I could swear that I’d linked to these two marvelous lefty anti-authoritarian short stories before, but I can’t find any reference to them on my website, so maybe not.
The first, a brief La Boétiean fable titled “The Actor and the King,” is by the enigmatic German anarcho-individualist novelist B. Traven a.k.a. Ret Marut (1890?-1969), best known today as the author of The Treasure of Sierra Madre and the Jungle novels. The second, variously titled “A King’s Lesson” and “An Old Story Retold,” is by the English art designer, fantasy novelist, and libertarian communist William Morris (1834-1896), best known today for News from Nowhere and The Wood Beyond the World. Enjoy!
I’m curious Rodderick, have you heard of David Ellerman and his theory of workplace democracy? His key insight is the interesting observation that slavery hasn’t really gone away, but merely assumed a different form: instead of buying a person’s whole labor over their lifetime (slavery), their labor is rented in small intervals. He even suggests that the words employer and employee are just turn of the century newspeak designed to obscure the fact that our current system involves renting and leasing human beings by making it sound less offensive. If you note the progression, viz:
Pre-1800s : Masters were kings and priests, and labor was bought and sold (i.e. slavery)
Industrial Revolution – present : Masters are officials and bosses, and labor is rented (“hired”, “employed”, etc)
present – future: ???
My second question to you is what do you think will come next in the progression, and how long will it take? Obviously one would hope the final step in this process would be no renting or buying of people at all, but having some kind of free, democratic system where everyone works for themselves. Assuming that is a logical possibility, would you say such a final stage is inevitable the same way Marxists often talk of inevitable historical change?
Obviously one would hope the final step in this process would be no renting or buying of people at all, but having some kind of free, democratic system where everyone works for themselves.
When applied to mass production enterprises based on repetitive labor, though, this has such examples as the putting out system and various French experiments where “employees” came into the factory, bought raw materials, rented factory space, and sold back finished goods. My impression is that these are often decried by leftists (in the sense where “leftist” = socialist = advocate of a command economy) as exploitative and inhumane to a worse degree than the wage labor system. Do you feel that this is not the case? Or are you envisioning a system where mass production based on repetitive labor has entirely vanished, being turned over to robot “slaves”?
Do you feel that this is not the case?
Well that may be the case. I’m not familiar with these French experiments, but my guess is any setup where the owners/bosses still own the means of production and everyone else has to sell their labor to them would count as “exploitative”. The main gripe against wage labor for being exploitative is that the bosses (undeservedly) keep most of the profits and tell their servants (employees) what to do, when to do it and how to do it. So if you have a system where people are called “master” and “servant” but in practice people are not constantly told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it from bureaucrats, then that would probably not be “exploitative” as the left uses this term.
Keep in mind also that neither Rodderick nor myself accept your use of “leftist” to describe belief in a command economy. While many on the “left” see ordinary people as worthless louts to be ordered about by wise economic planners, others see ordinary people as having the potential to change their lives and organize spontaneously to achieve their own goals.
Or are you envisioning a system where mass production based on repetitive labor has entirely vanished, being turned over to robot “slaves”?
Well I think it’s a bit silly to base ideas for society on technological fantasies that are unlikely to come to be for a few centuries ( millenia?). The fact is that any society, whether industrial or otherwise, is going to have some boring, repetitive tasks that need to be done, whether it’s digging ditches or putting together stuff on an assembly line. I think Noam Chomsky has responded to this “grunt work” problem with two observations:
1) It’s possible for a society to either share such grunt work equally, or else give monetary bonuses to the people doing the grunt work (neither of which describes present-day capitalism).
2) Many aspects of factory production were researched and developed in a boss/servant environment and thus were mostly designed to mesh with it. Conversely, almost no effort has gone into making production “nicer” for workers because there has been no need up to now; as Chomsky describes it, “Up until now there’s been an underclass of workers who either have to do the grunt work or starve.” Kevin Carson also likes to argue along these lines, claiming that a move away from bosses and bureaucrats controlling the economy would allow technology to help meet the needs of labor and not capital.
William,
this has such examples as the putting out system and various French experiments where “employees” came into the factory, bought raw materials, rented factory space, and sold back finished goods. My impression is that these are often decried by leftists
I think the main consideration is the extent to which workers have a real say over their own work and lives, which is different from the question of whether they are technically independent contractors or not. Greater say might well look like a move in the direction of independent contracting, but the reverse isn’t necessarily the case.
Anon2,
have you heard of David Ellerman and his theory of workplace democracy?
No, but I’ll give it a look. I’ve already gotten a chuckle out of this line on the first page: “The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the author and should
not be attributed in any manner to the World Bank.” Y’think?
He even suggests that the words employer and employee are just turn of the century newspeak designed to obscure the fact that our current system involves renting and leasing human beings by making it sound less offensive
And the terms aren’t really less offensive. “Employee” means someone who is used, like a thing. A term like “personnel” might seem like an improvement, in that it acknowledges that workers are persons, but the ending, with its analogy to “materiel,” still suggests that persons are a stock of things to be used. The currently fashionable replacement, “human resources,” is actually the worst of all in that respect. (I remember when some place I was working at changed the name of their Personnel Department to Human Resources Department with great fanfare, explaining that this name change would do more honour to the dignity of the workers. I guess either they were idiots or they thought we were — not mutually exclusive options of course.)
Assuming that is a logical possibility, would you say such a final stage is inevitable the same way Marxists often talk of inevitable historical change?
I think very little in the progress of history is inevitable. There are, to be sure, plenty of tendencies that can be identified, and social patterns that either tend to reinforce themselves or else tend to undermine themselves, but the precise ways they play out generally depend on particularities of circumstance that can’t be predicted. (All the theories that purport to explain why the fall of the Roman Empire was inevitable never seem to explain why the Byzantine Empire — the eastern half of the same enterprise — lasted another thousand years.)
William: Or are you envisioning a system where mass production based on repetitive labor has entirely vanished, being turned over to robot “slaves”?
Anon2: Well I think it’s a bit silly to base ideas for society on technological fantasies that are unlikely to come to be for a few centuries ( millenia?).
ME: I think that technological future might become feasible sooner than you think — perhaps within a century. Definitely sooner than millennia. (Though of course just above I said we can’t predict the future….)
Definitely sooner than millennia.
Possibly, but the point I wanted to make is that a “good” theory of how society should work should be applicable to any level of technology, since treating humans with respect and dignity shouldn’t necessarily depend on technological level. As Walter Block is fond of saying, if it’s wrong for the caveman to hit the caveman, it’s wrong for the spaceman to hit the spaceman.
I agree. One of the points where I disagree with a number of 19th-century antistatist thinkers (e.g., Proudhon, Spencer, and Molinari) is that they all think statism and militarism were justified/necessary at a certain stage in human history, albeit one that has passed or is passing, whereas I can’t see why the basic moral principles (respect for human rights) and economic principles (mutual gains from trade) don’t apply just as well at one historial period as at another. (See my debate with Phil Jacobson about this a decade ago.)
In other news, thanks again for the Ellerman tip; I’ve looked a bit at it and posted some preliminary comments.
Keep in mind also that neither Rodderick nor myself accept your use of “leftist” to describe belief in a command economy.
Well, I’m aware that there are other meanings, which is why I made a point of defining what I meant explicitly. Nonetheless, I’m not sure what other short word there is to use for people whose view of economics and labor history is generally compatible with the ideas of Karl Marx. So even if this does not exhaust the category of views that can be called “leftist,” I think it needs to be included among them.
The statist left is the right-left. The antistatist left is the left-left.
William H. Stoddard: Nonetheless, I’m not sure what other short word there is to use for people whose view of economics and labor history is generally compatible with the ideas of Karl Marx.
Well. “Marxist”?
If you need something a bit broader in application, you might try “Marxian,” or, more broadly still, “State Socialist.”
Well. “Marxist”?
If you need something a bit broader in application, you might try “Marxian,” or, more broadly still, “State Socialist.”
In practice, when most people think of a “leftist,” they are referring to people of such views. Just as when they think of a “rightist” they are thinking of a supporter of Bush, or earlier of Reagan—which is why I don’t call myself a “rightist” and don’t regard libertarianism as “right wing” or “conservative.”
And my experience has been that people who are on the left, but antiauthoritarian, tend still to endorse the exploitation theory and the Marxian view of private enterprise, and tend in the short run to favor state socialist measures such as public education and national health insurance, even if in the long run they might want to do away with the state that carries out those enterprises. So I want a word that is a bit broader than “state socialist.” “Marxian” might do, but (a) it’s potentially going to open up definitional issues about Marxian vs. Marxist and (b) I think in practice it would turn out to mean pretty much the same people that “leftist” refers to in common usage.
Back when I was in college, a fellow Objectivist put forth to me the following political spectrum: (left) communist—fascist—liberal—moderate—conservative—constitutional government—anarchist (right). That’s a possible construction, logically, but most people, when they think of a “rightist,” are not thinking of someone who wants to abolish the police and the armed forces. To some degree, I favor Wittgenstein’s “don’t ask for the meaning; look at the use.”
William,
Well, the question you posed was not whether “Leftist” properly refers to “people whose view of economics and labor history is generally compatible with the ideas of Karl Marx,” but whether there was another short word that could do the same work just as well. If there is such a word then there are independent reasons (already explained) for preferring that other word to “Leftism” when what you mean is “state socialism” or “government economic planning.”
I am not sure that I understand your objection to using “state socialist” in particular. Doctrinaire Marxists famously believe that the “workers’ state” is a transitional phenomenon, which will become unnecessary with the emergence of communism proper. Does that make the label “state socialist” inappropriate for, say, V.I. Lenin? Well, in one sense yes, and in another sense no, since he advocated state socialism in the short term and a form of anarcho-communism in the long term. But whatever complications this may introduce into applying the label, it will introduce exactly the same complications for your usages of “Leftist” and “socialist,” since you’ve made those identical with state economic control, and it was advocacy for state economic control during a “transitional” period, but not after, that supposedly generated this problem.
As for the common usage of “Leftism,” you’re right that when most people use the term, they are referring to state economic control. When most people think of “free trade,” they are referring to IMF-financed state corporatism, and when most people think of “anarchy,” they are referring to riots or civil war. What Wittgenstein advised looking to was not just the unordered facts about usage, but the logic of the use, and if the usage is incoherent or confused, the thing to do is to disentangle the confusion, not to pander to it. In any given case, depending on the breaks, it might be better to disentangle it by abandoning the word for a different word, or it might be better to keep on using the word, so long as you use it more rigorously or precisely. One should often do the latter when there is something challenging and genuinely valuable embedded in the package-deal which it is important to emphasize or affirm. I hear that some Russian radical once made similar efforts to reclaim or redeem the package-deal term “capitalism” from advocates of government privilege for the business class. While I disagree with the application on this point, I see nothing wrong with the method.
As for the common usage of “Leftism,” you’re right that when most people use the term, they are referring to state economic control. When most people think of “free trade,” they are referring to IMF-financed state corporatism, and when most people think of “anarchy,” they are referring to riots or civil war. What Wittgenstein advised looking to was not just the unordered facts about usage, but the logic of the use, and if the usage is incoherent or confused, the thing to do is to disentangle the confusion, not to pander to it. In any given case, depending on the breaks, it might be better to disentangle it by abandoning the word for a different word, or it might be better to keep on using the word, so long as you use it more rigorously or precisely.
Sure. But I don’t regard either “leftist” or “rightist” as a term that is capable of being used other than impressionistically. Attempts to give either term a rigorous logical meaning lead to absurdities, such as classifying both Rothbard and Buchanan as “right wing.” Or they lead to conclusions that clash too drastically with how the words are ordinarily used; for example, it’s plausible to say that the right supports rule by elites and the left supports rule by the masses, but in those terms the common Republican demand that the courts should stop overruling the will of the majority is left-wing and the Democratic defense of judicial review is right-wing.
The project of trying to find a rigorously logical meaning for right and left in politics would make sense if a one-dimensional spectrum of political thought made sense. Which is to say, in my view, neither makes sense.
Hence, not having any idea of using the term “leftist” with a rigorously defined meaning, I used it impessionistically, as a gesture toward a recognizable population within American politics. I had no intent to exclude other usages for those who found them convenient. My point was simply that I’ve gotten the impression that many people who are critical of “capitalism” tend to regard systems where the worker acts as an entrepreneur/subcontractor as more exploitative than the wages system, rather than less. So I find it a bit odd to see what looks like a suggestion that such alternatives would avoid the criticisms that apply to “capitalism.”