Still More on Privilege

See previous posts on "privilege" here (the first instalment) and here (the second). 

Marxist Marginalia has prompted really excellent discussion (and debate) on the concept of privilege that is worth reading. It has helped me clarify a lot of my own thinking about these matters and the general analysis put forward by herrnaphta seems to me basically correct.

Stressing points of agreement at the onset--as herrnaphta does at the beginning of the post--is important because, as I tried to argue in a recent post, all too often debates about privilege track the wrong issues and leave the most important ones unaddressed. To be fair, there are plenty of defenders of colorblindness out there who respond caustically and abrasively to the language of privilege, so proponents of the privilege framework can hardly be blamed for taking a generally defensive position when criticisms are leveled at their perspective. And, of course, one finds these colorblind types on the left as well as the right, so a generally wide scope of suspicion here seems to me justified as well. We shouldn't assume that these points of agreement are shared by everyone in radical circles, especially since there are colorblind analyses circulating around on the left. Marxists should be forthcoming about where they stand and should do their best to stave off misunderstandings by actively, explicitly pushing against colorblind forces on the left.

Be that as it may, there are important political questions left over after we agree that colorblindness is a toxic (racist) ideology that papers over oppression and silences its critics. There are still important questions left over after we agree that people of color endure forms of oppression that white people do not. I think the discussion at Marxist Marginalia does a great job of fleshing these questions out.

If there's one important point that I'm willing to concede that the privilege-based approach seems to emphasize more often than many Marxists, it is the following point:

Part of building an effective movement against white supremacy involves white activists understanding their privilege, and taking it into account when building solidarity with people of color...How can white people stop acting out their privileges? Obviously there are important ways that this can be done: realizing that you, as a white activist, need to shut the fuck up once in a while and that not everyone always wants to hear what you have to say is a good start, and a lesson that every white person needs to learn in general.

This accords with Trotsky's argument that black workers "can be developed to the class point of view only when the white worker is educated", i.e. only when white workers are disabused of racist beliefs, when racism is smashed within the labor movement at all levels---formal and informal, explicit and implicit. This is why he argued for a "merciless struggle against... the colossal prejudices of white workers [which] makes no concession to them whatsoever". Trotsky's uncompromising anti-racist position seems to me exactly right.

We could, of course, generalize from this argument. For instance: Men in a society marked by gender oppression have to learn how to shut the fuck up once in a while as well. Why? Because gender oppression is multifaceted and, as is well known, operates through the socialization process by way of certain norms and expectations about how "ideal" women and men are to comport themselves, interact conversationally, dress, behave, and so on.

One toxic element of that process is this: men, from a young age, are expected to be more vocal, more self-confident in expressing their opinions, more likely to sound off without paying attention to how long they've been speaking, and so on. The corresponding social expectations for women here encourage deference, listening patiently to what men have to say, doubting that one has the right to speak authoritatively, feeling unjustified in being self-confident, and so on. Unless we resist these default aspects of gender socialization in an oppressive society such as ours, the result is that men tend to dominate discussions and women don't get the opportunity to speak their mind. The result is patronizing, sexist "men who explain things" or, if you like, "mansplainers". These aren't inevitable characteristics that all men and women share, but this what we're up against if we're fighting for the liberation of women in society today.

This is a familiar problem for any conscious teacher who has to lead class discussions. I regularly have a number of male students who, though they have nothing particularly brilliant to say, have a very low threshold for raising their hand and feel quite comfortable pontificating and sounding off for long periods of time. There is also a tendency for male students to be dismissive toward the contributions of female students. On the other hand, many times I'll have a number of  women students who are far less willing to speak in class, even when they have very good things to say.

Unsurprisingly, female students seem more likely to express self-doubt that they have something valuable to add, whereas male students are far more likely to have a devil-may-care arrogance about them in virtue of which they feel confident raising their hands and speaking over and over. These are not timeless features of human beings. These tendencies are produced by unequal social relations and oppressive norms specifying how gendered persons are to behave, comport themselves, interact socially, etc. What's more: these oppressive relations and norms are not free-floating, they are historically emergent and institutionalized and---most importantly---they are inscribed into the material structure of our society.

Liberation, of course, requires exploding these oppressive expectations and relationships---in all of their material richness---through collective struggle. No amount of inward-looking reflection or attitudinal change will fundamentally uproot these forms of oppression. Only collective action which sets itself the goal of transforming the basic structure of society can end oppression. As I put it in a recent post:

The language of privilege can sometimes make it sound as if the only obligation of, say, white people in a racist society is to individually acknowledge their privilege and apologize for it.

But individual-level concepts such as apology, guilt, acknowledgement, repentance, responsibility and so on fail to capture the historical, social, political and structural features of racial oppression. Racial oppression is not a set of ideas or attitudes individuals have (although ideas and attitudes play an essential role in reproducing and justifying it). Oppression refers to asymmetrical social relations among groups of persons involving power, domination, exploitation and so on. Oppression is an ongoing social process whereby certain groups are systematically criminalized, brutalized, marginalized, exploited, or denied access to the necessities of life. So our task isn't merely to strike up this or that individual attitude toward this state of affairs; our task is to talk about how this social process works so that we can build social movements to decisively smash it once and for all.

However, reflection on these micro-political instantiations of macro-level oppression is still important for a number of reasons. After all, we don't want to reproduce---intentionally or not---these attitudes, practices, norms, cultural forms, and expectations in radical movements aiming to overthrow oppression. As is well known, the New Left movements of the 60s had a lot of deep problems with gender oppression in their ranks. Women were often ridiculed, slandered, or cast aside when it came time to decide who would occupy leadership roles. That was in spite of the fact that many, though not all, of these same organizations---on paper---had progressive positions regarding women's liberation.

We have come a long way since then thanks in large measure to the struggles of the women's liberation movement of the late 60s and early 70s. So it isn't inevitable that sexist ideologies will infect our movements, but it is will remain a strong possibility as long as we're living in a sexist society. Thus we have to consciously, actively, explicitly work against it on all levels if we're to avoid reproducing and consolidating it. The same is true of racial oppression and, I would argue, class domination (e.g. see this recent post on the revolutionary party that addresses the question of radical consciousness and class pressures).

But these problems---problems of building radical movements dedicated to linking different struggles against oppression on the basis of socialist solidarity---are not problems that are taken seriously by all. Some doubt that such movements are either possible or desirable. Others turn away from political movements entirely and propose that we lose ourselves in the inner-workings of micro-level oppression. I attempted to criticize this inward-looking, individualist approach in my first post on privilege. I think Marxist Marginalia does a good job of criticizing it as well, and I generally agree with analysis there that:

...white privilege theory is a product of the defeat of the movements of the sixties and seventies, and that the emphasis on individual behavior we find there arose as an alternative to collective political action. In the wake of those defeats, it became far easier to imagine changing the behavior of individuals than organizing a collective movement around systemic change. Political pessimism wrote itself into political theory through a variety of ways – Roediger’s adaptation of social history to argue that racism came from below, for example, dovetailed politically with the theoretically very different arguments for a Foucauldian emphasis on the micro-politics of power. Not all of this, of course, was detrimental. Some of it filled in gaps left by more systemically-focused theories of racism. But what became hegemonic was an anti-politics – a turn away from collective action towards individual rehabilitation.

This seems to me right on the money. The privilege analysis gets a lot right, and maybe even brought to light micro-political elements less well addressed by system-level theorizing, but in many guises it simply expresses a pessimism about the possibility of challenging the system. But in times such as these, such pessimism wears its implausibility on its sleeve. We shouldn't be sanguine about the challenges of building a multi-racial radical movement under conditions of racial oppression. But neither should we be confident that such a goal is neither possible nor desirable. As Marxist activist Duncan Hallas once put the point, "isn't the working class... under the influence of racist, sexist, nationalist ideas [and so on]? All that is true... but it can be changed in struggle. It is a long, hard and complicated struggle. But it is also the only cause worth fighting for."

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Once More on Privilege

Perhaps some of you were brave enough to wade through my long-winded, meandering series of reflections on the concept of "privilege" that I posed a couple of weeks back. Readers interested in this topic may have noticed a couple of debates recently that touch on this topic. The topic has been on my mind a lot lately.

I'm thinking about doing something more extensive on privilege, something that actually engages more closely with the concepts most sophisticated defenders. The target of my recent critical post did not really have in mind people like Noel Ignatiev or contributors to Race Traitor. Instead, I had in mind the large set of radical (and radicalizing) people committed to anti-racist struggle who frequently make use of the concept.

Right now, however, I'm not interested in a thorough consideration of the concept of privilege. Instead, I simply want to point out a problem that seems to surface whenever debates around the concept emerge.

As I pointed out in my critique, there are plenty of people who buy into the ideology of colorblindness and, because of their endorsement of colorblindness, chafe against the language of privilege for all the wrong reasons. Though I take myself to be a critic of the concept of privilege, I share nothing politically or philosophically on these matters with colorblind critics, and I harbor special ire for those colorblind critics who profess to be representatives of the Marxist left.

Yet, all too often the defenders of the language of privilege respond to critics as if they were all defenders of colorblindness. That is counterproductive and distorts the discussion considerably. There is a lot of room for debate on pressing political questions--e.g. what kind of movement do we want to build? are multi-racial socialist organizations worth fighting for, is solidarity in the fight against oppression possible or desirable?--that take for granted that colorblindness is bullshit, that we don't live in a "post-racial" society, that racially oppressed people are, as such, subject to forms oppression that white people are not, etc. Fighting colorblindness is crucial, but among those who are already won to fighting it, many questions remain (such as those I mentioned above).

Take the following quotation from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's Socialist Worker article "Race, Class and Marxism":

Oppression is not just an ideological tool to divide groups of workers, but has real material consequences as well. Because of racism, for example, the median household income for white families as of 2006 was over $50,000 a year. For Blacks, it was just under $32,000. By every measure of the quality of life in the U.S., whites are on the top and Blacks are on the bottom.

Marxists do not deny that these differences exist, nor do we deny that oppression means the lives of some workers are actually worse than others. For Marxists, the question is the cause of the differences. Are the disparities the result of white workers benefiting directly from the oppression of Black workers? That is, do white workers make more on average because Black workers make less?

To accept this explanation means to ignore the biggest beneficiary in the disparity in wages--employers and bosses. That employers are able to use racism to justify paying Black workers less brings the wages of all workers down--the employers enjoy the difference.

This is not to deny that white workers receive some advantages in U.S. society because they are white in a racist society. If they did not get some advantage--and with it, the illusion that the system works for them--then racism would not be effective in dividing Black and white workers.

This last bit is most important, because it is precisely this point that defenders of the language of privilege almost always charge Marxists with denying. The question isn't whether or not white workers enjoy certain advantages that black workers do not, given that we live in a racist society. White people of all classes are spared certain forms of racial oppression that non-white people endure. To say this is simply to restate the fact that we live in a racist society, a fact not contested by (genuine) Marxist critics.

The root of the debate is what framework best explains how this situation came about, how it is reproduced over time, and how we can change it. It seems to me that the language of privilege is substantially worse on all three counts when compared with a framework that focuses on oppressive social relations and the ways in which they are structured by the social system writ large.

Lots of white workers are racist. That is a sociological fact. White workers, insofar as they're white, are not racially oppressed. That is also a sociological fact. Because non-white people endure racial oppression in a racist society, they live with specific burdens that white people do not have to live with (e.g. consider the tribulations of raising black children (see here and here) in a racist society). Again, another fact.

But neither (genuine) Marxists nor those committed to the language of privilege deny these claims. So acknowledging these facts does not decisively speak in favor of the privilege framework as against other competing theories of oppression such as that advanced by contemporary Marxists. More, as we will see below, needs to be said in order to defend the privilege framework. My guess is that its dominance and wide currency during the 1990s has lent it kind of default credibility among many of today's radicals. But, like any worthwhile political framework, it should have to earn this credibility by showing that it is better than other competing approaches.

It seems to me that the basic questions here are as follows. By what social process do racist white workers come to hold racist beliefs? How is racist ideology--by ideology we mean "false consciousness"--produced and reproduced over time? What social function does it play? And, finally: Does the fact that certain groups are subjected to special forms of oppression under capitalism mean that workers of different groups cannot unite and fight for liberation from class exploitation and all forms of oppression?

I won't argue for these claims here, but the (genuine) Marxist response here would, first of all, be to locate the origins of racist ideology in a historical process of development that grows out of the need to legitimate slavery, colonialism, imperialism, genocide, primitive accumulation and so on. The continuous reproduction of racist ideology would be explained by its entanglement in a dialectic of ongoing social processes rooted in material conditions. The function it plays, of course, would be various and shifting, but basically geared toward maintaining oppressive social relations and staving off the possibility of a multi-racial challenge from below. And, as for multi-racial struggle, Marxists would say that it is both possible and necessary for us to fight for. Multi-racial struggle and solidarity is not historically unprecedented, but it is, to be sure, quite difficult to achieve under racist conditions. It can only be built upon an uncompromising commitment to completely uproot all forms of oppression. A colorblind multi-racial radical movement, on the other hand, is neither desirable nor possible. It would be a contradiction in terms and would serve to perpetuate racial oppression rather than challenge it. Genuine solidarity means taking seriously the principle that an injury to one worker is an injury to all.

These answers seem to be correct. But they are controversial and worth debating out within the growing radical movement in the US. Better to debate these questions than to cast aside all critiques of the language of privilege on the grounds that they are motivated by colorblind ideology.

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Fraternities and the Capitalist State

Many readers will have seen this article in Rolling Stone, detailing the horrors of the fraternity system in general, and at elite ruling-class feeder institutions like Dartmouth in particular. The article raises a lot of questions about fraternities as institutions–their role in consolidating gender oppression and facilitating rape, their hard-nosed conservatism, their brutal treatment of members, the nihilism and anti-intellectualism that they encourage and promote, etc. etc.. And, of course, the lurid details in the article about the culture of hazing in the Greek system is repulsive. But another striking element in the article is the role that fraternities play in grooming the ruling class. Here is a representative quotation from the article:

Nestled on a picturesque campus in tiny Hanover, New Hampshire, [Darmouth] has produced a long list of celebrated alumni – among them two Treasury secretaries (Timothy Geithner, '83, and Henry Paulson Jr., '68), a Labor secretary (Robert Reich, '68) and a hefty sampling of the one percent (including the CEOs of GE, eBay and Freddie Mac, and the former chairman of the Carlyle Group). Many of these titans of industry are products of the fraternity culture: Billionaire hedge-fund manager Stephen Mandel, who chairs Dartmouth's board of trustees, was a brother in Psi Upsilon, the oldest fraternity on campus. Jeffery Immelt, the CEO of GE, was a Phi Delt, as were a number of other prominent trustees, among them Morgan Stanley senior adviser R. Bradford Evans, billionaire oilman Trevor Rees-Jones and venture capitalist William W. Helman IV. Hank Paulson belonged to Lohse's fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, or SAE.

Reading this article alongside Marxist work on the nature of the State is worth doing. For example, in What Does the Ruling Class Do When it Rules? Göran Therborn argues that:

The qualities required of the personnel of the capitalist state have always been of a special kind, as can be seen from the filtering processes of education, selection and training... experience of manual labor has never played any role in recruitment; only certain intellectual talents of an openly elitist character have entered into the selection procedure. For example, it was in order to deepen this exclusivist basis that the teaching of Latin and Greek was reintroduced or given renewed emphasis in 19th century secondary schools... The influence of this educational system over the patterning of careers is asserted by the informal criteria of entry into the state machine; by the operation of 'good old boys networks'... The training of state personnel has focused on the systematic inculcation of one particular leadership quality. This is not the capacity to weld together a collective organizational team, but the ability to exercise authority over and ensure the respect of subordinate members of the staff. Boarding schools and the student fraternities of elite universities are devoted to the development of self-discipline and self-confidence in such leadership cadres."

For many academics, it is easy to forget that the university is one institution lodged within a much bigger system–capitalism. It is not a fully autonomous, self-standing entity where only the unforced force of the better argument reigns. Recognizing the university as, in part, an institution that facilitates the reproduction of capitalist social relations is key. This is especially true when universities attempt to brush against the grain of power, e.g. when they attempt to do away with the Greek systems. With so much social power–and wealth–concentrated in the Greek system, it is almost impossible for some universities to do away with them (or even reform them substantially) given the threat of backlash from moneyed alumni tied to fraternities and sororities. My sense is that it would take a movement to successfully defeat the Greek system on the campuses of big universities. Moreover, defeating fraternities would also require a certain high-profile crisis that could be seized on to turn public opinion against them. This, of course, would have to be combined with a critique–one that highlights the racism, sexism, and, of course, their class power–of the role that they play in society writ large.

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Is the Problem the 1% or the System?

The occupy movement has brought the issue of class power to the forefront in an unprecedented way. The entire framing of the movement's politics --the 99% against the 1%-- speaks against a political and economic system dominated by a wealthy ruling class. If the media was all-consumed by the ideologically-tendentious issue of deficit reduction only a few months ago, that focus has been shattered (or at least destabilized) by the rapid proliferation of occupy movements from Portland, OR to Orlando, FL.

But within the movement, questions remain. The vast majority of participants agree that the 1% enjoys a concentration of economic and political power that is highly unjust. A key goal of the movement everywhere is to challenge the entrenched power of an unelected dominant group --the 1%-- that lords over us. There is also a sense that the 1% is responsible for the crisis (and should therefore be made to pay for it). Among the most popular chants at Occupy Chicago are "banks got bailed out, we got sold out!" and "how to fix the deficit? tax, tax, tax the rich!".

But it is also commonplace for participants to argue that the problem is our broken economic and political system. This is an argument familiar to many on the Left who have argued that it is the internal contradictions of capitalism, not a failure of regulation or a climate of greed, that produced this economic crisis. But on the face of it, this emphasis on the system doesn't appear to cohere with the "dominant group" perspective that pins responsibility for the crisis --and the push for austerity-- on the ruling class (the 1%). Why? Because the "it's the system" perspective seems to suggest that the ruling class isn't responsible for the crisis in the sense that they made imprudent or unethical decisions. The "it's the system" perspective emphasizes the ways in which the system pushes individuals in the ruling class to act in ways that produce deep recessions and crises.

So, is it the system that's the root of the problem? Or is it the dominance of the ruling class? You probably saw this one coming, but I'm going to argue that this is a false dilemma. It is both the system and the dominant group within that system that is at the root of crisis.

Before I say what I think about this, I'd like to flag the fact that these questions have a long history in the Marxist tradition. The system vs. dominant group question was taken up in the famous Miliband-Poulantzas debate that raged in the pages of New Left Review in the 60s and 70s. This sparked several other debates internal to the Marxist tradition on the question of the state, the most interesting of which (in my view) being the arguments among German Marxists in the 1970s involving Hirsch, Offe, Altvater, and others. For an excellent introduction to these debates, see Simon Clarke's overview here, or read Martin Carnoy's The State and Political Theory (esp. chapter 5).

First, let me say a little bit about the 1% as a dominant group. We all know that the 1% has colonized the political system in the US for its own purposes. This is uncontroversial. The 1% spends vast sums each election cycle funding the candidates of both major parties. Presidential campaigns are simply a struggle between the Democrats and Republicans to garner more support and funding from corporate elites. The 1% also spends vast sums on PR and propaganda (this includes political advertisements as well as ostensibly non-political commercials, e.g. an Exxon-Mobil ad that ends with the jingle "Energy for a stronger America"). We can also add here that the 1% spends vast sums on pro-business interest groups (e.g. the US Chamber of Commerce, etc.). In addition to dominating the election system, the 1% also spends vast sums on lobbying efforts to fight for legislation friendly to their interests. Even when popular demands for reforms surface, the 1% uses its influence and power to mold reform proposals to fit its interests as much as possible. Consider, for instance, the Sherman Act, which was ostensibly passed to break up industrial monopolies, but ended up being used to break unions rather than business cartels. Or, take the following example. Commenting on the popular demand for a public Commission to regulate railroad corporations, an earlier U.S. Attorney General said that:

It satisfies popular clamor for a governmental supervision of railroads, at the same time that that supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such a Commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things. It thus becomes a barrier between the railroad corporations and the people and a sort of protection against hasty and crude legislation hostile to railroad interests... The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission but to utilize it. (quoted from Charles E. Lindblom's excellent Politics and Markets).

It is also well-known that government and industry interpenetrate one another through revolving-door arrangements. The person regulating a particular industry ends up as a highly-paid employee of that industry. High-ranking officials in a particular industry wind up with the public job of regulating that same industry (only to wind up, once again, with a cushy position in private industry afterward). This is a basic feature of how the political system in the US functions. Virtually all elected officials are either already wealthy businesspeople before they get elected, or they become wealthy business people in the course of their tenure.

There's still more to say here, however, about the various ways that the ruling class has colonized the state to serve its interests. Businesspeople have, as Charles Lindblom famously argued in Politics and Markets, a privileged position within government. They are not just another "special interest group". They stand above all other "interest groups" because of their position in society. They have direct access to governing politicians in ways that no other citizens have. Why? Because business leaders are, more or less, unelected public officials who make big decisions about the direction of our society, whether it be decisions about investment, employment, wages and benefits, location of factories and production, etc.

In any society, certain basic decisions must be carried out. Decisions must be made about what is to be produced, how it will be produced, according to what organizational structure, by whom, etc. Decisions must be made regarding the investment of capital in production, the allocation of resources, whether to use certain technologies, the amount of money devoted to innovation, etc. Decisions must be made regarding where plants and factories will be located, how many workers they will employ, whether workers will be laid off if profits fall, etc. Decisions must be made about how much compensation and bonuses executives should be paid. All of these decisions must be made by someone, no matter what kind of society we live in. And what's more --these are hugely important decisions that have massive consequences for the well-being and life chances of all of us. They have a huge impact on the standard of living, employment levels, wages, economic growth, prices and so forth.

But who makes these decisions in our society? Unelected business people. The majority of us do not have any say in these matters. The majority has no means of making the unelected public officials of the 1% accountable to our interests. This is not a new development. By definition, a capitalist society is one in which the basic structure of the economy --the means of production-- is privately owned and controlled by a small class. The productive instruments, the resources, the capital and so forth are all privately owned and controlled by a small class of owners --the 1%. According to our present legal/political system, to allow the democratic will of the people to determine these decisions would be to interfere with the private property of the 1%. Genuine democracy of, by, and for the people is incompatible with the private property of the 1%. In other words, the class power of the 1% is fundamentally at odds with the ideal of a democratically self-governing society.

So, business people (or, if you like, the ruling class, or the 1%) are basically unelected public officials. They make decisions of huge importance for all of us. Unsurprisingly, then, elected officials take the class power of the 1% seriously. They know that if business turns against their government, bad consequences will follow: rises in unemployment, stagnant growth due to a failure to invest, capital flight, etc. They know that they must try to induce (not command) business --with tax breaks, subsidies, lax regulations, etc.-- to fulfill its function in the system so that the economy does well according to its own standards. Whether elected officials in capitalist societies like it or not, they must take seriously the structural economic imperative to make the 1% happy. This is an example of how the power of the 1% places constraints upon what governments can and cannot do.

Governments have, since the very beginning of capitalism, taken on a basic supportive role vis-a-vis business. Costly investments in fixed capital and infrastructure, because they are not profitable in the short term, are often taken on by government in order to grease the axles of private businesses. Likewise with "early federal policy on banks, canals, and roads; governmental profligacy in indulgences to railroads; the judicial interpretation of anti-monopoly legislation to restrict unions rather than industry; the deployment of Marines to protect American enterprise in Latin America; the use of public utility regulation to protect business earnings; and the diversion of fair trade laws from their ostensible public purposes to the protection of monopolistic privilege" (Lindblom, p.174).

This leads us into a discussion of the system. Thus far, we've seen how the State in capitalist society is a class State. We've seen the multiple avenues through which a dominant group, i.e. the ruling class, can directly influence the actions of government. When government officials aren't themselves former (or current, or future) ruling class members, they are subject to the influence of corporate campaign finance, intense lobbying efforts, as well as influence generated by the concentrated economic power of business people. We've also seen that the class power of the 1% places constraints on what governments can and cannot do, no matter how strong its popular mandate from the people. But now I'd like to connect this discussion to an indictment of the system.

The first thing to say is that the sorry state of affairs discussed above didn't come about by accident. Nor did it come about in a vacuum. It is not the result of a co-ordinated conspiracy by people who know one another personally and communicate regularly about how to maintain their dominance. This state of affairs is the result of hundreds of years of capitalist development.

Capitalism is a system in which the basic structure of the economy is privately owned and used for the sole purpose of accumulating profit. Whether capitalists like it or not, they are compelled to maximize profit. They are forced, on pain of insolvency, to compete against other capitalist firms in order to survive. And winning out in competition means accumulating large profits, and reinvesting those profits in expanded production to accumulate still more profit. "Accumulate, accumulate, accumulate!" more or less summarizes the basic priorities of the system.

When the accumulation process is interrupted, the system seizes up and goes into crisis. There are many different reasons why interruptions occur, but one important reason is overproduction. Overproduction occurs when capitalists accumulate more capital, resources, or means of production than they can profitably make use of. So, when sufficient profitable investment opportunities are not forthcoming, what do capitalists do? They hoard their capital and try to wait out the storm. It doesn't matter whether mass unemployment or food shortages ensue: in periods of economic crisis the ruling class will hoard its wealth until profitable investment opportunities re-emerge.

So, in order for a capitalist system to function (in order for people to have jobs, in order for people to be able to purchase the necessities of life, in order for tax revenues to be generated to fund government salaries, the legal system, roads, the military, etc.) the accumulation process must be in full swing. When accumulation is disrupted, crisis ensues and the vast majority suffers as a result.

Now, at this point, we have to ask: if the above is true, what does it say about the basic function of the State in capitalist societies? The answer should be clear. The capitalist State's function is to cultivate and maintain favorable conditions for accumulation. In short, the fundamental role of the State in capitalism is to secure the conditions for profitability.

Let's expand upon this a bit. We've already established that the State is structurally dependent on the accumulation process. That is, the State is funded through resources derived from the private accumulation process (collected via taxation). Moreover the viability of a particular governing group within the State is dependent upon economic "success" (as opposed to stagnation and crisis). In this context, State officials are compelled --by their own institutional self-interest-- to try to ensure that the accumulation process runs smoothly. If they don't, they are liable to face sharp drops in tax revenues as well as other bad economic consequences (e.g. unemployment, stagnation, capital flight, etc.). This is what politicians --from both corporate parties-- mean when they talk about "creating a good business climate", or adopting policies that are "pro growth". This need to ensure that the accumulation process continues is what drove the construction of the Interstate Highway System as well as other big public works projects in U.S. history. The goal was to socialize the costs overhead and infrastructure to encourage private investment for profit. Likewise, this basic role is what explains the massive bailouts of financial institutions, the giveaways dolled out through "quantitative easing", and the big tax breaks handed out by Obama and the Democrats. Governing officials are trying to find ways to jump start the accumulation process --no matter what the human cost.

So, as we've seen, the function of the State is to secure the conditions for the accumulation of profit. But in order to do that well, the State has to act in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. And what is in the interest of the capitalist class as a whole may not be the same as what is in the interest of some particular capitalist firm. Recall that capitalists confront one another in the marketplace as rivals in competition. Let us add here the Marxist complaint that capitalist production is anarchic, haphazard and unplanned. Although the capitalist class a whole may act together to secure legislation on shared goals (e.g. union-busting), there will a lot that they disagree on, given that their priority is maximizing their own profit and bumping off competitors. What this makes clear is that the self-interest of a particular capitalist firm may not coincide with the class interest of all capitalists.

But the basic role of the State is to ensure that the accumulation process runs smoothly, i.e. to serve the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. Thus we should expect the capitalist State to periodically do things that buck the will of a particular capitalist firm. In fact, this happens all the time. Alternatively, because of special direct access and influence to State officials, sometimes capitalists are able to persuade governing officials to serve the interests of their particular firm more than the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. The point is that there may be a contradiction here: between the basic function of the state and the ways that particular members of the ruling class influence the state directly.

This isn't the only contradiction. The State in capitalist societies involves electoral competition. That means that different factions of establishment groups, organized into dominant political parties, compete against one another to determine which will head up the State. Regardless of which of them governs, of course, the basic function of the State remains the same. But the cycle of elections every four years in the U.S. means that particular governing officials can be removed from office and replaced by others. Thus, governing officials are compelled to seek popular support in order to reproduce their own power. In a word --their continued existence as public officials requires that they seek legitimation from the public. That doesn't mean that the rule of State officials must actually be legitimate --it merely means that their rule must appear to be so. If a governing party does not secure legitimation, it threatens to lose power to representatives from another establishment party. So, for reasons of self-interest, elected officials in capitalist societies must try to make it appear as if they are uniquely qualified to fulfill their role in the system. The need to secure legitimation also means that the State must speak in the language of universality and general interests. When it advertises itself publicly, it will always say that it stands for generalizable interests and popular goals --as opposed to the goals and particular interests of the capitalist class. If the capitalist state advertises itself as what it really is, it would not be able to secure legitimation. Thus, as Claus Offe puts it, "the State can only function as a capitalist state by appealing to symbols and sources of support that conceal its nature as a capitalist state; the existence of a capitalist state presupposes the systematic denial of its nature as a capitalist state."

However, in periods of social struggle, sometimes governing officials are compelled to grant concessions to popular movements in order to secure legitimation. But many --indeed the vast majority-- of reforms demanded by the population brush against the grain of the accumulation process. This reveals a profound contradiction in capitalist societies, i.e. the contradiction between accumulation and legitimation.

On the one hand, the capitalist State has to secure legitimation from the population. That doesn't mean that it has to actually be legitimate --it means that it is compelled to secure the appearance of being legitimate. In periods of intense struggle, this means granting concessions to popular movements (because otherwise it would reveal that the State doesn't serve the interests of the majority). But granting concessions or passing reforms contradicts the need to ensure that the accumulation process runs smoothly. Hence the contradiction and all of the instability that comes with it.

Austerity is an excellent example of how this contradiction manifests itself. Take Greece, where a nominally "socialist" party is in power. Presumably, it is not part of the party's program that their basic goal is to gut the welfare state and lower working-class living standards. Presumably the party is committed in writing to favoring basic center-Left demands, including maintenance of the welfare state. But, nonetheless, the ruling PASOK government in Greece is caught between the need to secure legitimation and the need to secure the conditions for the accumulation of profits. Through its actions, however, we see very clearly which conjunct of the contradiction has a stronger pull on the government. PASOK has pushed through a punishing program of deep cuts, austerity, layoffs, union busting, and tax increases on workers. But it is doing all of this in order to try to protect the profits of the European ruling classes and to re-establish the conditions for steady accumulation. But in doing this, the Greek state is showing itself for what it is: a class state. Hence, it is losing legitimacy by the day. As a PASOK MP describes the situation,

"The anger over the austerity measures is so deep that many PASOK MPs no longer dare to appear in public. “We can’t even leave our homes to go to a taverna any more,” the Guardian quotes an anonymous MP of the governing party as saying. “You’re called a pig or a traitor for passing measures none of us wanted to pass. It’s not a life.”

I don't doubt that many of the PASOK MP's didn't want to pass the punishing austerity packages. But they passed them nonetheless, because of the web of power relations in which the State is situated. The EU, dominated by French and German capital, has been pushing hard to protect the assets of the European ruling classes. They have made economic threats: capital flight, economic misery, inflation, isolation, etc. They have made political threats some of which hint at the possibility of military coercion and "regime change" if their harsh conditions are not met. At the same time, PASOK is under the tutelage of domestic Greek capital as well. Whatever the aims of the PASOK government officials themselves, the systemic pressure --and the pressure of tremendously concentrated class power coming from France and Germany-- are forcing them to put profits over the vast majority of the population.

So let us take stock of what's been said above. How is the dominance of the 1% related to the system? The 1% are dominant in virtue of their role within the system. If the particular individuals in the 1% simply disappeared, others would take their place and the problems would remain. Their position of dominance is facilitated by the structure of the system in such a way that we can only oppose their rule if we oppose the system that makes it possible. Furthermore, we see that the particular interests of individual members of the 1% sometimes contradict the overall interests of the whole 1%. This fact is, again, true because of the competitive, anarchic nature of capitalist production. This compels ruling class members to push very hard for subsidies, tax breaks, no bid contracts, etc. and milk the government for money and favors. This would be true even in a perfectly competitive "free" market, because the very nature of the capitalist system compels them to do this.

Finally, the connection between the dominance of the ruling class and the capitalist system explains why it is pointless to expect moral suasion to move the 1% to change its ways. The system isn't in crisis merely because of callousness and greed --though these vices are no doubt highly prevalent among the 1%. The system is in crisis because of its irrational drive to accumulate for its own sake in the face of growing contradictions and environmental limits. And the ruling class is forced --by competition-- to participate in this mad race toward destruction. Appealing to their conscience is pointless --we need to change the system. You don't ask Kings to be more benevolent and less cruel --you demand that they be dethroned. Likewise, we shouldn't ask that our rulers be more "socially conscious" or "less greedy". We should instead demand that the system that facilitates their dominance be overturned.

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On "Class Reductionism"

In some circles, it goes without saying that Marxism (or, at least, Classical Marxism, or first generation Marxism or whatever) is "class reductionist". I think it's worth spending a moment just trying to get clear on what the charge is supposed to be. To be sure, I think some version of it applies to some (not all) figures on the Marxist Left. I don't mean to suggest that the charge is inherently frivolous or misguided. Still, in my experience, the objection is thrown around so loosely that it's often not clear exactly what's being said. For this reason I've taken to simply asking those pushing the objection to explain what it means before trying to defend Marxism from the charge.

One gloss on "class reductionism" goes as follows. It is the mistake of reducing all forms of oppression, e.g. racism, to economic inequalities. I've encountered some who seem to think that this means that Marxists understand racial oppression to boil down to income inequality or stratification. I've encountered others who claim that Marxists conflate race with "socio-economic status". (Aside: I despise the term "socio-economic status". People seem to say it instead of class because it sounds more technical and "official". But it's a conceptual mess that obscures more than it clarifies. I really wish people would just say "class", even if they misuse the concept. If nothing else, it rolls of the tongue much more effortlessly.)

Others would say that "class reductionism" isn't a view about what explains what. It is, rather, a normative mistake that ascribes unequal importance or significance to, say, racism and class disparities. On this view, class reductionists just don't think that racism is as important as class to study or fight against.

For others, "class reductionist" is tantamount to a strong kind of eliminativism. This version of "class reductionism" holds that because talk of race and gender oppression can be reduced to talk of income inequality, it follows that talk of race and gender should be eliminated in favor of a political lexicon that is entirely based around the concepts of income inequality, stratification, etc. Some eliminativists even claim that there is something wrong with talk about race and gender, viz. that it obscures the real heart of the matter: income inequality. This seems to be the position of Walter Benn-Michaels, aptly dubbed the "Glenn Beck of the contrarian left" by Richard Seymour. This is basically a version of the familiar racist ideology of colorblindness, albeit with a generally left flavor.

If Marxism were class reductionist in any of the above senses, I too would reject it. But it's not clear that Marxism makes any of these claims. The normative mistake has been made by Marxist as well as non-Marxist socialists, to be sure. And they should be ruthlessly criticized for having made the mistake. As Trotsky argued, the "mistake" is usually connected to latent racism among some in the working class movement. Trotsky said of this phenomenon that "the argument that the slogan for self-determination leads away from the class point of view is an adaptation of the ideology of the white workers". "The Negro", Trotsky argued in 1939, "can be won to the class point of view only when the white worker is educated", i.e. only when white workers are disabused of racist beliefs, when racism is smashed within the labor movement. I don't think the normative mistake is a feature of Marxism as such, in fact, I would argue, Marxism speaks against abstractly and inflexibly ascribing unequal significance to race and class. As a form of analysis that looks at concrete conjunctures as dialectical totalities, Marxism is attuned to the combined and uneven development of economic and political formations. This is what underlies some of the best Marxist scholarship, e.g. on questions of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, on colonialism and imperialism, on national liberation struggles, permanent revolution, etc.

Moreover, Marxism makes no claims to the effect that racial oppression boils down to differences in income or "socio-economic status". First off, Marxism does not trade in concepts such as "stratification" or "socio-economic status" at all. Marxism offers a very rigorous, relational definition of class that differs in many respects from the ordinary language use of the term in everyday speech. The basic Marxist complaint against liberal income-based approaches to inequality is that they wrongly take income inequalities to be sui generis. They don't explain what it is about our economic system that produces income inequalities. Marxism, on the other hand, sees income disparities as deriving from more fundamental asymmetrical relations of power that are rooted in the material conditions of modern societies.

It is a fact that the material conditions of the U.S. social order, from the very beginning, have been structured by racial oppression, just as it is a fact that racial oppression itself grew out of a set of material conditions. U.S. capitalism literally comes into being, dripping from every pore, covered in blood and dirt. Let's not forget that capitalism comes of age in the context of expropriations of indigenous populations, colonial extraction of natural resources, and the enslavement of human beings -in short, what Marx called "primitive (or primary) accumulation". Modern racism emerges out of European colonial expansion and the slave trade. It grows out of a need to justify the enslavement, domination and subordination of non-white peoples to needs of the ruling classes of Europe. Thus, racism and capitalism co-originated in a complex dialectic of mutual development. Racial oppression has been a basic feature of the functioning of the system since its inception. It would be foolish to think that racism could simply fade away without being decisively uprooted by struggle against its historical and material bedrock. It should be clear that no Marxist worth her salt could, on the basis of the analysis above, endorse an eliminativist position.

So, for Marxists, disparities in income, job and educational opportunities, etc. are explained by an critical analysis of the material conditions of social life. What a historical materialist analysis of the system reveals, however, isn't just that racism is a basic feature of basic structure of society. It also reveals that capitalism, as a mode of production, is shot through with contradictions. One contradiction is that the interests of the two most important classes in capitalist societies, workers and capitalists, are diametrically opposed. If workers want a shorter work day, better pay, safer conditions, more voice in the workplace, capitalists want the opposite. But, the clash between workers and capitalists isn't a fair fight. Capitalists have a lot of advantages on their side: a legal system meant to service their needs and stop workers from organizing, a repressive state apparatus ready to defend their interests in moments of conflict (e.g. by breaking strikes), a political system beholden to their interests, etc. We could go on. What this reveals is that class relations, such as the relation between workers and capitalists, are asymmetrical relations of power. The fundamental problem, then, isn't that capitalists enjoy higher levels of consumption than workers. It's not that capitalists possess more stuff than workers that, at the end of the day, is the fundamental problem with capitalist social relations. It's what the capitalists can do to others with the stuff they possess that matters. In other words, Marxists don't fundamentally worry themselves with looking into whether abstract individuals, off in their own corners, are consuming unequal amounts of stuff. Marxists are concerned with social relationships, rooted in the material conditions of capitalist societies, that exhibit exploitation, oppression or domination.

Is Marxism, then, in any sense "class reductionist"? Not if we go by the senses of "class reductionist" examined earlier.

Still, I can imagine further charges of class reductionism that could be leveled at Marxism here. Someone could argue that Marxists are reductionist insofar as they don't understand racial oppression (or any other form of oppression) to be particular particulars, sui generis and completely autonomous from one another. The charge clearly sticks; Marxists indeed do not think that racism, for example, is totally sui generis. Marxism holds that no single part of the social life can be fully understood when torn apart from other features about modern societies and history. Marxists view society as a totality with complex dialectically mediated interconnections between various parts. But does that make one reductionist? I don't see that it does.

Marxists, on the basis of a concrete, materialist analysis of historical development, will argue that we can't understand modern racism without seeing how and why it emerges when and where it does. We don't fully grasp modern racism without learning about European colonialism, imperialism, and the battles for economic/political dominance between the ruling elites of different European empires. Does that mean that racism is reducible to its historical origins? Hardly. Here Marxists must emphasize that ours is a dialectical social theory. That means that racism and class exploitation develop such that there is causal interaction going both ways; the two reciprocally interact, co-evolve, inflect one another, in a dance of mutual reinforcement and tension (one sometimes pulling more strongly against the other and vice versa). Reduction of one to the other elides the dialectical structure of Marxism as a tool for social analysis.

This isn't idle academic squabbling. Getting clear on how forms of oppression are rooted in the system, and therefore bound up with other forms of oppression, is of immense practical significance. This insight underlies the political tactics and strategies of the Marxist left. Most importantly, it shows that an anti-racism that fails to uncover the ways that capitalism reinforces, exacerbates and consolidates racial oppression is doomed to failure. It also shows that an anti-capitalism that doesn't grasp the racial domination written to the very infrastructure of the U.S. economic system is similarly doomed to failure and defeat.

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Who Benefits From Oppression?

On the face of it, this is an easy question to answer: the oppressors. But unpacking this simple answer requires that we raise several questions that are not as easily answered: Who are the oppressors? Where are they located in the social system? Whom do they oppress, and why? How do they oppress? In what precise relation do they stand vis-a-vis the oppressed?

I don't intend to attempt to offer full answers to any of these questions. I have a more modest goal: to think through a particular strategy for answering them familiar to some on the socialist Left. I have in mind the sort of argument (see here) put forward by Lindsey German (formerly of the Socialist Workers Party (UK)). For a similar argument, see this article at SW.org.

Here's German's statement of the argument I'm going to examine:

I want to reject the concept of patriarchy as at best a muddled term simply meaning women’s oppression (in which case it cannot explain this oppression), and at worst a completely idealist notion which has no basis in material reality. I want to show that it is not men who “benefit” from the oppression of women but capital. I want to look at the way in which the family has changed, and how as it has changed women’s conception of themselves has also changed. Hopefully that will demonstrate that women’s continued oppression is not the result of male conspiracy (or an alliance between male workers and the capitalist class), but of the continuation of class society in every part of the world. It follows that I shall argue the “socialist” countries have no more in common with socialism than they have with women’s liberation.

So the answer that we should expect German to give to our question "who benefits?" is: the ruling class. But is that accurate?

It depends first on what we mean by "benefit". Suppose that we take "benefit" to simply mean money. What German wants to say is that working class men do not procure monetary benefits from living in a society that oppresses women, but the ruling class does. She offers two arguments in defense of that claim. First, a labor market in which men and women are divided, with women forced to accept lower wages and worse jobs, does not benefit working men as members of the working class. That is, this sort of labor market drives down wages across the board, making all workers worse off. Second, the ruling class directly benefits from dividing and conquering the labor market along gender lines, since the strength of a united class would be far more effective in bargaining for a larger share of ruling class profits. Notice that this is a counter-factual claim. That is, it asks us to imagine a contrary-to-fact scenario (i.e. one in which the working class isn't divided, but united) in order to make its point. Since a united working class, one without internal hierarchies and relations of domination, would be much better for all workers, it follows that internal inequalities within the working class are not in it's long-run interest as a class.

Now, for my part, I think both of these arguments are sound. First of all, a divided labor market is worse for workers and better for employers, hence why employers love "two tiered" pension plans, etc. etc. When workers compete amongst themselves for jobs, be it through "legitimate" means (i.e. by "meritocratic" means) or "illegitimate" means (i.e. by means of coercion, power, etc.), capitalists benefit because this increases their bargaining power vis-a-vis labor. When the strength of capital relative to labor increases, wages tend to fall. The converse is true: when the strength of labor relative to capital increases, labor is able to secure a larger fraction of profits. Also, the counter-factual scenario described above does make clear that a genuinely egalitarian and united working class would be the best scenario for the class as a whole.

But does this establish German's answer to the "who benefits?" question? I do not think that it does. Let's stick with the "monetary" interpretation of "benefit" (I'll consider other forms of "benefit" later). Is it in fact true that working class men don't draw any such benefits from the oppression of women? The answer, I think, is no: working class men do benefit from the oppression of women. Let's consider some examples. Take divorce. Studies show that the living standards of women tend, on average, to substantially drop after divorce, whereas men's living standards go up. That trend, German would surely agree, exists because we live in a society in which women are oppressed, thus the difference in monetary benefit from divorce derives from oppression. Yet men consistently come out on top, and thus benefit from it. Were arrangements to change such that men's living standards didn't go up on average after divorce, they would thereby lose a material benefit.

Now, German can reply here as follows: "but this is small potatoes compared to the benefits the ruling class garners from a sexist labor market and a sexual division of labor in the home". And she's right, as far as the claim goes. But replying in this way concedes my point: working class men do benefit, albeit in particular ways that don't mesh with their overall class interests, from the oppression of women. That's in part how sexism reproduces itself over time: some men are reluctant to give up benefits and privileges (however small, in the grand scheme of things) granted to them by sexist social relations. And this is also in part why the divide-and-conquer tactics of the ruling class are effective in some cases. After all, if the divide-and-conquer tactics didn't include some promise of a small benefit (small in comparison to the large overall gains that could be won without divisions), they wouldn't work. To say that men don't benefit at all is to lack an explanation of how the ruling class is sometimes able to successfully divide and conquer on the basis of gender oppression.

Think of it this way. Suppose that a sexist male worker has a balance sheet that adds up all of the relevant benefits and costs that pertain to his status. I agree, along with German, that there should be a large red entry in the "costs" column that makes clear what the worker is losing as a result of living in a capitalist society in which the working class is divided, and thus more easily conquered, by capital. But that doesn't mean that there aren't going to be any small green entries in the "benefit" column. Though they will be canceled out by the large red entry in "costs" column, there are still going to be entries in the "benefit" column.

Or take this example of benefiting from sexism. Imagine a household in which a married man and woman, both employed and both working class, abide by a traditional sexist division of labor at home. The woman works what we might call a "double day", that is, she puts in her paid 40 hrs a week at work, but returns home do her second shift of hard domestic labor for no pay. Suppose she is hard at work washing dishes while her husband relaxes on the couch and reads a stimulating novel. Would we really say that the man isn't benefiting from this sexist division of labor? To be sure, we can imagine a world that was better for both the man and the woman in which domestic labor wasn't privatized and unpaid, but socialized and equitably distributed. This arrangement would grant both parties greater benefits than they (respectively) receive in the status quo. But though this arrangement is a surely goal worth fighting for, it's a counter-factual scenario. The "who benefits?" question, however, pertains to the actual world. And in the sexist world we actually live in, the man on the couch is befitting in the short term, since he enjoys the fruits of his wife's labor while he reclines and reads.

And there are still other examples of benefits. For instance, in a sexist labor market, individual male workers benefit from having more job options available to them. Moreover, they benefit, as individual male workers, from their ability to more easily get promoted, get raises, etc. in the workplace. These benefits are real, material facts about our society. To be sure, qua worker, it is not in the overall class interest of male workers to exclude and subordinate any other members of their class. Each member of the working class is stronger when the class as a whole is stronger. From the narrow perspective of earnings, sexist working class men stand to benefit much more from united working class action than they do from the status quo. But that doesn't mean that men don't, in the mean time, gather various monetary benefits from living in a sexist society. Even though capital benefits long-term from sexism in a way that workers don't, it doesn't follow that no working class men benefit from it. Beyond being false, this claim creates confusion and has the potential to alienate left-wing allies who are drawn to socialist (and, in particular, Marxist) politics in a time of economic crisis.

So, I think the socialist Left can do without the "working men don't benefit from sexism" claim. First off, even from the perspective of monetary benefits, we've seen that the claim is false. Second, when we broaden the meaning of "benefit" the claim is even less plausible. There are innumerable examples here, but think, for instance, of the way that many young girls are socialized to be less confident in answering questions in a math class, whereas boys are socialized to think they should always "speak up" and answer such questions confidently. That isn't straight-forwardly monetary, but it is a benefit that boys enjoy (whether they want to or not) because of sexist gender norms in the socialization process. Saying that men don't benefit at all obscures these facts.

Still, socialists have extremely valuable, indeed essential, points to make in these discussions. It is true that the question "who benefits?" requires an answer that is class-specific. Saying "men as a whole benefit" is imprecise- since men of different classes may benefit in different ways (or, in some cases, some men may not benefit at all). Moreover, it also needs to be said that not every form of womens' oppression generates a direct benefit to men. Take "beauty" norms. Women are pressured to comply with oppressive norms that specify how they are to dress, what they are to look like, etc. Moreover, these norms pressure women into buying all sorts of expensive products, chemicals, etc. in order to live up to the standards placed before them. But, although men don't have to deal with this particular load of shit, they aren't really benefiting from the fact that women do have to deal with it. They are off the hook, sure. But that's more of a "negative" benefit than a positive one. It's not as though mens lives are better because women are forced to comply with all of these oppressive norms. To be sure, mens lives would be worse if they were similarly forced to comply. But just because something would be worse, it doesn't follow that I benefit from not enduring it. I wouldn't say that I benefit from the fact that I'm not being electrocuted right now. It is, to be sure, a privilege not to be oppressed in some particular way. But having the privilege of not being oppressed is not the same as directly benefiting from the continued existence of a form of oppression. This distinction is important. Sometimes this sort of privilege overlaps with certain benefits, but I would wager that it doesn't always overlap.

What, I think, motivates arguments like that put forward by German is the worry that if one admits that working class men benefit from sexism, one must admit that the working class is too fractured and divided to be capable of uniting to fight the ruling class. But that's not so. The idea that it is impossible for the working class to unite emerges from other sources (e.g. for an influential statement of the impossibility claim see Laclau and Mouffe's arguments in favor of this thesis in their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy). Drawing attention to the ways in which some sections of the working class derive benefits from oppressing other workers does not undermine the possibility of working class unity. Nor does it commit us to controversial concepts like the "labor aristocracy" or the like. On the contrary, such a critique of schisms among working class people is a necessary precondition to working class solidarity. Solidarity is an egalitarian idea that presupposes relations of equality and respect; there cannot be solidarity between two groups when one is actively involved in the oppression of another. Socialists have long realized this, and the history of the socialist Left is filled with interventions by Marxists arguing against racism, sexism and other forms of oppression from within the ranks of the labor movement.

Finally, the socialist counter-factual claim discussed above is powerful and can't be re-stated enough: if things were to radically change and the working class did overcome its internal divisions and inequalities... there would be no difficulty in bringing the basic structure of our society under democratic, community control in order to service human needs rather than profit. It is only the basis of having built such a working-class movement that we can really talk about building a socialist society, that is, an egalitarian society based on freedom, equality and solidarity. Any politics that promises full liberation without overcoming the domination of the ruling class is complicit in the continued domination of human beings by the iron laws of profit.

[Postscript: There is also a further complication here that concerns the notion of "benefit". In one sense, "benefit" is analogous to "good for someone". "Good for", of course, could be read (in an Aristotelian spirit) as "conducive to one's flourishing or well-being". Now, upon reflection, few of us would want to say that it is good for someone to oppress another. While they might acquire certain material privileges by means of oppression, they would nonetheless fall short of flourishing. Being oppressive is not a character trait we would associate with flourishing or living well; on the contrary, we understand such behavior to be a vice, something that evinces internal obstacles to flourishing. So, in this sense, we could say that men don't benefit from sexism since it is not good for them to be oppressors. It would be better, even from the perspective of their own well-being, if they weren't oppressive but rather more disposed to want to stand in relations of equality vis-a-vis women. This, of course, probably isn't the interpretation of "benefit" most people have in mind when they discuss the "who benefits?" question.]

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How To Argue About Taxes (and How Not To)

"Myopia afflicts the contemporary legislative process in the US in a dramatic and simple way, in the form of tables that set out the distribution of tax burdens associated with various tax reforms. Most government transfers are excluded from these burden tables, including, most importantly, Social Security and Medicare. It seems clear that a tax burden that is matched by an equivalent transfer is not, in the relevant sense, a burden at all... But the problem would not be solved even if all money transfers were included in the burden tables. That too would be arbitrary, so long as we excluded in-kind benefits such as roads, schools, and police, not to mention the entire legal system that defines and protects everyone's property rights. If literally all government benefits were taken into account, however, we would notice that almost no one suffers a net burden from government. We would be forced to conclude that there is no separate issue of the fair distribution of tax burdens, distinct from the entirely general issue of whether government secures distributive justice. This might be described as a question about the allocation of different benefits of taxation, expenditure, and other government policies to different individuals; but that looks very unlike the original question." (pp.14-15, The Myth of Ownership, Nagel and Murphy (Oxford: 2002)).

The point is that it is false to claim that we can intelligibly discuss "tax burdens" as an isolated matter apart from the social/economic system of which taxation is but a small part. In particular, it is preposterous and unjustifiable to merely examine or criticize "tax burdens", conceived of as levels of taxation on whatever (income, consumption, etc.) without also looking at the way that taxes are spent.

If, say, my income tax goes up by 5%, say by $1000/yr, and I get unlimited access to higher education (which is worth much more than $1000/yr), it would be absurd to say that my increased rate of taxation means an increased "burden". I haven't been burdened in the slightest- I've just netted quite a lot of value. It would be pointless to debate whether my 5% was, in itself, fair or unfair without considering what we get from taxation: services, a functioning society, basic social institutions, a more equal and fairer distribution of resources, etc.

But that is how the conversation is set up in mainstream "debates" about taxes. It is a discussion merely about "burdens" and whether they should be lifted just a bit or quite a lot. If it's not economists going on about what's most "efficient" or "best for growth" (as though these underspecified goals were the only values relevant to the determination of tax policy), it's politicians blathering about how to distribute the "tax burden" fairly. Now I don't want to suggest that we shouldn't pay attention to the distribution of tax rates. How tax rates are distributed is an extremely important- I've argued many times on this blog that working class tax rates should be decreased while corporate taxes, estate taxes, and the top marginal income tax rate should be steeply increased. It matters a great deal whether we have, say, a flat income tax or a progressive income tax, or whether capital gains and dividends are taxed at the same rate as wages.

Moreover, I'm not saying that taxes can never end up being a burden. For many people in the US, they absolutely are. For working class and poor people, deeply regressive taxes can end up being quite burdensome indeed. But they are burdensome on the assumption that basic needs go unmet despite the fact that people's relatively low income is taxed at a high rate. When a working class person faces high consumption taxes that increases the cost of food, that is clearly a net burden. But say that this same person pays high premiums for health insurance from a for-profit provider every month for inadequate coverage. If we were to institute a single-payer system, this person's taxes might well increase. But it would be false to say that this person is now enduring a new, increased burden. On the contrary, they would no longer have to pay high premiums to a for-profit insurance agency, and they would receive far more extensive care than they received before. What they pay in taxes is less than what they paid in premiums, and they now receive more extensive care for less money. This is clearly a net gain. The language of "burden" here is a red herring. Again, we can't make sense of the justice of tax policies without examining, among other things, what goes in and what goes out. If my taxes go up 2% and I get 25% more in terms of goods and services, it would be bizarre to say that I'm now burdened 2% more than before.

Thus, there is no abstract way to say whether a certain rate of taxation, all by itself, is burdensome or not- we can only know whether its burdensome by looking at the balance of what one pays in and what one gets out of it. We have to examine someone's class position. If we operationalize this in dollar terms, we could say that a particular policy was burdensome if and only if I paid far more into the system than I got out of it. And to calculate "what I get out of it" we have to add up a long list of social goods, institutions and services: roads and infrastructure, legal systems and courts, educational institutions, public parks, libraries, fire protection, Medicare/Medicaid, and so forth.

So, for the vast majority of us, taxation in general will not be a burden in this sense at all. Conversely, for the ruling class, taxation probably will be a "burden". They will, it seems, be required to pay more into the system than they are likely to take out of it in terms of services and public goods. Again, in a narrow sense, if the system of taxation is progressive (i.e. if the average rate of taxation increases with income) the rich will pay more into the system in dollar terms then they get out of it in services. But there are three reasons that nobody except ruling class parasites should worry about this.

First, it isn't quite right that the ruling class puts more in than they put out. In order for them to earn any profits whatsoever, they need a set of basic public institutions (legal system, police, military, courts, infrastructure, anti-trust regulators to guarantee competition, etc.) that make it possible to own property and have a market economy at all. Markets aren't "natural" in any sense whatsoever: they are conventional and require quite a lot of "big government intervention" in order to exist at all. Though we are encouraged to forget this and ignore it, the obvious fact is that private property is a legal convention, not a fact of nature. "We are all born into an elaborately structured legal system governing the acquisition, exchange, and transmission of property rights, and ownership comes to seem the most natural thing in the world. But the modern economy in which we earn our salaries, own our homes, bank accounts, retirement savings, and personal possessions, and in which we can use our resources to consume or invest, would be impossible without the framework provided by government supported by taxes". All of this must be in place in order for a capitalist economy to exist at all: the basic institutional framework underwriting markets are not "free", they must be paid for by tax revenues. So, to be sure, isn't exchanging equivalent for equivalent if we add up the taxes they pay alongside, say, the value of the education they procure from a free public university. But it's a fact that the ruling class needs a lot of government intervention (to break strikes, to intimidate protesters, to thwart social movements, to intervene globally to create a good business climate, to protect property, etc.) to make the profits that it makes. And that intervention is not free: there's a sense in which the ruling class owes the government "rent" for being there to create the conditions for profitability. Of course, power relationships mean that the ruling class is often in a position to get out paying this "rent"; thus they make working people pay it for them. They are, after all, just trying to maximize profits for themselves, even if this means socializing necessary risks and costs. The ruling class way of life is as follows: evade all costs, exploit ruthlessly, externalize risks and wastes, and jealously covet all the earnings that it can get its hands on.

Second, there can be no ethical objection to the idea of taxing the rich at much higher rates. On the contrary, there is something deeply unsavory, morally speaking, about the person with massive surpluses who refuses to relinquish any whatsoever to help those with nothing. The idea of paying according to one's means is a basic ethical principle that seems rather hard to reject. Such a principle correctly abhors the vices of avarice and miserly tendencies to hoard things for oneself. Moreover, it is absurd to ask Bill Gates to pay the same dollar amount in taxes as a working-class single mother. To object to that is to depart from our ordinary moral horizon entirely, so the ethical objection to taxing the rich hardly holds water. But, as we will see below, this moral/ethical element only arises on the condition that the pre-tax income of the ruling class is legitimate. But it is not. It is already tendentious for a ruling class person to say that their pre-tax income is "theirs" in some fundamental way (it is only "theirs" under a particular regime of property relations and public institutions which they willfully ignore in discussions of taxation). But even if it were "theirs", there are still very strong, and quite uncontroversial, ethical reasons to think that the "pay according to one's means" principle is sound. Cough it up, moneybags.

Third, it is false that the ruling class receives in profits exactly what they deserve as a result of their productive efforts. That's not how markets work. Markets aren't conscious, they aren't aware of who deserves what, and they certainly aren't in the business of rewarding people. Some of what determines market distributions is brute luck, some of it has to do with allocating resources in such a way that profit is maximized, some of it is short-sighted irrational craziness (as in the buildup to the recession we're in). In principle, I needn't do anything productive whatsoever to earn profits on an investment. Arbitrage is the most obvious example: this is when someone moves massive amounts of capital very quickly to exploit a small, temporary shift in exchange rates between, say, two currencies. This is how Soros made his billions. There is nothing productive whatsoever about such transactions. This is simply a case of money making money.

So, incomes in a market economy aren't in any sense based on what one "deserves". Often, many deserving people are denied employment simply because there is no way to profitably employ all of them. For the most part, incomes in a capitalist economy are determined by the office or position one occupies in the economy. And depending on the location of that office/position you have more or less economic power- and it is primarily the degree of economic bargaining power that determines your income. For example, if you're an un-unionzed worker in a labor market in which unemployment is high, then employers have a huge amount of economic power over you. They are in a position to push wages down in part because there are many workers competing against each other for scarce jobs. Because of your powerless position as an unemployed worker (you have nothing to take to market but your own capacity to work), your income is liable to be low. On the other hand, if you own large amounts of alienable productive resources (e.g. a factory, large amounts of resources) you are in a position to command a very high income indeed. It's not how productive you are or how hard you work, in the end, but what particular office you occupy within the system that largely determines your income.

Let us not forget that capitalism is a society in which the ownership of the means of production is concentrated in a small fraction of the population's hands. The majority of people in capitalism do not have large amounts of capital or land that they could invest for a profit; the only important productive asset most people have is their ability to labor. This means that those who own the means of production are in a position of power vis-a-vis others in that society, and thus they are in a position "to demand returns in the form of profit, interest, and rent". Most people, therefore, are not in a position of economic power such that they may extract profit, interest and rent from others.

Let me say a bit more about this to drive the point home. Marxists aren't claiming that capitalists and landowners never derive any income from, say, improvements to their land or labor they expend managing their firms. What fraction of income landlords and capitalist receive as a result of their labor is not, strictly speaking, what angers Marxists. What Marxists see as problematic is that fraction of income that capitalists and landlords receive, just because they are owners of capital or land. Their main complaint is about "money making more money" in a society in which the majority don't have such a luxury and must therefore work for every dollar they earn.

The basic problem here is that the ruling class can only earn profits on the condition that there is a large class of people who do all the labor necessary to produce profits in the first place. The ruling class can only make their massive fortunes on the condition that they own and control the means of production, whereas the majority of us do not. Their social/economic power comes from the fact that they control what we need to survive- jobs on the one hand, and goods and services on the other.

And as any child can tell you, if all the workers in a society simply stop working, the whole society grinds to a halt. If they were to stop working indefinitely, the ruling class would wither on the vine- they wouldn't even be able to continue to eat and procure their own means of subsistence. What this shows is that they are plainly dependent on a system of social labor. This is why the ruling class pulls out all the stops to prevent and to break strikes. Ruling class persons, then, are hardly self-created, isolated producers who create something out of nothing. They occupy a particular place in the economic system, and it is in virtue of their place vis-a-vis production that they are able to have the power they have, and earn the incomes that they do. So to say that there is some sense in which they "deserve" their pre-tax income is absurd. To say that they it is an illegitimate intervention into their private affairs for them to be taxed is patently false: their pre-tax income is only possible because of a massive, public system of social labor (which is not ignored at production time, but is happily ignored at tax time). Their income is not a private affair- they need the rest of us who do the work if they are to earn it! When the day comes that the ruling class produces everything they have entirely by themselves, on a deserted island, without the help of anyone else, then perhaps their complaint will have some merit. But of course they wouldn't be a ruling class anymore in such a case- they'd just be some weird person on a island who makes all their own stuff. They'd have no power over us and they'd have no way of exploiting our labor for profit.

But as long as they need the rest of us to have what they have, they should dispense with the bogus talk about the "privateness" of what they earn. It is public in every sense of the word- and it is justly taxed by society in order to fund the basic institutions, services, and goods that are required if any society is to flourish.

But though socialists support the demand to tax the rich, this isn't the goal of socialist politics. The goal of socialist politics isn't to achieve an "optimum" (whatever that would be) level of taxation on the ruling class; the goal of socialist politics is to transform society in such a way that there is no ruling class. The goal is to bring the basic structure of society under the democratic control of the people, rather than leaving it under the dictatorial control of the capitalist class.

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