anyone is interested in undoing that legal apparatus. Instead, as White himself says, “activists may use one law to overturn another” (61). The prevailing strategy is to work through the legal means afforded by the system to alter, rewrite, or abolish the laws and practices that undermine our democracy, that keep it from truly representing the will of the people. (Let me get away with that solecism for the moment. White has a very bad tendency to believe in Rousseau’s “general will.” Let’s just note for the moment that, when it comes to gun control and the tax code, the legal and governmental status quo is demonstrably not in aligned with the view of the majority.)

But, and this is where I will end today and resume tomorrow, what if we no longer have any faith that the current legal and institutional system afford any possibility of reforming it back into the direction of making government responsive to the people? In other words, if we accept that we no live in an oligarchy, what alternatives do we have for fighting that reality. I fully agree with White that marches and petitions are not going to get the job done. They are ignored with impunity. So what should we be doing?