Tag: politics

John Rawls described society as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.” There is a value proposition underlying the formation of an organized community and submitting to its laws. While an individual loses freedom, they receive a wealth of opportunities to cooperate with others to secure more resources than any of them could secure alone. The freedom of the individual outside of community is a meager freedom that promises no security, but community allows a person to get everything they need for themselves by participating in formal and informal support networks. Given that people are generally born into their communities rather than forsake primal independence to join, the value proposition should be understood as framing what community does for people and what people do for community.

The value proposition also provides a motivation for obeying a community’s laws. Law makes up the fabric of society, defining the rights and duties of citizens to the community, and of the community to the citizens. Knowing those duties and knowing that they will be enforced by the collective power of the community defines a space in which cooperation can take place. All individuals involved can be secure in what the law promises, and they can form cooperative agreements within the framework of law.

The benefit of law only follows when all individuals in the community follow the law. Citizens then have motivation to obey the law and abide by the consequences when they do not. Even the most cynical perspective can recognize that the law provides more advantage than disadvantage. The value of predictability alone motivates a self-interested preference for obedience to the loss of security in a lawless society.

When the laws are arranged to systematically disadvantage a group, members of that group will not experience the same sense of protection as members of the privileged group. In such a case breaking the law has no connection with forfeiting security. One who already lacks that security must then evaluate upholding on the basis of expected gains agar mere avoidance of consequences.

In addition, one must always consider two paths: obtaining a benefit within the boundaries of the law or obtaining a benefit outside of those limits. If breaking the law offers a greater benefit or a benefit that one could not obtain through lawful means, breaking the law becomes a pragmatic option. Where obtaining a benefit lawfully is made impossible due to systematic disadvantage stemming from the arrangement or enforcement of the law, the motivation for individuals from disadvantaged groups to obey the law becomes thin.

Where privilege bounds economic success, the ability to secure basic needs will differ across advantaged and disadvantaged identity groups. Members of the advantaged group may look at their peers and elders and reasonably believe that they can secure their living by conforming to expectations. No degree of conformity and obedience protects a systemically disadvantaged group because their group identity alone is nonconforming. Gains can be erased when the advantaged group decide to raid what they perceive as undeserved rewards, as happened at Rosewood and other race riots.

In that light the consequences of property crime become equivocal across legal and illegal acquisition. In either case one’s gains might be taken at a later time. If the illegal path presents a shorter and more certain path than the alternative, property crime becomes a rational choice. Where past injustices disrupt generational wealth for disadvantaged groups, property crime may also serve as a means of reparations, a restoration of unjust takings.

In liberal democracies police officers work to apprehend perpetrators of petty theft or the drug trade while ignoring wage theft undertaken by managers against workers. Unwarranted taking is a criminal matter only when the working class takes from the owner class. Public money pays for police officers to apprehend shoplifters, and members of disadvantaged groups provide ready scapegoats. When the owner class steals from the working class, the only remedy lies in expensive civil courts, giving the owner class the advantage of wealth. Confronted with these asymmetries, members of disadvantaged groups do not enjoy the protection of the law at all. One loses no security by breaking the law if one is unable to rely on its protection.

You take a walk around your block and see a cloud of black smoke. When you find the source, you see flames licking the walls and roof of a house. A window is open on the second floor, and coils of cinder-flecked smoke writhe into the air. Someone is leaning out of the window and calling for help. They want to jump, but need someone to catch them.

No sirens or flashing lights appear to be approaching. The person pleads with you to stand under the window and just try to catch them. They tell you that the door to the room is too hot to touch. Shingles fall off the roof around the window.
What do you do? What should you do? Firefighters appear to be nowhere near. If they are not nearby, the person could pass out from the smoke, unable to jump to safety before the fire truck arrives. No one else is nearby, and all you have to do is stand under the window, break the person’s fall, and help them get away from the burning house.

If it is clear to you that helping the person is the right thing to do, you should be likewise ready to respond to calls for social justice, to investigate systemic bias, and to remedy injustice directly. In Buddhist philosophy the simile of the house of fire demonstrates the motive to help all people achieve liberation. Underlying the simile is an assumption that one is morally required to answer calls for aid, to put oneself at risk to save another in distress.

Social injustice has inflicted physical, psychological, and social damage in all societies. Class warfare is not an imagined future. The present day exploitation and destruction of working people and the world they inhabit is owner class warfare against the working class. Our world is burning, we are buried in debt and desperation, and we are divided and suspicious of one another. We need to heal, not ignore, the diversity of traumas wrought on us by capitalism, by the owner class, by the martial class. Escape for ourselves only is not enough. The house is on fire, and a lot of people need rescue.

If one supports a law or government policy, one can be presumed to support the associated consequences. It is not clear why one would desire a certain law to go into effect if they did not desire its consequences to follow. Expressing dissatisfaction with unexpected consequences could be consistent with support for a policy, as when one’s support wavers when once unexpected but undesirable effects come to light. Nevertheless, desire for expected outcomes can be readily inferred from desire for the policy that will cause them.

Capital punishment provides a straightforward example of support for both a law and its consequences. If one supports capital punishment, one then supports the resulting deaths. One may believe that those people justly convicted and sentenced deserve to die, or one may believe that the ultimate consequence is an acceptable cost for deterring others from crime. Without such an attitude toward death, one’s support for capital punishment would be incoherent. While it would be consistent for a supporter of capital punishment to desire that no one is mistakenly executed, they have nevertheless found desirable the execution of at least some people.

When considering rectification of historic social injustice, a person who supports only gradual change must also support the consequences of sustaining injustice. If a person believes social injustice is wrong and should be corrected but not immediately, they have implicitly accepted the resulting limitations on the life and well-being of the the disadvantaged group. Arguing for gradual change or maintaining a status quo of injustice implicitly argues that the oppressed accept the limitations on their health, wealth, and well-being in order not to discomfort the privileged.

Requiring gradual change to rectify social injustice places an unequal value on the lives of the disadvantaged and the privileged. Members of disadvantaged groups face shorter lifespans due to bias in healthcare, hiring, and education. If a welfare program’s food assistance does not allow for a family to buy fresh fruits and vegetables, or not enough of any food, people who rely on that program will suffer the effects of hunger. When the disruption of generational wealth places most of a population at an economic disadvantage, members of that group will more often suffer the effects of hunger. As long as the structure of social institutions maintains this situation, human lives will be shorter and more painful. Webs of disadvantage like this one render social institutions as a whole prejudiced against disadvantaged groups.

If one understands that support for a law entails support for its known consequences, one must also recognize a shared culpability when those consequences manifest. When members of a privileged group reject the discomfort of negotiating new boundaries or receiving less undeserved deference, they express a disregard for human life. They bear moral responsibility for the lives lost to that disregard. Instead, members of privileged groups should study the dynamics of injustice in their society, forsake their privilege at every opportunity, and demand immediate rectification. Asking people to wait means asking them to die.

In order to mobilize the working class against itself, the owner class offers significant privileges for workers who agree to enforce owner class interests. Police forces, military personnel, and other security forces bring order to society by enforcing a law crafted by the owner class. Workers in these professions compose a martial class, a identity group clustered around the essential function they serve in society. Their fellow workers are often the targets of enforcement because the law regulates the behavior of workers more extensively than the behavior of the owner class. In particular, the owner class employs these forces when the working class organizes to advance their class interests.

The legal system pits the martial class against the working class by focusing efforts on crimes committed by the working class and ignoring crimes committed by the owner class. The disparity becomes evident when comparing the relative impact of property theft as opposed to wage theft. The owner class deprives the working class of far more money in wages than property stolen, but wage theft is not the focus of any police activity.

Since the martial class often stands between the owner class and the working class during moments of class struggle, the martial class bears the brunt of actions often directed toward the owner class. The owner class exploits the martial class by using them as a bulwark against collective action of workers. While the martial class enjoys additional privilege associated with their work, they risk their health and standing in the community by serving their occupation. The intra-class divide deepens as the martial class forms a distinct identity that supersedes other identities or communities, directly pitting members of the martial class against their communities.

Nevertheless, the martial class must be judged as class traitors when they blame the working class, not the owner class, for the risks associated with their occupation. When the working class rallies to end exploitation, the martial class works to end the demonstration and discourage further action. They ensure that the owner class can ignore the demonstration while the martial class forces the workers to abandon the struggle. Despite sharing in oppression by the owner class, the martial class silences their fellow workers so that the owner class can continue growing wealthy through exploitation.

Since the mission of the martial class is framed as enforcing the law, the martial class identify as protectors of society as a whole. The owner class maintains some working class support for the martial class by promoting this protector narrative. However, the laws governing property and criminal behavior are arranged to benefit the owner class, so the martial class advances their interests by enforcing those laws. Where the members of the martial class accept this narrative, they commit to seeing the rest of the working class as threats to the stability of society and therefore just targets of violence.

Framing the mission of the martial class as a sacred duty to society motivates extreme responses to defiance of the law. As protectors of society the martial class frames themselves as a public service and bulwark against disorder. In this framing extreme measures to punish criminals or suppress organized demonstrations are justified in the same way that one would justify self-defense or defending one’s community from outside invaders. Supportive members of the working class, especially professionals already aligned with the owner class, ignore the martial class’s violence because they take it as an assurance that their interests will be protected just as fiercely even though this is rarely the case.

With the worker class divided among professionals, martial occupations, and privileged identity groups, the owner class has many potential allies against the remaining workers. Professionals empower the owner class through soft power, political, social, and artistic support for nationalist capitalism. The martial class directly supports the owner class by providing hard power in the form of security and suppression of dissent. A worker who begins to understand their position must also confront a fragmented social environment where many natural allies have already been suborned. Effective resistance requires building alliances among others who recognize their situation due to critical reflection or experience with systematic disadvantage. The power of the working class will remain limited unless we can overcome divides that uphold the power of the owner class.

In the interest of harmony, an individual should cultivate tolerance of beliefs different from their own. While one may go beyond tolerance to cultivate curiosity or appreciation, the virtue of tolerance serves as the minimal moral demand. However, tolerance alone does not provide any framework for resolving conflicts between belief systems. When a belief cannot live and let live with another belief, tolerance alone does not tell us what to do.

In his later work on justice, John Rawls stresses that a liberal society must ultimately maintain a pluralist stance about good and acceptable beliefs. Individuals must be free to define and pursue good as they understand it as long as they can do so without causing harm to others. A pluralist must be tolerant, but pluralism also provides a standard for resolving conflicts of tolerance.

A pluralist society cannot support beliefs that do not themselves admit pluralism. Otherwise, one highly intolerant belief system can drive out all other beliefs, and pluralism collapses into monism. Karl Popper refers to this dynamic as the Paradox of Tolerance. Intolerant beliefs exceed the bounds of tolerance because they cannot coexist with other beliefs. While Popper’s Paradox has intuitive appeal, the normative proposition does not follow from the definition of tolerance alone. An additional value is needed to supply the moral judgment that Popper’s paradox endorses.

Pluralism locates tolerance in a framework for judgments about the bounds of acceptable beliefs. Where two beliefs are in conflict, pluralism requires adherents to practice tolerance for one another. A pluralist community should generally discourage overly rigid belief systems that render tolerance impossible. Where such beliefs arise organically, a society must resist accommodating them in order to preserve pluralism. Otherwise intolerant beliefs will drive more tolerant beliefs to the margins, and pluralism will collapse.

Dividing workers against one another prevents formation of class consciousness and collective action against the owner class. Racism and sexism provide obvious examples, aligning white men against what should be their fellows, black workers and women workers. Police and military forces compose a martial class that defends the wealthy’s class interest from the rest of the working class, dividing them from and pitting them against the “civilian” population.

Class consciousness arises from recognizing the alignment of one’s own needs with the needs of others in the same economic situation. Where one worker sees that their colleague suffers the same exploitation they do, and both wish it to end, they can build trust and cooperate with one another against the owner class that exploits them. The owner class also recognizes their shared interest in continuing to exploit workers, so they cooperate with one another to undermine collective action.

Class consciousness can be undermined by disrupting the perception of shared interest. Highlighting non-class identity traits invites workers to align with their identity group above their class. Where the owner class privileges one identity group, workers who identify with that group see their interests more closely aligned with their identity group rather than their colleagues. As a result, the owner class need to contend only with a subset of the working class, and they can mobilize the support of privileged identity workers in the struggle.

While whiteness and maleness continue to serve this divisive function for the owning class, the introduction of professionalism has also done widespread damage to class consciousness. Workers in “professional” careers enjoy high wages and flexibility in their work environment, making such careers highly desirable among workers. Entry into a professional career usually requires tertiary education, limiting the pool of qualified workers. Social inequalities expands access to higher education for members of the privileged group, so race and gender disparities influence the composition of the professional class.

Tertiary education serves as a shared experience between the owner class and the most privileged members of the working class. Many social signifiers students learn in order to enter a professional career are also signifiers of the owner class. In their eventual jobs, professional workers engage in status games similar to those played by the owning class, notably conspicuous consumption and the pursuit of positional goods. When a professional considers the experience of the working class, they may find that experience much different from their own due to their income and working conditions. Professionals may reasonably question whether they belong to the working class or instead to some middle class that stands between the two.

Nevertheless, professional and non-professional workers alike experience exploitation by the owning class. While professionals enjoy an elevated status due to their income and social signifiers, their household wealth remains a fraction of that held by the owning class who employ them. Professional workers generally hold their jobs in order to support themselves and their household because they lack sufficient wealth to do otherwise. Owner class employers claim property rights in all of the creative labor produced by their professional employees, alienating them from the products of their labor. Professional workers usually draw salaries rather than hourly wage, so their employers can demand variable amounts of time from them, alienating them from their family and community.

The owner class also exploits the professional class by making them complicit in the exploitation of non-professionals. Given unbounded demands on their time, professional workers have an incentive to leverage their earnings to pay for time-saving services usually provided by non-professionals. When the owner class creates an opportunity to extract work from non-professionals, professional workers provide the demand for services and become the primary customers. A non-professional then expends their effort and time on the needs of a professional for the profit of an owner rather than serving their own analogous needs. The professional as customer directly engages with the non-professional who must then treat their customer as if they belonged to the owner class, alienating them from one another. As a result, the professional stands in a similar relationship to the non-professional as the owner does, reinforcing the professional’s perceived alignment with the owner class.

By focusing on wealth disparities, professionals can see themselves in the same frame as the rest of the working class. When the class signifiers and delegated oppression are removed, the professional worker finds themselves more similar to non-professional workers than to their owner class employer. Their lives are just as contingent on the whims of the owner class. They have similar ability to influence their working conditions and terms of employment, weak as individuals but strong as a collective.

The owning class creates the illusion of a “professional” middle class to disrupt class consciousness among workers of the most and least privileged classes, limiting their ability to act collectively. Professionals must resist acting as delegates in oppression and reflect on their shared motivation with the rest of the working class. Otherwise, the oppression of both classes will continue.

Abstract political theory creates frameworks without reference to material conditions or historical events. Like many Enlightenment philosophers, John Locke approached property acquisition as an ideal thought experiment. The ahistorical perspective allows a theorist to ignore the history of unjust acquisition. Instead, a Lockean philosopher can defend situational injustice by showing alignment with the ideal theory. Locke himself argues that ownership claims arise from the investment of labor, so one must work to own property and profit by it. Anyone lacking property must have not done the work and should invest their effort if they want to improve their situation. With this framework a Lockean does not need to address past injustices that prevented equal opportunity for acquisition.

Acquisition of private property needed justifications during Locke’s time as traditional commons arrangements transitioned into private ownership. Locke’s theory justifies the enclosure of common lands because private ownership improves the land over its natural state, and anyone else could do the same by enclosing a different parcel. In practice, there are distinct class differences in who was entitled to enclose the commons and who would be forced to abide by those enclosures. New property claims dissolved traditional usage rights, removing claim to the land from the very people who worked it. While these seizures should be condemned in Locke’s theory, an abstract political theory conceals these injustices. The framework projects from an idealized original state to the current situation. The placement of the present moment becomes a rhetorical act intended to connect “now” with the idealized “state of nature” and disregard the permutations in between.

Supporters of regressive political economies benefit from convincing the working class that all positions in society have been earned fairly. The poor deserve poverty, not aid, and the wealthy are owed influence, not stewardship. Scholars are never entirely isolated from political interest, as evidenced by privately funded research originated solely to vindicate a politically important narrative. If the community of scholars widely endorses a perspective that aligns with politically interested narratives, we have reason to challenge it with historically grounded scholarship. Abstraction cannot absolve moral wrongs against actual people.

In a coercive social order, the government exercises state power to ensure compliance with the decisions of a few individuals who govern everyone else. A government the exercises state power only in accordance with the community consensus could be described as a cooperative social order. A Pyramidal government will often employ coercion, and a Horizontal government will often require consensus building to facilitate cooperation. Insofar as coercion can be employed to build consensus, and cooperation between the elite and a subset of the working class can support a hierarchy, these two social orders can be distinguished from the Pyramid and the Horizon.

Defenders of coercive social order have many examples to demonstrate feasibility. Cooperative social orders historically exist only temporarily and at small scales. As such, advocates for cooperative authority must demonstrate that they propose something feasible as well as desirable. In the absence of longstanding empires built on cooperative arrangements alone, the advocate for cooperative social order remains at a disadvantage.

A forensic analysis of failed cooperative social order reveals a few themes. After an initial period of easy consensus, the community finds it more and more difficult to address needs without imposing some hierarchy. Clashes around those nominated to the hierarchy and their handling of the situation then erode the ability to form consensus, and the community fails. Alternatively, the community adapts to hierarchy and practices more coercion to maintain itself.

Both trajectories might be framed as failures of cooperative social order, and one might infer that coercion must be a feature of any functioning society. However, the historical prevalence of coercive social order provides an additional dimension to the account. Any cooperative social order brought into existence must cope with coercive social orders already established. A successful cooperative community attracts individuals seeking refuge from coercive societies and invites individuals to resist coercive societies through collective action. The rulers of a coercive society then have an interest in the failure of cooperative ventures in order to discourage challenges to their power. Since no community can maintain itself against constant attack, the cooperative eventually succumbs to economic or political pressures applied by its neighbors.

Coercive social orders enjoy a substantial natural advantage. By definition a coercive government needs to build consensus across a smaller number of individuals. Rulers agree on law and policy, police and military segments agree to obey the rulers and enforce compliance on the rest of the population.

A cooperative social order must obtain a wider consensus or else resort to coercion. Even in a small community, obtaining agreement will consume more time and effort than the unilateral action of a single individual. Larger communities or networks of communities take on additional coordination burdens to make and implement large scale decisions. By every measure, a cooperative social order is less efficient than a coercive social order.

The natural advantage makes coercive social order attractive, but it should not obscure the human cost. A coercive society engages in a form of warfare with its own citizens. Enforced compliance enables rulers to organize society around their interests and appease only enough broader interest to maintain the support of the martial class. The support of the martial class then carries out violence to ensure compliance of remaining population, dividing the society within itself. An honest critique of coercive social order must focus on the morality of enforced conformity and systemic oppression. A focus on efficiency serves only to obscure the moral cost of a coercive social order.

English-speaking political theorists identify John Rawls as among the most important political philosophers of the 20th century. Rawls developed a rational theory of justice in liberal democracy using a thought experiment inspired by social contract theory. He imagines organizing a state where none of the organizers know their position in the society they create. Assuming the organizers are rationally self-interested, Rawls claims that they would establish two principles of justice. The Equality Principle states that rights and freedoms should be as extensive as possible while being distributed to all citizens equally. The Difference Principles states that social and economic inequalities should be evaluated by their benefit to the least advantaged, and competition for prestige positions should be fair and open to all.

From the examples he employs, Rawls imagines that the United States political economy reflects the principles of justice. The Bill of Rights defines an equally distributed system of rights and freedoms, political positions are won in open and fair elections, and capitalism allows anyone to earn economic success on the free market. Rawls argues that the competition inherent in republicanism and capitalism ensures beneficial outcomes regulated by free choice of the citizens.

Like John Stuart Mill, Rawls overestimates the benefits of republican capitalism. Economic inequality is maintained by concentrating wealth, effectively transferring it from the working class to the wealthy. The worst-off individuals are both the most vulnerable and the most exploited. Their liberty is limited by their lack of wealth. Comparing American capitalism to the Nordic model or social market economies of Europe, the poorest benefit from increased regulation on the market and constraints on economic advantage influencing electoral politics.

Rawls published Theory of Justice in 1971. To frame the United States as conforming to the Difference Principle in the shadow of the civil rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr requires overlooking substantial injustices. Charitably, Rawls may have acknowledged the shortcomings in American political economy, but his emphasis on competition shows substantial sympathy with capitalist justifications of the market. The Difference Principle requires one to evaluate inequalities based on how the losers in the competition fare, so Rawlsian argments should be marshalled to support social justice and a welfare state.

Fortunately, Rawls’s positive assessment of capitalism can stand apart from the Difference Principle. The Difference Principle does not assert that there should be inequalities; it merely sets the conditions for inequalities to be just. While Rawls composed his theory of justice for liberal democracy, he succeeds in framing a notion sufficiently general that it applies to political organization generally. Recuperating the work of Rawls and Mill from their commitment to liberal democratic capitalism enables anarchist and socialist arguments to be framed in the language of academic political theory.

Pyramidal distributions of power guarantee social and economic injustice. To maintain sufficient support from the working class, the aristocrats will establish affinities between themselves and the working class. These affinities create the illusion of shared incentives, enabling the aristocrats to recruit for and justify the actions of the military and police that enforce state power. Identification with the aristocratic affinities divides the working class against itself, limiting its ability to act collectively. Horizontal distributions of power prevent the rise of aristocrats and therefore the motivation for stoking division.

The history of class exploitation, colonialism, and racial oppression demonstrates the theory. Medieval Christian lords pointed to shared religion as their source of authority, enabling exploitation of Jewish people and warfare against Muslim empires. British colonizers fomented rivalries in Africa to cultivate economic relationships and eliminate competition. With the unifying identity of “whiteness,” some Americans abuse people of color as a means of sharing in the superiority of the elite who exploit all of them.

When aristocrats promulgate affinities, they create a hierarchy of moral status. The preferred group, always significantly overlapping with the aristocracy, enjoys the full status of moral personhood. They have legally recognized rights and freedoms largely defended by the authority of the state. As one deviates from signifiers of the preferred group, one loses moral status. Legally recognized rights are not defended by the state and may be retracted, enabling any economic success to be plundered by the preferred affinity or the state itself. Public policy defines ways to control and contain marginalized groups, denying them agency. While the preferred affinity group, especially the aristocrats, may enjoy prosperity, the marginalized groups never enjoy the equivalent security.

Social and economic disparity raise significant obstacles to the cultivation of agency. Compounded traumas of poverty, incarceration, and illness impose significant economic, social, and personal costs. Some options may be significantly more costly for a member of a marginalized group, and some may be entirely unavailable. Anything they build remains vulnerable to the preferred affinity group’s plunder. While some individuals can overcome structural disadvantage, those who fail represent a failure of society to uphold the moral obligation toward them. By inhibiting and denouncing the agency of marginalized group members, the aristocrats who organize society become culpable for that immorality.

Since horizontal distributions of power remove any incentive to align affinity groups with social value, these specific harms to agency cannot arise. Self-governing communities could embrace promulgation of affinity groups to strengthen inter-community networks and facilitate research into history and migration. In that context affinity collapses into a curiosity or historical accident rather than a signifier of moral status. Without the horizon, aristocrats weaponize affinity to establish and maintain the hierarchy that benefits them at the expense of everyone else. As such, only horizontal distribution of power enables a moral forms of governance. All governance under a pyramid at best has immoral features.