Goldman on Marriage and Capitalism

I couldn't agree more than with Emma Goldman's position on marriage and capitalism:

It [marriage] is like that other paternal arrangement ---capitalism. It robs man of his birthright, stunts his growth, poisons his body, keeps him in ignorance, in poverty and dependence, and then institutes charities that thrive on the last vestige of man's self-respect.

For her take on love and its relationship with freedom:

Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?

Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root.

Link: "Marriage and Love", 1911

Chomsky on Anarcho-capitalism

Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn't the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error. The idea of "free contract" between the potentate and his starving subject is a sick joke, perhaps worth some moments in an academic seminar exploring the consequences of (in my view, absurd) ideas, but nowhere else.

Link

It is looking increasingly likely that I'll be doing my PhD in Philosophy next year at the University of Johannesburg. Just waiting on finalisation of application and awarding of a bursary, both of which seem probable. Going to be starting on the research proposal this month, below is a short, bastardised proposal. Wish me luck.

Draft Title: Towards a Neo-Aristotelian, Stateless Economy
Author: Tristen Taylor
Date: 11^th of November 2007

"For a long time it has been agreed that the present political system is decayed to its foundations, and that another system must be set up. Yet, in spite of the fact that this view is widespread, and that men’s minds, wearied by revolution and wars, are prepared to grasp at any means to recover order and repose, nobody has risen above the old routine. They have continued on old principles, as if it was impossible to have any better ones…."
--Henri de Saint-Simon, The Reorganization of the European Community

In my Masters thesis[ii], one of Henri de Saint-Simon’s old principles was considered in some depth; the State itself. The argument was made that the philosophical backing for and the subsequent implementation of the State began with Plato and his Republic. Two thousand and three hundred years ago humanity was faced with a choice between Plato's Republic and Aristotle's polis. We chose Plato, and we were wrong on perfectionist grounds. Should have gone for the polis.

The justification of the State as a form of social organisation that essentially has A) a defined territory, B) a population, C) a government that is engaged in the organised use of force, D) a hierarchical structure was analysed through the lens of consequentialist, Neo-Aristotelian ethics. In particular, through the following key aspects of Aristotle’s ethics:

1) Political life is part of the good life. Eudemonia is comprised, in part, of certain political activity.

2) Even the contemplative life requires a person who is engaged in it to play an active and meaningful role in the political activities of the polis.

3) Even if the contemplative life is to be preferred to the political life, this does not absolve a scholar from playing an active and meaningful role in the political sphere. It is that person's function as a citizen.

4) However, being involved in the political life is not enough for an individual; he must also act in a virtuous manner (which he gains through education and habituation) and his use of rational ability.

5) The citizen needs to live in accordance with a strong and deep sense of friendship, and have material goods such as health and leisure.

Not only was the State unjustified according to this reading of Aristotle’s ethics, my thesis also concluded that the polis was not a State and that the best society to live in a revised form of the polis. This revised form of the polis (the modern polis) has the following elements:

1) Citizens have sufficient time to engage in contemplative pursuits and meaningful political action.

2) That citizens and the modern polis have a fair degree of self-reliance and good health.

3) The modern polis is engaged in the education and habituation of moral virtue.

4) Citizens do not only have the opportunity and ability to play a part in the political life of the modern polis, but also can do so in a significant manner in line with a very strong kind of participatory democracy (similar to that of the Athenian democracy) and are expected to do so.

5) There is a spirit of community and philia within the modern polis.

However, a big question was left unanswered in my Masters thesis, namely what sort of economy would a modern polis have? Given the physical scale of a modern polis and requirements of obtaining eudemonia, what sort of economy is both possible and best suited? Would free market fundamentalism be the best system as Murray Rothbard has advocated for? On the other end of the scale, what about Michael Albert's participatory economics?

In addition, the economic philosophies of several key perfectionists also need to be examined. These include Karl Marx, L.T. Hobhouse, and R.H. Tawney. To the best of my knowledge, none of these have been seriously examined in light of the modern polis (especially viability and their ability to promote eudemonia).

If none of these ethical/economic theories work for the modern polis, a new type economy (perhaps incorporating elements of the above) will have to be found.

This is an important undertaking. Our current system is unsustainable. Modern capitalism is drawing close to ecological limits (climate change and resource scarcity) and will soon become untenable. We are at a vital juncture in human history and new style of social organization (which includes economics) has to be found. Philosophy has an obligation to seek this solution.

Some key readings:

Albert, Michael. Parecon: Life After Capitalism (London: Verso Books, 2003).

Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by W.D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Aristotle. The Politics. Translated by A. Dreizehnter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Hobhouse, L.T. Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911).

Hobhouse, L.T. The Elements of Social Justice (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922).

Marx, Karl. Capital. Translated by Eden Paul (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1933)

Marx, Karl. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1847.

Rothbard, Murray. Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (von Mises, Ludwig Institute, 2000).

Tawney, R.H. Equality (London: Heinemann, 1964).

---

[i] Henri de Saint-Simon. 1814. The Reorganization of the European Community. In: Carl Cohen, Communism, Fascism & Democracy (New York: Random House, 1964), pg. 25

[ii] Tristen Taylor. Justification of the State and Anarchist Alternatives (University of the Witwatersrand, 2007)

China Mieville on Libertarianism

China Mieville has written a very good piece ("Floating Utopias") on the libertarian fantasy of floating cities beyond national boards (sounds like a good idea actually, put all those whack jobs in the middle of the Atlantic and hope for a big storm). This is his definition of libertarianism, from the before-mentioned article:

Freedom Ship’s board of directors are canny enough to recognize tax hatred as a defining characteristic of the tradition of fantasies in which it sits. It is one of countless recent dreams of a tax-free life on the ocean wave: advocates of “seasteading” are disproportionately adherents of “libertarianism,” that peculiarly American philosophy of venal petty-bourgeois dissidence.

Libertarianism is by no means a unified movement. As many of its advocates proudly stress, it comprises a taxonomy of bickering branches—minarchists, objectivists, paleo- and neolibertarians, agorists, et various al.—just like a real social theory. Claiming a lineage with post-Enlightenment classical liberalism, as well as in some cases with the resoundingly portentous blatherings of Ayn Rand, all of its variants are characterized, to differing degrees, by fervent, even cultish, faith in what is quaintly termed the “free” market, and extreme antipathy to that vaguely conceived bogeyman, “the state,” with its regulatory and fiscal powers.

Link

Some More Tolstoy Quotes

I had to check something up in Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You the other day. As usual, I was amazed at such a rational, structural analysis of the duties of a Christian and the essence of Christianity. Below are some quotes from the last chapter. Enjoy.

#1:

But putting aside the sin of deluding men into regarding the most awful crime as a duty, putting aside the revolting sin of using the name and authority of Christ to sanction what he most condemned, not to speak of the curse on those who cause these "little ones" to offend--how can people who cherish their own way of life, their progress, even from the point of view of their personal security, allow the formation in their midst of an overwhelming force as senseless, cruel, and destructive as every government is organized on the basis of an army? Even the most cruel band of brigands is not so much to be dreaded as such a government.

#2:

All these men and those who depend on them, their wives, tutors, children, cooks, actors, jockeys, and so on, are living on the blood which by one means or another, through one set of blood-suckers or another, is drawn out of the working class, and every day their pleasures cost hundreds or thousands of days of labor. They see the sufferings and privations of these laborers and their children, their aged, their wives, and their sick, they know the punishments inflicted on those who resist this organized plunder, and far from decreasing, far from concealing their luxury, they insolently display it before these oppressed laborers who hate them, as though intentionally provoking them with the pomp of their parks and palaces, their theaters, hunts, and races. At the same time they continue to persuade themselves and others that they are all much concerned about the welfare of these working classes, whom they have always trampled under their feet, and on Sundays, richly dressed, they drive in sumptuous carriages to the houses of God built in very mockery of Christianity, and there listen to men, trained to this work of deception, who in white neckties or in brocaded vestments, according to their denomination, preach the love for their neighbor which they all gainsay in their lives. And these people have so entered into their part that they seriously believe that they really are what they pretend to be.

The universal hypocrisy has so entered into the flesh and blood of all classes of our modern society, it has reached such a pitch that nothing in that way can rouse indignation. Hypocrisy in the Greek means "acting," and acting--playing a part--is always possible. The representatives of Christ give their blessing to the ranks of murderers holding their guns loaded against their brothers; "for prayer" priests, ministers of various Christian sects are always present, as indispensably as the hangman, at executions, and sanction by their presence the compatibility of murder with Christianity (a clergyman assisted at the attempt at murder by electricity in America)--but such facts cause no one any surprise.

#3:

A man of the modern world who profits by the order of things based on violence, and at the same time protests that he loves his neighbor and does not observe what he is doing in his daily life to his neighbor, is like a brigand who has spent his life in robbing men, and who, caught at last, knife in hand, in the very act of striking his shrieking victim, should declare that he had no idea that what he was doing was disagreeable to the man he had robbed and was prepared to murder. Just as this robber and murderer could not deny what was evident to everyone, so it would seem that a man living upon the privations of the oppressed classes cannot persuade himself and others that he desires the welfare of those he plunders, and that he does not know how the advantages he enjoys are obtained.

#4:

Even if you are told that all this is necessary for the maintenance of the existing order of things, and that this social order with its pauperism, famines, prisons, gallows, armies, and wars is necessary to society; that still greater disasters would ensue if this organization were destroyed; all that is said only by those who profit by this organization, while those who suffer from it--and they are ten times as numerous--think and say quite the contrary. And at the bottom of your heart you know yourself that it is not true, that the existing organization has outlived its time, and must inevitably be reconstructed on new principles, and that consequently there is no obligation upon you to sacrifice your sentiments of humanity to support it.

Above all, even if you allow that this organization is necessary, why do you believe it to be your duty to maintain it at the cost of your best feelings? Who has made you the nurse in charge of this sick and moribund organization? Not society nor the state nor anyone; no one has asked you to undertake this; you who fill your position of landowner, merchant, tzar, priest, or soldier know very well that you occupy that position by no means with the unselfish aim of maintaining the organization of life necessary to men's happiness, but simply in your own interests, to satisfy your own covetousness or vanity or ambition or indolence or cowardice. If you did not desire that position, you would not be doing your utmost to retain it. Try the experiment of ceasing to commit the cruel, treacherous, and base actions that you are constantly committing in order to retain your position, and you will lose it at once. Try the simple experiment, as a government official, of giving up lying, and refusing to take a part in executions and acts of violence; as a priest, of giving up deception; as a soldier, of giving up murder; as landowner or manufacturer, of giving up defending your property by fraud and force; and you will at once lose the position which you pretend is forced upon you, and which seems burdensome to you.

A man cannot be placed against his will in a situation opposed to his conscience.

If you find yourself in such a position it is not because it is necessary to anyone whatever, but simply because you wish it. And therefore knowing that your position is repugnant to your heart and your head, and to your faith, and even to the science in which you believe, you cannot help reflecting upon the question whether in retaining it, and above all trying to justify it, you are doing what you ought to do.

The Road to Serfdom

Not often do I descend into the murky depths of libertarianism--it makes me feel dirty--but when I stumbled across a cartoon version of Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" I just had to read it. Given the average intelligence of a libertarian, a cartoon seems the perfect medium.

The best summation of libertarianism I've ever run across is:

Government is the Great Satan. All Evil comes from Government, and all Good from the Market, according to the Ayatollah Rand.

The Thesis, Economic Hitman, and Alcoa

Well, I'm back. Lately my personal life has been...well interesting. End of a marriage, family illness, and whole bunch else. The blog, I fear, has been ignored.

So, the news. The thesis was granted last week, and I received hard copies of the examiners' reports. I'll type them up and post them here. I have to fix a few grammatical mistakes, but nothing a weekend can't fix. Maybe I'll be really stupid and attempt a PhD. God alone knows what I'll do with that.

Two days ago, while eating lunch with radical comrades from Umzabalazo we Jubilee (which kind of exists as a underground, staunchly anti-capitalist South African social movement), I received a call from Alcan's economic hitman, who had just arrived in South Africa from Canada and wanted to meet me. As usual, he tried the old corporate tactic of co-option. He stated that Alcan was a good company, concerned about the environment, and that there were ways Earthlife Africa and Alcan could work together. When I told him that the only thing I was interested in getting out of Alcan was the price of electricity from Eskom, he was not happy. He then dragged out the next corporate trick, threats. He was concerned about my facts and that there would be consequences. I take that vaguely veiled threat to be a host of lawyers descending with paperwork. Well, screw that. Serve me and I'll spin that like a record.

For more on Alcan in South Africa, go here.

Keeping with aluminium smelting, Alcoa (who is trying to buy Alcan) just received a US$10 million contract from NASA. The corporatisation of space continues. Link.

There's even an idea for ads in space.

Link to Thesis Fixed

The link to my thesis is fixed. You can find it at:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df5nwz2n_2gmmjgh

Thesis Done

Yeah, the thesis is in. I handed it in on the 14th of Feb., a day before deadline. And, oh man, was it a rush to complete. Essentially, I did the last half in the last month. Late nights at acoffee shop in Melville with a series of borrowed laptops. Three solid weeks of swimming in coffee, chain-smoking, Red Bull, and massive doses of vitamins; working at the job during the day, writing at night.

I knew things had deteriorated when, on the way to work, I stopped at the local shop. I plomped at Red Bull on the counter, stared at the cashier with bloodshot eyes ringed in black, sniffled, and asked for two packs of smokes. She looked at me and glanced at her manager, who nodded slowly. She reached behind her, without taking her eyes off me, and grabbed the smokes. I don't blame her. Oil-stained jeans, dirty t-shirt, I probably smelled bad. Prime candidate for drug-addled armed robber.

When I took my daughter to one side and told her that her father had turned into a drug addict in the quest to prove the validity of anarchism using Aristotle's ethics and politics (or, put another way, Aristotle was an anarchist), she looked up at me, sucked her dummy thoughtfully, and then asked for a biscuit.

Err, we have a problem

In racing to the deadline (14th of Feb. 2007), I've stumbled across a problem, namely Aristotle:

Comments on part three.

While it shows you've learned a lot about Greek history and a lot about Aristotle, there are three important ways it could be improved. First, it doesn't have the philosophical rigour or independent thinking that part two exhibits. There is too much history (even if you keep it, it should be trimmed) and quotations in lieu of your own philosophical analysis. Notice that not once is an argument laid out and critically evaluated. It seems like you take your main goal to be an expository one of showing that most people are wrong about their reading of Aristotle. But that doesn't clearly get supported in part three (I presume the supposed false reading is that Aristotle would think that the good life is possible under a state, not something that part three thoroughly addresses), the goal of which ought to be to present an attractive moral theory that would make sense to appraise the state in light of.

Second, it's still unclear to the reader whether you are simply recounting Aristotle, or using Aristotle as a springboard to construct a plausible perfectionist ethic. Perhaps you're just recounting in part three but will modify in part four. And maybe that's OK, though it makes more sense to me just to devote a chapter to articulating an attractive moral principle with which to evaluate the state. The point is that you need to be more explicit about the status of your use of Aristotle. All the extensive historical information suggests you're after a descriptive rendition of what he thought. But then the question arises as to why the reader should care about what he precisely thought, especially given, for one example, that slavery is patently unjust to the contemporary reader.

Finally, and most easily resolved, the status of the political life is vague. Saying things like the good life "requires," "demands," and "needs" political participation of a kind isn't subtle enough. Is the requirement a merely instrumental one (politics of a kind causes virtue), or is it a constitutive/contributory one as well (politics of a kind just is virtue of a sort)?

While I haven't read part four yet, I would spend a good chunk of the remaining time you have thinking about beefing up the critical discussion of A's ethics and clarifying your view with respect to it. It seems that what you find interesting about A is the suggestion that a certain communal relationship is constitutive of the good life, even if A himself tends to prize the life of the scholar. I would focus more on this facet of his thinking, saying that you're going to focus on it because you find it the most attractive, and then I'd say why you find it so.

I look forward to reading part four, where everything comes together, and will get to it tomorrow.

Thad (The Supervisor)

Complete Draft of the Thesis

I'm almost there. The last month or so has been a special effort to get the thing done, and prove that Aristotle was right (Plato wrong) about what sort of society we should live in.

Go here for the entire draft. One more edit to go until final.

Aristotle, the State, and the Polis

Part Three of the thesis is now up. Go here and feel free to comment, if you have the stomach for 15,000 words of purple prose.

Thesis Progress

One of the reasons for lack of posting over the holiday period was an intense session at working on the thesis. I slept with The Politics besides me. Anyway, I've finished with Part Three, an examination of Aristotle's politics and ethics, how they apply to the polis and the startling conclusion that 1) the polis is not a State, 2) Aristotle has been systematically mistranslated, 3) for Aristotle, eudemonia (the good life) is impossible outside the polis.

I've sent it off for comments and I'll soon be putting it up on this site for your comments. I just may be able to finish this beast on the 15th of Feb., thus saving myself from another year of Wits's ruinious fees. Speaking of which, there's this year's 10% fee increase, keeping with long-standing tradition. Bastards are jacking up fees higher than the rate of inflation. Scum-sucking capitalist swine, making money of the desperation of the many to become the few. Parasites on the body politic. In fact, that about the best you can about the goddamn, foul, putrid, greedy, vain and ugly leechs that form the Wits management. Fuck them and the horse (neo-liberalism) they rode in on.

On Plato's Republic

A friend of mine once said, "You should read the Republic the same way you should read Mein Kampf."

I concur.

Tolstoy Quote

From the last chapter of The Kingdom of God is Within You:

"And yet simply from the fact that other men as misguided and as pitiful creatures as yourself have made you soldier, tzar, landowner, capitalist, priest, or general, you undertake to commit acts of violence obviously opposed to your reason and your heart, to base your existence on the misfortunes of others, and above all, instead of filling the one duty of your life, recognizing and professing the truth, you feign not to recognize it and disguise it from yourself and others.

"And what are the conditions in which you are doing this? You who may die any instant, you sign sentences of death, you declare war, you take part in it, you judge, you punish, you plunder the working people, you live luxuriously in the midst of the poor, and teach weak men who have confidence in you that this must be so, that the duty of men is to do this, and yet it may happen at the moment when you are acting thus that a bacterium or a bull may attack you and you will fall and die, losing forever the chance of repairing the harm you have done to others, and above all to yourself, in uselessly wasting a life which has been given you only once in eternity, without having accomplished the only thing you ought to have done."

Josiah Warren

How's this for declining useless debate?

"I decline all noisy, wordy, confused, and personal controversies. This subject is presented for calm study and honest enquiry ; and, after having placed it (as I intend to do) fairly before the public, shall leave it to be estimated by each individual according to the particular measure of understanding, and shall offer no violence to his individuality by any attempt to restrain, or to urge him beyond it."

Josiah Warren, Manifesto, 1841

Homo democraticus

In doing some research for the thesis, I ran across this:

"Homo democraticus, as Tocqueville characterised him, is obsessive about rights, neglectful of duties, reluctant to believe in anything, anxious, and solitary. These defects make him prey to what Tocqueville called ‘soft despotism’ whereby freedom is abandoned, and a bloated central power administers to the needs of an infantilised population.

"In an egalitarian, democratic but atomised society, Tocqueville believed that people would not turn to each other to meet their needs through free exchange, civic association and the pursuit of what Tocqueville called ‘self-interest rightly understood’. Instead, they would look to an omnipotent state, which would remove in a paternal-like manner all the trouble of thinking and acting for oneself.

"Thus, in Tocqueville’s view, it appears that C.S. Lewis’ ‘men without chests’ will eventually be the natural denizens of democracies. For although Tocqueville regarded the aristocratic regime to be unjust—based as it was on an unnatural convention of hereditary superiority—its hierarchical order still preserved room for standards transcending the individual will."

The Lost Books of Aristotle

The thesis is living again, and I'm making progress into Aristotle's Ethics and Politics, with minor detours here and there. One such detour was into the lost books of Aristotle. I ran across this webpage, which is to be noted for both its intrigue and turn of phrase:

"Most of Aristotle's writings are now lost. That is a shame: Antiquity was not careful enough abouts its greatest thinker, while practically everything is extant from Plato, inventor of the idea of myriad-year-old winged souls fleeing to above Sky, or the 9,000 year old Atlantean superpower defeated by heroic Athenians in 9,400 BC. Well, Fiction is generally sold better than Science, so it was copied much more diligently."

And:

"I tried to discuss this topics with several colleagues of mine, but without success. Maybe all of them are Platonist."

Just War

The next time someone mentions just war theory to you, point them to this post at Today in Iraq, ask them to look at the photo, and then ask how that can ever be just. Once, in a philosophy course on applied ethics, I sat through an entire lecture on just war theory. What suprised me was that I was the only one (+/- 30 students, 1 professor) who had trouble with the concept that any war could be just.

Philosophy Blogs

For those interested, there's an alternative universe of philosophy blogs, some of which are unsure of their own existance. Go here for a pretty good list.

There seems to be a particular kind of humour associated with philosophy blogs (my favourite has to be "what it is like to be a blog?"). As a philosophy student, I can see how this happens. Even one reading of the Critique of Pure Reason is enough to unhinge anyone, let alone learning German for a deeper understanding. Can you imagine if the Critique had been written today? After slogging through ten pages, academic editors--never noted for their love of the English language or any other, for that matter--would be reaching for green bins in a sudden conversion to recycling.