June 30, 2010
China-Fetishism and the Usefulness of History
Via Dave Semple, I’m alerted to a recent bit of China-fetishism at the Socialist Unity blog. Actually, by the standards of China-adoration this piece isn’t particularly egregious. On the face of things you’d do well to distinguish this from a China People’s Daily article. Except that Chinese propaganda tends to shy away from explicit statements about the means of economic organisation, insofar as that might suggest there are working alternative systems.
It can seem mystifying that self-identified (hard) leftists turn to China as a laudable example of counter-capitalism. Because it’s astonishingly obvious that China’s massive economic development of the past 20 years has not been achieved via anything like communism or the collectivisation of the means of production.
Rather, it’s been achieved by the CCP deciding to allow a form of capitalist activity to take place within fairly controlled sections of the economy, where the state remains a key player with (part-)ownership of industries whilst a new class of western-style entrepreneurs and businessmen have been allowed to emulate (in particular) Anglophone capitalist practices.
The means of production have not been collectivised (or rather they were collectivised and that resulted in famines and a peasant-level economy), and the means of production are not in the hands of the proletariat. On the contrary, the enormous proletariat subsists with no labour rights, no rights to free speech, no rights to free press or association and no right to choose – or remove – the country’s leaders. As well as myriad human rights abuses, this also ensures no proper political accountability, allowing for the possibility of disasters such as this. Even the capitalist class walks on eggshells: a multi-billionaire today, but piss-off the wrong CCP official and your property can be seized in an instant tomorrow, appropriated by a state upholding no meaningful contract law or property rights.
China-fetishists usually reply that Chinese economic development has lifted millions out of poverty (which it has). But this is usually used as a fig-leaf to ignore the CCP’s systematic rights abuses such as forcibly relocating entire villages to provide cheap labour for new economic projects, or razing entire cities to the ground to facilitate 5-year plans regardless of who happens to be living there. And given that – as above – poverty reduction is not the result of socialism but of a hybrid of extreme American-style capitalism in the economy combined with top-down Stalinist authoritarianism in politics and society, it’s difficult to see how the “but there are fewer poor Chinese now” reply can be used as a socialist/Marxist defence. Oh, and it’s also inconsistent: western capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty, so if that’s the mark of a desirable economic-political system why fetishise China in particular?
What we’re seeing on the modern far left, of course, is the time-tested practice of ignoring inconvenient facts in order to adhere rigidly to a political ideology – namely some variant of Marxism – that is predicated upon condemning Western capitalism as the worst form of socio-political arrangement. Quite logically (at least, within the paradigm), “better” alternatives are sought out in existing world regimes…ironically going against the work of Marx himself, who argued that communism would develop (gradually or via revolution) out of mature capitalist regimes.
Such ignoring or inconvenient facts by the chaps at Socialist Unity – or for that matter Ken Livingstone, his former adviser John Ross, or pop economist Philippe Legrain – is in this day and age of no particular importance beyond intellectual frustration. But in other times and places the adherence to ideology over inconvenient fact has had altogether more sinister outcomes.
Being on the wrong side of such ideologists in the Russia of 1922, the Catalonia of 1937-8, or the Czechoslovakia of 1948 (to pick three examples from hundreds) would be as good as a death sentence. The 20th Century stands as a marked warning to the dangers of ideology unfettered by fact, and the terrible things this can induce individual human beings – of left and right – to do. As Anthony Beevor puts it at the end of his history of the Spanish Civil War:
“Ideological and religious invocations deliberately tried to make the violence abstarct. There was said to have been a sweet-natured youth among Moscardo’s defenders at Toledo, who was called the Angel of the Acazar because before firing his rifle he used to cry, ‘Kill without hate!’ This depersonalisation existed on the republican side as well. David Antona, a CNT leader, said that ‘the bullets which ended the lives of the officers at the Montana barracks did not kill men, they killed a whole social system’. People were encouraged to submerge their identity and individual responsibility into causes with either mystical or superhuman auras…It was this dehumanization of the enemy which made the war so terrible, along, of course, with the modern weapons and the tactics of terror aimed against civilian populations.”
The economic, social and political failures of 20th Century communist systems were enormous (whatever the real, but ultimately far lesser, faults of capitalism). The persistent refusal to acknowledged this – and to act towards China as Soviet apologists did towards Russia 70 years ago – rather implies that contemporary China apologists should be taken outside, lined up against the wall…and forced to read some bloody histoy.
Pun intended.
June 29, 2010
Jeremy Hunt: The Importance of Class in Politics?
Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, recently revealed his vast ignorance of British footballing history whilst managing to insult thousands:
“[A]s a Minister I was incredibly encouraged by the example set by the England fans, I mean not a single arrest for a football related offensive and the terrible problems that we had in Heysel and Hillsborough in the 1980s seem now to be behind us and I think, you know, there is small grounds for encouragement there even though obviously we are very disappointed about the result.”
Anybody with even a basic knowledge of English football will know that what happened at Hillsborough had absolutely nothing to do with hooliganism. They will know that the disaster – which left 96 Liverpool fans dead – was the result of poor crowd management, as confirmed by the 1990 Taylor Report (PDF). Suspicions, however, have long lingered about the role of the police and its account of events following the disaster.
Hunt’s comments cannot be easily dismissed as a “slip of the tongue”. The controversy surrounding Hillsborough ensures that nobody with even a basic understanding of the disaster could now make the mistake of blaming hooliganism. That the Secretary of State is apparently more influenced by the outrageous lies of the Sun Newspaper than with what actually happened calls into question his competence to be a minister for sport. That Hunt was shadow secretary for the same office during last year’s 20th anniversary Hillsborough memorial services is an even greater indictment of his callous ignorance.
But could there be something more going on? Economists and psychologists frequently employ the concept of cognitive bias. It’s worth asking whether any are at work here. I can think of 3 possibilities:
1. Not only is Hunt ignorant about the history of English football, but he is predisposed to think of football as a yob sport where trouble is usually caused by yobs. Given that 44-year-old Hunt would have become socially aware in the 1970s and 80s (when English hooliganism was rife), this explanation is very plausible.
2. Hunt, as a conservative, is predisposed to trust figures of institutions and authority over the masses in need of control. This means he is more likely to assume that fault lay with yob crowds than with police authorities.
3. Hunt is extremely privileged and has grown up and worked amongst similarly privileged people, likely to have low interest in football and low interest in a disaster that affected working class Liverpool fans. Accordingly, he’s never been in a social situation whereby 1. and 2. above could be adjusted, or his ignorance about Hillsborough corrected.
Number 3 will, of course, set the cat amongst the pigeons. But I suspect there’s something to it. Having grown up lower-middle class and attended a normal state comprehensive with lots of working class kids, it is unimaginable to me that someone could not know the truth about Hillsborough. Yes, I grew up on Merseyside. But in Southport there were as many Manchester United as Liverpool fans. And for crying out loud, by Mum knows what happened at Hillsborough and she’s French and doesn’t like football.
Of course, we musn’t be deterministic. Plenty of people have privileged backgrounds and manage to care about those less fortunate than they. Harriet Harman, for all her faults, stands as a good example. Equally, sometimes people from working class backgrounds can’t wait to join the elites and dump on those they’ve left behind. Hello David Davis, hello Norman Tebbit.
And believe me, I know how irritating it can be to have your (perceived) class background used against you. Just ask Captain Swing. But all that having been said, does Jeremy Hunt offer proof of what I and many others were saying about Double Dip Dave and Boy George before the election? That class matters; that being a millionaire Bullingdon Boy will affect the way politicians see – and attempt to influence – the world around them.
June 28, 2010
Ostriches of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the causes you claim you want to fight for!
I don’t know very much about climate science. However, I know a few basics based on what is said by accredited experts. For example, that burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide and other gases that form a layer in the earth’s atmosphere that traps heat, causing the planet to warm, the global climate to become more volatile, thus potentially putting life as we know it at risk.
Within that framework there is much room for debate. About how, and how quickly, C02 emissions need to be reduced. About how dynamic the planet’s climate is at adapting itself. About the appropriate short-term costs (especially to developing nations) of bringing climate change under control. Reasonable people may disagree about such things. But beneath that, I accept climate change is real.
Similarly, I don’t know all that much about economics (although I did study some economics at university my working knowledge is fairly limited). But I understand that following the financial crisis of 2008 the British economy went into recession. Because of various factors – including especially a big jump in unemployment that saw tax receipts fall but government outgoings rise dramatically – Britain is now in a situation where the deficit – the difference between outgoings and income – is especially wide. Firstly this means that Britain makes huge interest payments simply on the debt that it must incur to keep financing its outgoings, money would be better spent elsewhere. Secondly there is a medium-to-long term risk of international financial markets reacting adversely towards British government lending if the deficit is not brought under control, and Britain looks like it may be unable to fulfil its debt obligations.
Accordingly, outgoings need to be reduced, income needs to be increased, or some mix of both. Given the scale of the present deficit, at least some of the solution will have to lie in spending cuts by government. Of course, this is not the only option: tax rises can be pursued too. Therefore reasonable people may disagree, for example, about the balance between cuts and taxes. Furthermore because cutting too deep and too hard can induce economic recession, reasonable people can (and should) challenge the speed and severity of the cuts package announced last Tuesday by George Osborne.
Yet in both cases – climate change and economic cuts – there are camps who stubbornly refuse to engage within the terrain of reasonable argument. We’re all familiar with the loony right, which simply denies that climate change is even happening. The sorts of people who with no climate science qualifications dismiss the findings of experts, and decry the international conspiracy which they, through their special powers, can see through and expose.
Increasingly however these right-wing ostriches are finding counterparts on the left: those who simply deny economic reality and insist that no cuts at all are necessary, dismissing fiscal austerity as simply a right-wing conspiracy to slash the state (as oppose to the Tories not letting a good deficit-reduction package go to waste, which is a more reasonable view of events).
Plenty of these people were present at Saturday’s blog nation conference, insisting that the correct strategy to resist Tory cuts is to simply insist that “cuts aren’t necessary”. Somewhat missing the blindingly obvious point that this government thinks they are, so a better bet would be to pick which specific cuts to fight, accepting others as tactical but necessary losses.
Now not everybody on the left denying the need for cuts is simply sticking their fingers in their ears and claiming to be above the “conspiracy” of economic fact. To his credit, Paul at TCF has been taking the time to get to grips with an alternative economic model that argues cuts can be avoided on the basis that sovereign nations are unique forms of economic actors. I commend him for trying to find a working economic model, rather than just shouting “cuts aren’t necessary!” with the expertise of the average ostrich. But two points I urge him to consider: 1) this is surely a case of picking the model because it gives you the answers you want, rather than because the model is right, and 2) even if the model is right, the present government isn’t using it and the same goes for the vast majority of others. Which means you will have to explain why we should switch to it. But look how long and complicated your blog post it. In politics, if you’re explaining you’re losing. And if you’re explaining at that length in that detail (without accredited economics qualifications that enable you to argue from authority, however unfairly) you’re dead in the water.
A far better strategy for the left is to accept that cuts have to be made, and get on with deciding what to try to protect. We cannot protect everything, so let’s choose causes to fight for. These fall into broadly two camps. Firstly, the unseen, unheard, disenfranchised and therefore extremely vulnerable. Cuts in this camp will include: services for the mentally ill, pensioners living alone in poverty, single women and women who are victims of sexual and physical violence. These groups are low-visibility, poorly connected politically, and are ease to cut services from because they don’t (and can’t) organise effectively to defend themselves
Secondly are big campaigns with high visibility that have organisational power behind them and can effectively resist central government plans…but may not primarily defend the interests of the most vulnerable. Hear, think anything with strong union backing, representation and organisation.
The choice on the left must be about which battles we choose to fight. Do we prioritize the defence of the vulnerable and marginalised, or the issues that (what’s left of) trade union power has a good chance of winning on?
But we must choose, because trying to fight every battle is a good way of losing them all
June 25, 2010
Network Rail and the Illusions of Property
It is a basic truth – though one hated and resisted by libertarians – that all property is ultimately dependent on the state. This is because without the coercive power of the state to defend and uphold the private property of individuals (or for that matter, corporations) no property could be meaningfully secured from seizure by others.
Connectedly, any economic system based on the holding of property is ultimately a function of whatever the state deems to be permissible. Because the state is the ultimate enforcer of property rights, and of legal contract, the specific economic system permitted within any given state is exactly that: permitted. In modern western democracies like Britain we have opted for an economic system which gives great privilege to individual property rights (of persons and corporations), protects and enforces contracts, and has developed to favour a broadly free-market system for the allocation of resources.
Of course it wasn’t always thus. The transition in Western Europe from medieval feudalism, through variations of mercantilism, onto something like free-market capitalism by 1800 was a long and complex one. America’s unique history complicates things further. And until recently many parts of the world did not license extensive private property and contract rights or grant precedence to the market, and instead assigned monolithic state bureaucracies the task of allocating resources. Indeed this still goes on in a (very) few places, like North Korea and (in different ways) Cuba.
But overall the lesson of history is that capitalist free-markets (for all their myriad faults) tend to work much better in terms of allocating resources and respecting individual freedoms than alternative systems
However, over roughly the last 30 years western capitalist democracies like Britain and America have increasingly moved towards further dependence upon free-market structures, and a further emphasis on the role of private enterprise (built on a foundation of private property), as oppose to state provision. This emphasised role for free markets is usually what is referred to (with frustrating wooliness and usually implying disapprobation) as “neo-liberalism”.
It’s worth noting that a particular feature of successful capitalist systems, that give pride of place to individual property rights and free-market transactions, will likely be – and in our case, has been – a legal structure that puts considerable and extensive measures in place to slow down and curtail the ways in which particular powers and agents of the state may interfere with these rights and transactions. However, this is ultimately done by the state itself; a sort of self-denying ordinance designed to enshrine and especially privilege private rights and transactions, upon the belief that society and economy turn out best this way.
An upshot of this is that such rights and transactions start to take on the appearance of being somehow prior to the state, or of standing outside of its remit in some innate or essential sense.* Thus, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that such economic arrangements are allowed, and guaranteed, by the state. Furthermore, in a democratic state those arrangements can ultimately be changed by approved democratic process. i.e. by governments with democratic mandate.
However, with the advent of “neo-liberalism”, this point has increasingly been lost upon many, particularly politicians and especially those currently ascendent in the Liberal Democrat party.
Which brings us to the case of Network Rail and the £2.4million in bonuses. Here we have a startling illustration of some of the above points. Although Network Rail is nominally a private company, it has no share holders and is propped-up by state finance. In other words, the most blatant case of state-guaranteed property rights imaginable. So when Network Rail bosses award themselves egregious sums in bonuses, it should be straightforward for the Government – as the agent of the state – to step in and say “no that’s not happening”.
Except what actually occurred was that Philip Hammond sent a letter asking the bosses of aforementioned state-guaranteed company to “show restraint”. Which they duly ignored, giving two fingers to the taxpayer.
A core problem here is a prevailing mentality in contemporary politics: that private enterprises are sacrosanct independent entities, rather than existing merely by privilege of the state. This confused belief allows Network Rail to proceed as it has. It also underpins a situation in which the British state backs newly-merged megabanks at a cost of billions, yet which are allowed to make record private profits, pay-out bonuses (even if these are subjected to one-off tax) and still not lend to those who need it, for the good of economic recovery. All without any market risk – the motor and improver of capitalist competition – due to tax-payer guarantee.
Politicians and so-called “men of action” are often scornful of the activities of philosophers. But Britain’s current crop would do well to become acquainted with one of the great masters of the art. Thomas Hobbes could teach Philip Hammond a thing or two:
“[A]nnexed to the Soveraigntie, [is] the whole power of prescribing the Rules, whereby every man may know, what Goods he may enjoy, and what Actions he may doe, without being molested by any of his fellow Subjects: And this is it men call Propriety. For before constitution of Soveraign Power (as hath already been shewn) all men had right to all things; which necessarily causeth Warre: and therefore this Proprietie, being necessary to Peace, and depending on Soveraign Power, is the Act of that Power, in order to the publique peace. These Rules of Propriety (or Meum and Tuum) and of Good, Evill, Lawfull, and Unlawfull in the actions of Subjects, are the Civill Lawes; that is to say, the Lawes of each Common-wealth in particular.” (Leviathan Ch.XVIII)
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* Note: Even if it were true that individuals somehow have “innate property rights”, they would still depend upon the coercive power of the state to give those rights meaning, or else be left at the mercy of the stronger.
June 24, 2010
Please Give
Yesterday afternoon brought good news for England fans after the 1-0 win over Slovenia. The evening, however, was a bit of a dampner as it turns out we’ll be facing Germany next. FYI, one of the USA, Ghana, Uruguay and South Korea will definitely be in the semi-finals. That’s what not topping the group meant.
But I want to draw attention to something far more serious. Few may know this, but during the 2006 World Cup incidences of domestic violence increased by 30% in the UK. The combination of alcohol, sport and especially an England defeat bode particularly ill for the thousands of British women trapped in abusive relationships, which often include sexual violence and where abuse frequently rebounds onto children.
Furthermore, services established to support women – or get them out of such relationships – are often woefully underfunded.
The Boris Keep Your Promise campaign has highlighted the deception of Boris Johnson, who pledged to increase funding for London’s rape crisis centres but instead did the opposite, ensuring that London’s one rape crisis centre is under threat of closure.
Last month the BBC reported that in Scotland 3,000 women are turned away from refuges each year because of a lack of funds. With public spending cuts about to go into over-drive, women’s support services may be amongst some of the worst hit.
What I’d like to ask everyone to do today is to donate to the charity Refuge, who do outstanding work to support and safeguard abused women in Britain. The donation form is here. Please give what you can.
June 23, 2010
What ye reap, so shall ye sow
Crude Marxists see politics as a mere function of the economic superstructure. Crude libertarians see political activity as essentially reducible to the modes of economic behaviour. Crude theorists (as well as non-theorists) of other stripes often posit “power” as being the essential determinant of everything. Often, however, power is understood either in overly-narrow terms as the ability to coerce by physical force (thus making the thesis false) or in overly-wide terms as whatever is/was able to succeed (making the thesis uninformative, because everything thereby becomes “power”).
By contrast, I urge the increased recognition of words, concepts and ideas as vital to political struggle and outcome. Often this is parsed in terms of “legitimacy”. If an activity is rendered sufficiently “illegitimate” in a given society, people will refrain from undertaking such activities of their own accord and before incurring the displeasure and condemnation such activity attracts. Thus, whereas 40 years ago discriminating on grounds of gender or sexuality was considered the norm, nowadays many (though sadly not all) would never consider undertaking (say) employment discrimination on these grounds. And it’s not just because the law has changed; it’s because social attitudes about what’s acceptable and right have changed too. (The relationship between laws and attitudes being a dynamic and complicated one. BP is currently hurting from a major crisis of legitimacy – legal changes to offshore drilling practices may in turn reflect this crisis, showing that social expectations are not simple functions of legislation any more than they are of economic structures).
In politics, the side that is best able to shape the direction of discussion on particular issues, and control that discussion, is often most likely to win.
Let’s digress with a quick example from history. Following the nationalist rebellion of Spanish generals against the democratically elected Republic in 1936, a propaganda war ensued between two sides desperate to attract foreign aid and recognition. The nationalist rebels claimed they were resisting the tide of communist barbarism set to crush western civilization, in turn alleging that millions of soviet troops were in Spain. The Republican government by contrast pointed out that it had been democratically elected (a claim admittedly undermined by the threat of revolution by many leftists, in the event of their losing the election), and that Mussolini and Hitler were already using Spain as a live training ground.
In actuality, Stalin was largely withholding troops and resources so as not to provoke Britain or Germany at a sensitive moment in Soviet industrial development, offering only minimal assistance to Spain (much of it actually counter-productive). By contrast, Germany and Italy were soon committing war atrocities at places like Guernica. But in the crucial first phases of the war, the nationalist rebels used the power of words – and fear – to secure de facto recognition and tacit support from key foreign powers. They won the war of words and ideas in part regardless of the facts about who was actually doing what in Spain. History might have been very different if the Western powers had swung the other way, and checked Europe’s fascist dictators.
Returning to the present, yesterday’s budget should come as a slap in the face to a sleeping British left. The Con-Dems widely trailed their “progressive budget”, with Gideon Osborne himself declaring:
“Everyone will pay something but the people at the bottom of the income scale will pay proportionately less than those at the top. This is a progressive Budget.”
Leftist sources have predictably responded by claiming that this is not a progressive budget at all. The New Statesman here has a fairly standard example. But part of the problem lies in the very term “progressive”.
As I’ve pointed out in detail, “progressive” is a stupid word to use in politics because it doesn’t mean anything. When leftists say they are “progressives” they’re saying nothing of substance, whilst vaguely implying that they are in favour of nice fluffy things like helping people, and the environment, and being pro-gay, and pro-women’s rights, and, y’know, stuff. The basic aim is to attempt a differentiation from the political right without having to commit to anything of substance or principle, and hoping that vague feelings of warm fuzziness will guarantee support.
But because there’s no content behind the term “progressive”, there’s nothing to stop the Conservatives – or for that matter the Lib Dems – appropriating the word for themselves. And that’s exactly what they have done previously, and did yesterday. This has (at least) a two-fold effect.
Firstly, by dressing the budget in the cotton wool of “progressive”, The Coalition could easily spin deeply regressive taxation changes and ideologically driven public sector cuts as being equitable, fair and representative of an “all in this together” austerity.
Secondly, because the left – and Labour especially – has shied away for so long of talking the language of being the left – of equality (rather than mealy-mouthed meritocracy), of redistribution, of the state as an agent for social justice (rather than just bank-bailouts and surveillance policing) – responses to the Tories become flat-footed and lose the initiative. Slipping into the specifics of policy (about cuts, about VAT, about child benefits) is already too late. As the old saying goes: “in politics, if you’re explaining you’re losing”. The initiative is duly lost to the ConDem side, which simply has to reply that this is what a progressive budget looks like in these hard times. We’re all progressives now, after all.
Words matter. The British left needs to have a long, hard think about what kinds of words it wants to carry on using about itself, and whether it might not rather stake out some clear, commitment-filled ground that The Coalition can’t happily squat in for political advantage. A good start, incidentally, would be to stop chucking around two other over-used terms. Instead of merely saying we need to control the “discourse”, and construct better “narratives”, it’s time to come up with the discussion to fill that discourse, and the story to go into that narrative.
So join me on Saturday, where maybe we can make a start.
June 22, 2010
How not to think about penalties, and humans
I have not read Superfreakonomics. This is because I have read Freakonomics. Which is a hot-potch of unconnected, of over-hyped, speculative, simplified, uninteresting factoids.
However, Steven J. Dubner, co-author of aforementioned strings of factoids, was on Newsnight recently spouting some silliness about football penalty-taking. Which conveniently gives me an excuse to gun-down one of my favourite philosophical canards.*
We’ll get to the meat in a minute. First consider Dubner’s exposition of how football players take penalties. He tells us there are three options: left, right, or down the middle.
Which is false. There are at least: top left, bottom left, top right, bottom right, hard down the middle into the centre, hard up the middle into the roof, and stuttered run-up to see if the keeper goes left/right and then shooting right/left.
But let’s grant Dubner the left/right/middle simplification and see where it gets him. Apparently “kickers very seldom go centre”. Further apparently, kickers are however more likely to score if they do go centre. Why? Allegedly because “the risk of embarrassment is very high if you go centre and are stopped.”
Hmm, well, maybe. It could also be the psychological factor of the goalkeeper standing in the way. I mean, intuitively it makes sense to put the ball where the gap is now, not where it isn’t. And nervous footballers may well be affected by such intuitions. And that’s not to mention factoring-in individual player preferences (“the bottom corners are lucky for me”; “this keeper’s weak on his right”, “I’m playing for England so I’m going to miss anyway”, etc).
But ignore the characteristic simplification of the situation in order to formulate some nice neat explanations. The nub of Dubner’s claim (and what I’m interested in) is that players don’t go centre – even though statistically this is the best way to score – because they are fundamentally self-interested agents who “say they are playing for team and country, but really are playing for themselves”. Allegedly, footballers seek to maximise their own self-interest and this is served by not shooting according to the statistically-best option, regardless of whether this hurts the team as a whole.
I’m not going to assess this specific example. Although I am suspicious about one of the key working assumptions: that there is high disutility in hitting a penalty straight down the middle. (This seems dubious, as slamming one down the keepers’ throat is a lot better than a German-style easily-saved pat to the right against Serbia).
What I’m really interested in is the general claim Dubner makes about human motivation: that “we are all self-interested creatures, even when we say we’re not”. This is the canard to be shot.
Given a new lease of life in various (but by no means all) economic fads over the past 60 years, the tiresome view that human beings are selfish egoists who ultimately only ever do anything for personal gain has been around a long time. Both David Hume and Adam Smith poked fun at these systems of morality based in “self love”. Arguably (though this is a bit of a dodgy interpretation) the character of Thrasymachus in the early parts of Plato’s Republic is a porte parole for the view not just that might makes right, but that humans only ever try to help themselves.
Luckily however we can turn to a quick counter-example developed by Simon Blackburn, which bops the “we’re all just self-interested personal utility-maximisers” meme squarely on the head. Here goes (adapted a bit for fun):
Imagine a mother facing a terrible choice, forced upon her by The Authority and from which there is no chance of escape. She must opt for one of the following:
Either: Her son (whom she loves dearly) will be tortured and electrocuted to death. However, she will undergo a brain-washing procedure that guarantees she will awake from the operation believing her son is safe and sound, and living a life of luxury in the Bahamas.
Or: Her son (whom she loves dearly) will be provided for and enabled to live a life of luxury in the Bahamas til the end of his days. However she will undergo a brain-washing procedure that guarantees she will awake from the operation believing (erroneously) that her son has been tortured and electrocuted to death.
Six things to note: 1) any mother who genuinely loves her son will choose the second option, 2) this is a completely intelligible response, 3) any mother who choose the first option would strike us as something of a selfish monster who did not love her son very much after all, and 4) it seems fitting and proper to cast disapprobation upon a mother choosing the first option because indeed we correctly attach great moral value to the sort of benevolence contained in the second option, 5) the possibility of such self-sacrifice is often what brings dignity, complexity and magnanimity to the human moral experience, and consequently 6) no room for some of the most interesting aspects of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe (and so on) in the “people just maximise-self interest” story so beloved by folks like Dubner.
Which, I contend, is something of a deep problem for them.**
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* There’s a smug pun in there for Anglo-French linguists.
** A prize will be awarded to the first person who misses the wood for the trees and offers me a Rational Choice Theory explanation as to why Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe et. al. set pen to paper.
June 21, 2010
Blond Babble
I had hoped that after the election Phillip Blond would fade back into obscurity. Unfortunately he seems to be lingering around like a bad smell, recently polluting BBC1′s The Review Show with prejudice.
Of all the nonsense Blond spouted (including a segment inviting him to plug his incoherent, ignorant, printed delusion of grandeur), his 5 minutes on feminism were certainly the worst. However they also provided a masterclass in how to do modern anti-feminism, so unlike most of what Blond says it’s actually worth a quick analysis.
Start off around 16.50mins. Blond brashly declares that the problems facing women in 21st century Britain are “much more profound” than the institutional disadvantages identified (albeit with trademark inaccuracy and rantiness) by Germaine Greer. The root cause is in fact…”the type of feminism that’s made its way into public policy debates”.
It’s classic Backlash tactics. The problem for and with women’s empowerment turns out to be…women’s empowerment. The reason that women are faced with disadvantage and inequality turns out not to be because of oppressive cultural structures, or economic systems that combine with these to unfairly disadvantage one gender rather than the other. No, the women’s movement is to blame.
But what exactly is this “type of feminism” that Blond so laments? Er, “it is essentially, first wave, women as men, non-relational feminsim”.
Ouch.
Let’s deal with this bit first: “women as men, non-relational feminism”. Yep, you guessed it, this is pure unadulterated Blond Babble. Buzz-words pronounced with gravitas as though no idiot could possibly misunderstand their significance…except that if these words are to mean anything substantive at all, Blond has to define them as technical terms. Which of course he doesn’t do, because Blond doesn’t do definitions or analysis. Just self-serving Blond Babble.
But what’s actually funnier is the “first wave” reference. Anybody with any knowledge whatsoever of feminist thinking knows that “first wave” feminism refers (broadly) to the early 20th century campaign by the suffragette movement demanding equal rights for women with regards to, for example, the vote. At this stage, feminist thinking demanded a set of basic legal rights and some equalities. It did not (generally) advance philosophical theories of gender being a social construct, or the other forms of more counter-intuitive (but important) thinking Blond later aludes to. First wave feminism demanded that (some, generally wealthy) women be granted some of the basic rights of democratic citizenship. Yet according to Blond this is “the type of feminism” that has disastrously undermined women’s progress in the early 21st century.
Stop sniggering at the back, please.
Moving swiftly on, Blond prepares to let us all in on a secret. Like Mel Gibson, Phillips knows exactly what “women want”: “to have their families and their relationships, but also have a career”. Which admittedly seems reasonable enough. After all, it’s what most men want and indeed the vast majority correctly take it for granted that these things are perfeclty compatible goals…for men.
But apparently “until we can have a new type of feminism”, “that is pro-family” (as oppose to those evil vote-demanding suffragettes who simply hated the family!), women (unlike men, note) cannot have both a family and a career. And whose to blame? The women’s movement!
It’s a classic display of anti-feminist backlash thinking. The tried and tested trope – that women “want to have it all” (i.e. baby, family, job) but that this is a false promise of the women’s movement – is used to indicte the women’s movement. Yet it should be blindingly obvious that if men can “have it all”, but our social expectations and economic structures conspire to ensure most women have to choose between family or career, then something is wrong with our social expectations and economic structures. To blame the women’s movement for this inequality is a little like blaming anti-slavery campaigners for the continuation of slavery in the days before abolition.
But that’s exactly what backlash thinking does, and does with such aplomb because its central tenet (“the women’s movement is to blame for the problems facing women”) has been so successfully inculcated from the 1980s onwards.
One outstanding question: how much does Blond consciously intend to do this? There’s no doubt that his colossal ego makes him an intellectual poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger effect. And given his hilarious ignorance of the basic history of the feminist movement, and his chucking-around of straw-women feminist terms, I’d say this indicates simple ignorance rather than conscious undermining.
But then that’s what we’d expect from a really successful backlash movement: for it to be taken as an obvious common-place that women’s empowerment is to blame for the problems faced by women, because really everyone knows that wimmin were better off before they got words like equality and fairness into their silly little heads.
June 19, 2010
Michael Gove’s Class War
Michael Gove is by all signs intent on pressing ahead with the idea of Swedish-style Free Schools. Despite the fact that the man in charge of Sweden’s schools said they won’t work.
You may also recall various commitments from Michael Gove and friends that Free Schools will not be funded at the detriment of the wider education budget. You know, those normal schools for poor oiks where the parents haven’t got the luxury of leisure time, connections, confidence and experience to convert their front parlour into an autonomous education centre for the local Jacostas and Maximilians.
And it comes as a surprise to absolutely nobody that the Tories have really been considering exactly the opposite. Whilst their original weasel-words promised to find the money from “waste” in the education system (for as we all know, British comps are overflowing with surplus brand new text books and uneatan caviar), the Conservatives have outdone perhaps even themselves. They are now revealed to have been considering almost literally taking the food out of poor children’s mouths, to divert resources towards the middle classes.
I’m sure Tories tell themselves comforting stories: “Oh, those poor kids aren’t exactly going to starve, are they? This isn’t bloody Africa after all.” Which of course misses the point that whilst the poorest kids – especially those of primary school age – will indeed subsist on the diets of crisps and wagon wheels that Jamie Oliver famously exposed, many will now be deprived of the one square meal they get a day.
What’s startling about Gove’s commitment to free schools is actually how ideological it is. Rather than targeting the (so-called) “failing” schools, generally comprehensives in deprived inner city areas, that desperately need money pumped not just into the schools, but into the local areas so as to relive the poverty that is the common denominator in “failing” institutions, Gove wistfully applies the (rather selectively chosen) logic of the market. That by allowing middle class parents to choose to educate their kids in a quasi-independent manner, this will somehow create “competition” and “drive up standards.” Despite being warned by the country that’s tried it that it doesn’t actually work, and the prospect of deeply regressive uses of government funding.
Who says ideological principle in the face of uncomfortable reality is dead? Ladies and Gentlemen I give you Michael Gove, the Reverse Robin Hood of our times. Just to ram the point home: there’s a class war alright, and Gove’s side are winning it.
But where art though Lib Dems, who didst claim to be the True Progressive Force of Britain?
Aside from the fact that before the last election Lib Dem education policy was in the hands of David Laws, a man so far to the right many Lib Dems muttered that he should have joined the Tories, there’s a basic reason why the Libs won’t be a bulwark against Tory desire for free schools. Which is that the Lib Dems are a party of the middle class, and that free schools are a policy to benefit the (upper) middle classes. As seen up and down the country at the local level, Lib Dems protect their middle class voters when it comes to actually making decisions. It will be no different as this Parliament grinds on.
Of course, that’s just the hard logic of politics. But it’s also another nail in the coffin of Lib Dem pretensions to being a genuine force of the left.
June 18, 2010
World Cup Ticket Sales…and an Ethos of Justice?
As this article from The Independent indicates, the reasons for the poor attendance and empty seats at recent World Cup matches are complex. Corporate no-shows seem to be part of the story. But this is an intriguing quote from The Guardian:
“The empty seats – which look terrible on television – are a problem for Fifa because, having sold batches of tickets at reduced prices to local groups, it cannot now put them back on the market.”
Another related – albeit speculative – thought is that Fifa is not allowing the South African government to bus-in school children and the local poor (as it promised it would) to fill empty seats because this would aggravate those who have paid for their tickets.
We perhaps therefore have a situation whereby tickets
a) cannot be put back on the market at normal price because reduced-price tickets to the poor have already been made available, and so selling tickets again at full price would be deemed unfair or unacceptable
and
b) seats are left empty because giving free tickets to the poor when others have paid is deemed unfair or unacceptable.
If so, there may be an interesting parallel with a recent debate within Anglophone political theory.
First, let’s re-cap John Rawls’ famous “difference principle”: that when constructing the rules that govern the basic structure of society (i.e. its key institutions that have a lasting and significant impact on people’s lives) inequalities in essential ‘primary’ goods are to be permitted only to the extent that they make the worst-off better-off than they otherwise would be.
This principle came under attack in the late work of Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen. Cohen asked us to imagine the following sort of situation (I’m simplifying quite extensively for ease of exposition).
Imagine a society whose basic-structure institutions are ordered in line with Rawls’ principles of justice, including the difference principle. Now imagine there are a group in that society – “the Talented” – who, if they were to work in a particular line of employment would make everybody better-off, such would be their productive output. However, the Talented will only do this work if they are highly remunerated on a pay-scale out of line with what others can expect to earn. Cohen believed that Rawls’ difference principle permitted such out-of-line pay for the Talented, on the basis that their higher output would make the worst-off in society better off.
But for Cohen this exposed a fundamental failing in Rawls’ institution-focused conception of justice: that the Talented lack a proper ethos of justice and are inflicting inequality – and injustice (though the two are not necessarily synonymous here) – upon their society. The Talented could do their socially-productive work for lower pay, but they choose to extract higher wages instead. Rawls’ difference principle permits this, and for Cohen it therefore misses a fundamental component of what justice (allegedly properly understood) requires: that society be characterised by an ethos of justice whereby some – e.g. the Talented – do not exploit their abilities in order to advantage themselves over others, even if that extra work benefits the worse-off.
I’m not going to take a stand on the extent to which Cohen’s critique of Rawls is a good one.* What I want to do is take the idea of a social ethos of justice and apply it to the case of World Cup ticket sales. Underpinning Cohen’s understanding of a just social ethos seems to be something like the old Marxist adage “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” For indeed if the Talented contributed in line with their ability simply in order to benefit the more needy, then they would not demand higher pay, and (perhaps) society would therefore be more just.
In the case of South Africa, let us imagine that everybody were to adopt this Marxist adage with regards to the World Cup. In this case, Fifa’s problems might melt away. On the first hand, tickets could indeed be put back on sale despite some having been discounted earlier; potential customers able to afford the last-minute full-price tickets might say to themselves “it’s OK for me to pay full-price, because I can afford to – those other people who bought the reduced-price tickets were poorer than me. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need!” Similarly, children and the local poor could be bussed-in to fill empty seats on match day. Those who had already paid full-whack would simply adopt the same reasoning. Indeed, a (minor) egalitarian redistribution would have taken place, arguably making society more just and more fair.
But here’s the rub. Despite the initial appeal of the Marxist adage, no human society ever seems to have gotten up and running off the back of it. Some level** of acquisitive self-interest propels capitalism, and like it or not it’s capitalist societies that have tended towards the greatest freedom and prosperity for all members (despite their myriad failings).
Sadly, there’s little prospect of being able to temporarily induce an ethos along the lines of “from each according to his ability…” amongst South African football fans simply for the duration of the World Cup. A prevailing social ethos, after all, cannot be so quickly or so readily instantiated.
And whilst Cohen’s last book attempted to envisage a world in which more people had the social ethos of Marxist justice, there are reasons to find his efforts unconvincing. Justice may in some sense lie beyond us – and World Cup tickets may likewise have to remain unsold.
–
*Though for what it’s worth, my sense is that Cohen is right and that justice fully understood requires an operative ethos of justice not just a certain institutional structure. However this is a very esoteric debate, and I’m not sure whether anything of much significance turns on it because a Rawlsian society would be so much more just than anything we’ve yet seen that Cohen’s critiques are academic in both the literal and pejorative sense of the term.
** Though the devil will be in the detail of how much, and how much is both necessary and/or desirable.
