Vulgar Material

Responding to Jonah Goldberg’s very Jonah Goldberg-y “the right might deny climate change, but the left are intelligence denialists, so there,” Chris Dillow expresses what seems to be a fairly common position when he says that

I don’t know much force this question has: maybe some lefties do reject the heritability of IQ on ideological grounds. I want to make another point – that there’s no need for them to do so. You can accept that IQ (or ability generally) is heritable and still be a strong egalitarian.

I say this because of a simple principle: luck egalitarianism. This says that inequalities are unjust if they are due to circumstances beyond one’s control. If we grant that ability is inherited, then differences in ability are obviously a matter of luck. Insofar as these give rise to inequalities of income, a luck egalitarian can thus claim they are unjust.

In this context, Tim’s claim that the high intergenerational elasticity of wealth (pdf) uncovered by Greg Clark might be due to inherited ability rather than inherited wealth is irrelevant. The luck egalitarian can reply: it doesn’t matter whether what is inherited is wealth, ability, cultural capital or whatever. Whichever it is, it’s a matter of sheer luck and thus unjust. There is therefore a moral case for equalizing such inequalities – though whether there’s an economic case is another matter…

My point, though, is merely that there’s no conflict between leftism and a belief in the heritability of ability. In this respect at least, the left has nothing to fear from science.

Unfortunately I think this is a bit wrongheaded. Leftism and egalitarianism isn’t just benevolence, otherwise it would be trivial (at least to non-sociopaths.) The right has, when not infected by liberalism and when regarding its own confessional or ethnic community, pretty much always supported social welfare on paternalistic grounds.[1] What distinguishes the left is that it wants to redistribute not just consumption goods but power, and the greater are the ineradicable differences in the ability to responsibly wield power, the more that project is essentially dangerous and/or impossible. We do not propose charity, whereby the rich (&c.) give to the power (&c.) because their conscience dictates so – even right-liberals support that – but robbery, whereby the poor take from the rich because their self-interest dictates so. This is necessarily a “victim-blaming” stance, whereby the obstacle to oppression considered most worthy of addressing is not the oppressor’s immoral choice to oppress but the oppressed’s collective self-consciousness and ability to resist.

This is obvious enough in the case of children, who really are inferior to adults in important respects. We give power and responsibility to children for basically pedagogical purposes, so they can wield it skillfully when they are real people. This is why political projects that try to assert one group’s collective superiority have always relied on this metaphor; in this case, it’s correct. Of course we should act benevolently towards children, and yet this is not incompatible with a social system that affirms at every juncture their total political, economic, and even personal subordination. If they are to be continued to be treated benevolently, it is not because children have taken collective action to assert their rights, but because adults have taken action for their own reasons (regard for the cuteness of children, the need for another generation of adults with the right characteristics, fear of revenge once they become adults, whatever.) The same applies, ex hypothesi, for every other form of subordination to which the child metaphor is applied. The social equality of children isn’t just wrongheaded, it’s impossible, adults can steamroll children in basically every category. The only question is how benevolently this superiority can be expressed.

Of course we can contemplate less radical natural inequalities, but correspondingly less radical social inequalities are the corollary. Accepting these past a certain degree of triviality means one is no longer part of the left[1], but hypothetical findings from science might make them mandatory.

I do not believe such things are the case to any nontrivial degree. Insofar as they are false, and their social acceptance if false would/does have deleterious consequences, they should be combatted, with patient and charitable education when sufficient and by knocking skulls when necessary. But if I were convinced otherwise, I would have to revise my politics.

[1] Arguably, in this sense, many left-liberals are just traditional conservatives + cosmopolitanism.

[2] We might say that it forces us to be no longer part of the left except for certain exceptions, like children. But the left as constituted cannot accept this (except, possibly, collectively) because cross-platform solidarity is a necesary feature of its ability to remain coherent. We can collectively ignore children just as we once collectively ignored sexuality, but we can’t adopt a rule saying that any given plank is optional once it becomes “canonical” without disciplinary dissolution.

I recently started Albert O. Hirschman’s “Rhetoric of Reaction” (a classic for a reason; beautifully written, remarkably even-handed, schematically indispensable; its faults, though real, can be reserved for another conversation.) Hirschman famously categorizes rightist (more generally, anti-change) arguments into “perversity,” “futility,” and “jeopardy” theses – arguments that the effects of a proposed change will be (respectively) contrary to its original intentions, entirely nil, or serving to eliminate some previous and more precious accomplishment. It implicitly poses an obvious and complementary question: can we propose a similar schematic for left-wing arguments? Sure! Trivially, even.[1]

As the opposing team to Perversity, Futility, and Jeopardy, then, let’s look at what I’ll call Feedback, Induction, and Expertise. Just as the first three are employed by the right across a wide variety of domains, so the second are employed by the left. Just as the first can be appropriated occasionally by the left as well, the second can find occasion to be used by the right. And just as the first three exist in a certain amount of tension and even contradiction with each other, so does the second trinity.

Like Hirschman, I am on the left, meaning that unlike him, I am attempting to explicate arguments that I broadly support (or have an incentive to.) However, like him, my at least explicit goal is neither to praise nor bury these “theses” or classes of arguments. Like perversity, futility, and jeopardy, each of feedback, induction, and expertise admits of accurate as well as inaccurate uses.

I. The Feedback Thesis

The feedback thesis is that social (dis)advantages tend to compound and reinforce themselves over time. Racial prejudice against blacks as stupid stymies their achievement in higher education, and these weaker outcomes as seen as evidence that they are intrinsically stupid. Poor health impedes one’s ability to work productively, which impedes one’s ability to earn income and thus purchase healthcare. Membership among the rich grants you political power, which you can use to keep you and your buddies rich. Examples of this could be repeated ad nauseam – indeed, it’s my claim here that, if you’ve spent much time reading anyone to the left of Skeletor, you could repeat them ad nauseam yourself – but perhaps the purest and most general form comes from Pierre Bourdieu:

Depending on the field in which it functions, and at the cost of the more or less expensive transformations which are the precondition for its efficacy in the field in question, capital can present itself in three fundamental guises: as economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the forms of property rights; as cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of educational qualifications; and as social capital, made up of social obligations (‘connections’), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of a title of nobility.[2]

Power comes in many different forms, says Bourdieu, but these can each be used to get the others. And feedback need not cross between domains either. Thomas Piketty is hardly the first to note the consequences of the fact that (literal) capital (literally) compounds upon itself.

The feedback thesis has three important components or implications – strategic, ontological, and epistemological. The strategic implication is that reality is, to a great extent, highly path dependent. Path dependency, after all, is a general feature of systems where changes are self-reinforcing, just as convergence is a general feature of systems that are self-correcting. In this “strategic” sense, feedback arguments can be understood as a general counter-argument to “futility,” as they fundamentally model a world where outside intervention can permanently upgrade things from lower to higher equilibria, from vicious to virtuous cycles. (It if presumes path dependency in this respect, of course, it also proposes a form of convergence, in that the long-run equilibrium of a system is absolutely vicious levels of inequality. Who exactly is on top, though, is contingent, and continuous shoveling may make the long-run level of inequality other than its in-principle equilibrium one.)

The ontological implication, which flows directly from the strategic one, is that the wretchedness or glory of any particular group does not have to be attributed to their essential characteristics, but can be understood as historically accidental and therefore changeable. If an important category of conservative futility arguments are arguments about group essences – that blacks are inherently stupid, violent, and lazy, or women inherently submissive and illogical – then in its ontological mode the feedback thesis is not just anti-futilitarian but specifically anti-essentialist.

The epistemological implication – perhaps even deserving its own subcategory, an “ideology thesis” – flows from the fact that cultural power and dominance in the realm of ideas are also forms of power that can be purchased with other forms. The classic statement of ideology is, of course, Marx’s epigram that “the ruling ideas of every age are the ideas of its ruling class.” In historical materialism, of course, the claim is that conversion in one direction – from economic to ideological power – has fundamental explanatory power. But regardless of this prioritization, the ideology thesis has powerful implications: that the entire field of available knowledge is biased “to the right,” that is, to those who hold greater power in various regards. Almost all the leftist rhetorical impulses that opponents find maddening enough to give pride of place in their parodic accounts of that rhetoric – from the dismissal of rival economic theories as “bourgeois” to invocations of false consciousness – have their root, to the extent that they are really expressed, in the inescapable logic of the ideology thesis. (A less epistemologically paranoid, but still generalizable, form of this concerns the deduction since power in general produces the power to structure public policy and social structure more generally, the structure of society is “to the right” of where it would (should) otherwise be – and that we may be relatively sure of this regardless of what form that structure takes.)

Rightist appropriations of the feeback thesis can take one of two forms, either of which tends to be an appropriation of the ideology thesis in particular. The first form is its application to cases where, for reasons of historical accident, the right can make claims, basically similar in structure and implication to the left’s, that it speaks for the marginalized and powerless, such as the rural or unborn. (The pro-life activist, after all, is hardly making an implausible claim when she notes that the unborn cannot advance their own interests.) By necessity, these tend to be rather domain-specific. The broader meta-ideological counterclaim concerns the right’s own basis for epistemological paranoia – that the left is in fact in strategic control of the means of ideological production, having the majority of schoolteachers, journalists, academics, artists, and intellectuals more generally in its pocket. Invocations of “the liberal media” may appear irritable mental gestures masquerading as ideas, but are actually coherent arguments against everything supposed to be held by that media. (“Neoreactionaries,” who expand the folk concept of “liberal media” into the more theoretically elaborate “Cathedral,” carry this epistemological paranoia to its fullest logical conclusions.) Leftist responses to this, in their turn, can either dispute the major premise – noting, for instance, that these ideological state apparati are ultimately still opposed to the abolition of capitalism, race, gender, the family, and so on – or the implicit one – noting that ideas can be produced by truth as well as power, and thus that the relevant consideration is not the distribution of ideological power per se but the degree to which it conforms or fails to conform to the overall distribution of other forms.

II. The Induction Thesis

The induction thesis is relatively straightforward. While perversity, futility, and jeopardy all claim that some proposed change will have consequences that are baleful at best, the induction thesis retorts that, in fact, most changes have turned out fine. Almost every major change that conservatives at the time screamed about has turned out quite fine. Getting rid of kings didn’t lead to anarchy. Women’s suffrage didn’t lead to shrews conscripting hapless men into marriage (as hilarious as that might have been.) Just generally we’ve had two to three centuries of things getting better and betterer as they’ve gotten lefter and lefterer.

It’s 2050 and feminism has finally won. Marriages are by the hour, day, or even job. Policemen live in fear of giantesses.

In this, the induction thesis on its lonesome simultaneously blows the whole conservative troika out of the water. Whatever the real effects perversity, futility, or jeopardy might point to, and even if we weren’t able to articulate any countervailing effects, those effects still obviously exist and outweigh the perverse, futile, or jeopardizing ones. To this spectacular triumph we must append three important caveats.

The first is that the major premise can be disputed. Did things get better? Moderate conservatives typically claim that things have gotten better, but then gotten worse in their lifetimes – endorsing first but not second-wave feminism, or emancipation but not desegregation, and so on. They might well be right in this, but the induction thesis is a powerful argument that they are unlikely to be. But radical antimodernists can coherently claim that life has gotten worse in important respects, and for a long time, too. We may have accumulated more toys, but society has become more atomized and less spiritual, the elimination of ties of dependence has deprived us of important virtues, and the physical environment has been ravaged. (It is far from unusual, and in fact it is probably the rule, for rightists and conservatives who are not libertarians or fusionists to be sincere environmentalists.[3])

The second caveat is that it is agnostic about the actual reasons things have gotten better. It is in principle conceivable, even if most people would not credit it with tremendous plausibility, that although advances in the physical sciences have tremendously improved our quality of life, we would enjoy these fruits //even more// if we had retained the social institutions of 1066. As far as I know no one advances that argument explicitly – even making the implicit explicit is a popular way to make fun of anarcho-capitalism – but more serious claims are advanced on behalf of 1776, 1830, 1930, and so on. Moderation on this front is open to the same weaknesses as noted above, but regardless, one can coherently credit undeniable advances to factors other than changes in social institutions, such that the social changes can be held to be baleful in effect.

The third caveat is that this is only true in the aggregate. Any particular proposal might still have terrible effects. Nobody today claims that Prohibition worked, even if they whistle and look the other way when discussing modern drug policy. Nobody other than friendless weirdos like me[4] thinks Communism worked great. And even I’m reconstructed enough a Stalinist to admit that plenty of Communist initiatives, like collective farming, turned out to be major mistakes.

Implicit, then, in most versions the induction thesis is that while the left should win most of the battles, it shouldn’t win all of the battles. Radicals can use induction against liberals to argue that “imprudent” revolutionary change has a good record, of course – the entire rhetorical value of the concept of “bourgeois revolution” lies precisely in this, and why radicals tend to argue against liberals not just that the violence necessary to establish capitalism was great (which, on its own, could be a simple mote in the eye of capitalism and liberalism) but that it was necessary (establishing a precedent for revolutionary action.) But by default, the mode lends itself to cautious optimism.

Hirschman noted that if the futility thesis is substantively more “moderate” than the perversity thesis, it is not necessarily more respectful, and indeed can take the form of vicious mockery. This is doubly true for the induction thesis. In terms of its expression, the most remarkable thing about the ways it is invoked is how frequently it is mean, humorous, and “speaks for itself” through the simple quotational use of older conservative opposition to positions now accepted by even mainstream conservatives. In the age of social media, these have achieved easy virality.

Like the appropriations of feedback that do not embrace epistemological paranoia, right appropriations of the induction thesis tend to be domain-specific for obvious reasons. This may be the rarest of all six possible forms of appropriation; in fact, I can’t think of many examples other than outside of the domain of arguments for free markets and technology against protectionism and calls to restrain labor-saving technical innovations, where there is a record of people on the left making disastrous predictions that were, in retrospect, inaccurate.

There was a Mallard Filmore cartoon that used a simple induction argument – interviewing some smarmy moron liberal and pointing out how the Laffer Curve has always been right – but… well, I can’t find it immediately on Google, and while I could wade through a thousand Mallard Filmores… I’m… just not going to do that. I’m good. Thanks.

III. The Expertise Thesis

Whereas the induction thesis is agnostic about the mechanisms behind “progress” – that is, why futures tend to be better than pasts, all things considered – the expertise thesis rests on a specific mechanism – that the arrow of social time is deducible from the arrrow of epistemological time. The future knows the past, the past doesn’t know the future, and therein lies the difference. We know more than we used to, and so our judgments are better than those of the past.

Whereas the induction thesis mocks the past, the expertise thesis looks down upon it. We are lucky enough to live in more enlightened times – though not, presumably, lucky enough to live in even more enlightened times, as our descendants will.

Two caveats are necessary in speaking about the expertise thesis, which, together, make it probably the most appropriated of any of the six. The first is that while is it gnostic about mechanisms, it is agnostic about content (as opposed to the induction thesis, which can point to the leveling character of social changes.) The second is that its logic not only speaks to the relationship between future and past, but between more versus less educated groups of people. “Educated” here needs not refer to formal schooling; standpoint epistemology, for instance, is an attempt to theorize the oppressed as fundamentally more capable of viewing reality as it is than are their oppressors, who more fully mystify themselves through ideology.

As with appropriations of the feedback thesis, appropriations of expertise can be more domain-specific or quite radical. The less ambitious, domain-specific appropriations seek to establish that social scientific (or sometimes life-scientific) advances, or perhaps just long-standing consensus among experts in the relevant field, supports the right-wing policy under discussion. Contemporary conservatives can justly point, for example, to the consensus against tariffs and trade restrictions among professional economists. Racists both in the 1790s, 1890s, and 1990s believed that recent advances in biology had justified their position.

It is characteristic of the expertise thesis both in its “natural” and appropriated form that opponents are metaphorically constructed as religious dogmatists. Since the Enlightenment, “the Church” has been constructed as a case of backward darkness and superstition, and it is remarkable that even explicit criticisms of Enlightenment ideals themselves have tended to take this form since the 1890s. If the doctrine that no men should have sex with each other is constructed as a basically idiotic, religious injunction, so is the doctrine that they are all created equal. Consider eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard:

The fact is that modern science is unquestionably bringing the democratic dogma under review. And it is high time that scientists said so frankly. Nothing would be more laughable, if it were not so pathetic, than the way scientists interlard their waitings (which clearly imply criticism of the democratic philosophy) with asides like: “Of course, this isn’t really against democracy, you know.”

Now these little pinches of incense cast upon the democratic altar may keep near-heretics in good standing. But it is unworthy of the scientific spirit, and (what is more important) it seriously retards progress…

When, therefore, believers in race betterment are accused of being “undemocratic,” they should answer: “Right you are! Science, especially biology, has disclosed the falsity of certain ideas like ‘natural equality,’ and the omnipotence of environment, on which the democratic concept is largely based. We aim to take the sound elements in both the traditional democratic and aristocratic philosophies and combine them in a higher synthesis — a new philosophy worthy of the race and the civilization that we visualize.” [5]

The more generally applicable rightist appropriation of the expertise thesis is that expertise is distributed unequally, and those with the expertise to have climbed to the top of it are those who should. In its radical rightist implications, it is similar to the radical leftist ones of the feedback thesis, fully considered.

An important subtype of the expertise thesis might be called the adaptation thesis. In what might well be considered its own class of argument, were I not arbitrarily attempting to squish these into three left theses to match Hirschman’s three right ones, this proposes that a change to society is necessary because society itself has changed. However, in three important respects, this is basically similar to the expertise thesis. First, it empowers experts, because it generally requires expertise to recognize. Second, its basic opposition is between backwards and modern. Third, it is formally neutral in its content, and thus lends itself easily to appropriation.

IV. Tensions and Contradictions

Hirschman noted that the three conservative theses exist in tension with one another; the futility thesis, for example, assumes that reality is basically static and unchangeable, whereas the perversity thesis assumes precisely the opposite.

Of course feedback, induction, and expertise – like perversity, futility, and jeopardy – are hardly entirely in conflict, and share resonances as well. After all, each trinity tends to be invoked by the same groups of people, and not merely (one hopes) for reasons of expediency. Positive feedback loops and the asymmetric nature of accumulating expertise over time can be understood to form the basis of inductively apparent progress. Ideological mystification produced through feedback can at once exist and strain under the weight of increasing societal expertise. That increasing societal expertise can in part be a result of our increasing awareness of feedback, and of the increasingly large sample size of the induction.

But the tensions are real. Accepted on their own terms, they imply very different understandings of history and of proper political action.

On its own, for instance, the feedback thesis actually implies that things should get – from an egalitarian perspective – worse and worse, not better and better. When Karl Marx expected exploitation to increase with productive capacity not just over the history of capitalism but over the history of class society as a whole, he was only explicating the basic logic of the feedback thesis. Marx was hard-headed enough to understand by “progress” that increase in productive capacity. But on the inductive view, the feedback thesis must be as generally wrong as the perversity, futility, and jeopardy theses – or, at least, since those are about outcomes and feedback is about a mechanisms, it must be overridden by other factors even if it is not “wrong” as they are. For its part, the expertise thesis argues that things get better over time as surely as the induction thesis presumes it.

If they are not equal in their commitment to progress, they are likewise unequal in their commitment to equality. From the perspective of feedback, any egalitarian transformation of society is always justified. Of course one cannot deduce simply from feedback that we should all live in communes, but feedback presumes its own limitations on effective action – that power will always accumulate to those who have more power, over and above what a Rawlsian minimax principle (or whatever) would allow. Reality is always to the right of where it should be. Induction, as noted, more weakly can say that egalitarian social change has been good – at the very least, has not been so bad as to collapse the allegedly fragile social fabric that conservatives insist we find ourselves in. While feedback arguments tend to imply radicalism, inductive arguments tend to imply liberalism, in that the ideal political framework would be one where the left wins most, but not all, of the battles – as left-liberals claim is the case for the current social order. For its own part, while inherently pro-change, expertise and its little sister adaptation are indifferent to the matter. Indeed, expertise in its naive form tends to be an argument for the class interests of the intelligentsia.

This – along with the perhaps more obvious matter of the secular increase in the power of experts, bureaucrats, and managers over time – may explain why skepticism towards progress and skepticism towards this social group tend to go hand in hand, and not only among ordinary conservatives. Indeed, the logic of the feedback thesis may lead one towards an unconventional social conservatism, insofar as “social progress” on the cultural front – the dismantling of traditional, local-level systems of authority such as the patriarchal family – can be understood as moves by which the ascendant managerial class cuts off the tall poppies that might stand in its way. It is by this sort of class analysis that Marxists like Alasdair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch, and Eugene Genovese have been won over to conservatism without sacrificing their historical materialism. Many anarchists a weaker form of these arguments, where if they do not reject feminism and other cultural corollaries of the Enlightenment, they do express concern that the rest of the left – in either its social-democratic or Leninist forms – has been captured by the interests of paper-pushers as a class, or simply by “the state” in abstracto.[6]

An additional feature of their varying attitudes towards equality concerns the fact that feedback is interested in relative outcomes and the distribution of power among different groups and individuals, whereas induction and expertise take it for granted that there is an unproblematic common good. Part of this again speaks to the fact that experts may speak to their own sectional interests, representing it (as all ruling classes do, the ideology thesis would have it) as that of the whole society.

Beyond this, an additional irony – and argument that liberals may fairly raise against radicals – is that each of these arguments, like perversity and jeopardy, is weaker the more commonly accepted it is. In principle, we might overcorrect for feedback effects, start taking the progressive nature of social change for granted, and take for granted as well our superior epistemic position to the past, throwing out the “congealed wisdom” whose inheritance would otherwise actually guarantee it. The smarter and more abstract conservative arguments are to the effect that this has already happened.

V. Parting Thoughts

Finally, some words on the assumptions embedded in this schema itself.

First, the parallelism here assumes that the relevant distinction is between left and right, not between (say) right, liberal, and left. Partly this is because it is constructed in response to Hirschman, who understood his trinity as a set of arguments that are invoked both by radical rightists as well as right-liberals. For the purposes at hand, I think, this makes sense, because they are primarily not arguments that are made in constructing an ideal static model of society, but in favor of moving society “to the left” or “to the right.” In this respect, we might expect a classical liberal to invoke “left” forms of argument in the 1770s and “right” forms in the 1970s, even though his substantive vision of the proper social order remains relatively unchanged.

Second, although all of Hirschman’s trinity have been levied against egalitarian social change, it is change, not egalitarianism, they are concerned with. In this respect, I have not quite kept the parallelism, except, if one wishes to stretch, in that feedback effects assume that the need for change will be constant if one wishes to preserve equality.

Third, although I perhaps only folded in adaptation to expertise for the sake of a parallel number of arguments or theses, I have not constructed these to parallel Hirschman’s three individually. I do not think that a set of direct, polarity-reversed parallels would be particularly interesting.[7]

Last, I don’t pretend that any of the individual insights here are original (even where I can’t recall the source.) If this sort of thing has any value, it will be in a schema itself achieving fixation as a set of common terms to categorize arguments – as perversity, futility, and jeopardy have. The above is, I imagine, inadequate to that task. But as there is no widely acknowledged parallel to the original schema

VI. Notes

[1]In fact, this is obvious enough that I’m certain it’s been done before; indeed, as I write this, I haven’t even finished Hirschman’s book, so maybe he comes up with left complements himself! So that’s certainly something I should look into. But there isn’t any counterpart set that’s as well-known as the original PJF trinity, and in any event, I suspect composing this prior to exposure to others’ attempts will offer the possibility of some amount of convergent validity, if there’s some real virtue here.

[2] Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital”

[3] The logic of this actually extends further than the simple time series regression that we’ve mastered nature more and more as progress marches forward. Burkean arguments for the fragility of complex systems and the perversity of artifice are basically homologous to the major environmentalist arguments, and absent further arguments to distinguish them, if you accept one you should accept the other.

[4] And the majority of the FSU, depending on which poll you trust, but that’s another story.

[5] Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt Against Civilization: the Rise of the Under-Man, pp. 265-66. They don’t title books like they used to!

[6] I have written a bit on the longue duree of left, right, and bureaucracy here, if you’re into that sort of thing.

[7] After having written most of this, I now see that it is what in fact Hirschman proposed. This may be, perhaps, why they have not reached fixity.

I just read, and had some time to digest, Ishay Landa’s the Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism. Landa has a specific historiographic target: the revisionist thesis which regards fascism as “neither right nor left,” and if anything socialistic – the antithesis of liberalism. This he disarms ably, showing that fascists sought to continue capitalist relations of production using means that had long been endorsed by liberal thinkers themselves. At the center of his argument is the conflict between what he designates, using terms whose meaning should be obvious, economic liberalism and political liberalism. Prior to – roughly speaking – the middle of the nineteenth century, economic and political liberalism were a natural match, as the bourgeoisie curried proletarian allies in its struggle against the aristocracy. Afterwards, political freedoms threatened (the) economic freedom (of the bourgeoisie,) and the philosophical package held together by classical liberalism fell apart. Landa thus covers much of the same territory as Peart and Levy, but whereas their idealism was only able to describe, Landa’s materialism is able to explain. That said, I have a few reservations. Continue reading →

Some quick notes, not necessarily thoroughly organized, on this:

1. A quick summary for the perplexed: as in some other of their work, the story here is of how the egalitarian commitments – at least methodological ones (as with Hobbes) – of classical political economy were overturned in the latter half of the twentieth century in favor of a philosophical anthropology of biologically-based heterogeneity. An egalitarian rationalism gave way to a paternalistic empiricism; there was, in a sense, a romantic counter-revolution. This applies to both the marginalism that acted as the more direct successor to the classical tradition – we learn a bit about what Jevons thought about the common man’s ability to think and make decisions – and to the institutional/historical schools.
2. The other major theme is the role of sympathy in the classical political economic tradition. Smith and Mill in particular have fairly developed notions of how we develop empathy for our fellow human beings (and beings in general,) notions that fit into their approach to economics and have since ceased to play such a defining role. I wonder if some of this is more about disciplinary boundaries, however, than the political issues to which they link it (though that certainly played a part.) Smith and Mill were first philosophers and then economists, whereas their successors have tended to think more and more narrowly (even if over an increasingly wide variety of domains) over time.
3. Though partisan (not just in which side its sympathies are clearly on, but in whom it tries to associate the sides with – Peart and Levy are Austrian-style libertarians) and idealistic (the penetration of real-world interests into the production of different theories is treated only briefly,) the rough outlines of the story are something I’d noticed indpendently, so they clearly aren’t coming out of nowhere here. There are also some very interesting discussions of sympathy and of common sense.
4. As an example of what might be read as the partisanship at play here, Peart and Levy try to claim Herbert Spencer and Ludwig von Mises as analytic-egalitarian good guys standing against biologically-based conceptions of natural hierarchy. Nevertheless, reading them charitably, we can read this as a claim about the commitments of their basic philosophies rather than all of their politics or beliefs. (After all, Karl Marx was certainly a racist, but in a way that’s cut against by the inner logic of his commitments – on which more later.)
5. Though it was published too early for that to have been the motivation for writing it, this functions very well as inoculation against NRx for young libertarians – and not just because Mr. Moldbug’s hero, Carlyle, plays a significant part, or because of the object-level sympathies of the authors. (For those who are already neoreactionaries – and my trackbacks seem to suggest that there are more of you reading this than my actual comrades – I feel that you’re probably already been counter-inoculated, so I’m not sure it would do much good. Instead I’ll recommend Larry Tise’s Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840, not because I expect it to deconvert you either but because it is basically the spooky bedtime story that Nick Land warned he was going to tell you some day.)
6. Amazingly for a book about the end of classical political economy, Marx isn’t even in the index, let alone the main thread of the tale. Does consideration of his role lessen our opinion of the book’s thesis? On the contrary, I think: a comparison of Marxism vis-a-vis other socialistic theories seems to, in fact, recapitulate just what Peart and Levy try to show for debate within the world of capitalist economic thought. Marxist political economy, which carries the torch of the classical tradition, identifies all actors as equally competent, and locates exploitation in the sphere of production rather than exchange. The latter is inevitably paternalistic in considering the exploited and tends towards (covert or otherwise) anti-Semitism when considering the other direction. Consider Bakunin, Veblen, and the rightist deviations that would eventually join up with fascism as examples.
7. On the other hand, the socialist side seems to not confirm their ideas about sympathy (perhaps more on this some other time,) as Marxism tended to be more, well, materialistic than the opposing doctrines, and to reject anything with a veneer of sentimentality. Or perhaps it does – they see the best features of the classical tradition as reappearing without the doctrine of sympathy later in the Chicago and Austrian schools, and so perhaps we can locate Marxism as part of this second-generation classicism.
8. Speaking of the Tribe, did you know that one of the arguments used for restricting Jewish immigration back in the day was that they were in fact found to have lower performance on intelligence tests? Perhaps the supposed +2 Intelligence bonus evolved sometime in the last century.
9. Also a somewhat minor point: we’re all familiar by now with how Smith’s invisible hand quote gets trotted out forever and ever in ways that are pretty contrary to his actual thoughts. Have you heard the Smith quote about Chinese earthquakes, too, about how we care about them less than hurting our little finger? If you’re like me, you had, but not in context. In fact, with that context, the point is actually precisely the opposite of what the isolated quote is usually held to imply: yes, Smith says, we’re narcissistic, but you can’t just jump from that to externally sociopathic behavior:
   

   
   Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

   To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it. But what makes this difference? When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble? When we are always so much more deeply affected by whatever concerns ourselves, than by whatever concerns other men; what is it which prompts the generous, upon all occasions, and the mean upon many, to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others?

   It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he who, whenever we are about to act so as to affect the happiness of others, calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration. It is from him only that we learn the real littleness of ourselves, and of whatever relates to ourselves, and the natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator. It is he who shows us the propriety of generosity and the deformity of injustice; the propriety of resigning the greatest interests of our own, for the yet greater interests of others, and the deformity of doing the smallest injury to another, in order to obtain the greatest benefit to ourselves. It is not the love of our neighbour, it is not the love of mankind, which upon many occasions prompts us to the practice of those divine virtues. It is a stronger love, a more powerful affection, which generally takes place upon such occasions; the love of what is honourable and noble, of the grandeur, and dignity, and superiority of our own characters.¹

10. Peart and Levy attempt to draw a relationship between central planning and eugenics, not just in the sense that eugenics is itself an example of central planning, but that there are deeper sympathies. At the level of vague hints and associative innuendo that much of this is here to, I suspect, rhetorically accomplish, this doesn’t particularly square with the fact that the actually centrally planned Soviet Union was the only major power of the early twentieth century that didn’t attempt to eugenically manage its population (apart from “quality”-neutral pronatalist policies.) However, this might be read as consistent with the more concrete claim made, but not elaborated at length, that a material incentive for hierarchical conceptions of human nature was that they would justify the assumption of managerial powers by scientific elites. Since Soviet leadership, including broad scientific elites, already had considerable managerial powers, and separate justifications for it, they may have had no need of the racial hypothesis. But further investigation of this probably entails greater familiarity with Soviet thinking about population management in the period before the adoption of the planned economy than I have myself.
11. I’ve been intending to read Landa on liberalism and fascism for a while, but given the overlap between the thinkers treated here and those in Landa – Mises, Spencer, Carlyle, I think a few others – now I really do.

f.n.

1. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, Sec. III ch. 3. Paragraph breaks added by me for readability. <3 u otherwise adam!!!

The following is a(n obviously incomplete) directory of indoctrinatory primers, catechisms, and introductory readers for various political points of view – left, right, lawful, chaotic, good, evil, sane, insane, whatever – which take the form of links to essays, blog posts, or books available easily online, and/or FAQs, which, while not precisely reading lists, seem to me to be in the same spirit. I have not read through most of these – though it’s certainly on the bucket list – and therefore cannot vouch for their quality, but have limited myself to pages that seem to show at least some degree of effort. Use to avoid epistemic closure, deepen your understanding of the One True Way, know thy enemy, or simply gawk at the moral diversity of mankind.

The organization of this is admittedly somewhat arbitrary, and will no doubt offend someone by placing them overclose to their enemy, or too far from whom they see as their natural comrades. Inocculatory readers and FAQs have been placed with their infectious counterparts, rather than from the point of view from which the attack has been launched; compilations of questions of fact have been placed with the traditions with which they are most readily associated, rather than the ideology of the compiler; either of these could have been otherwise. At the moment, in its incomplete state, this is not a terrible problem – the list is small, the organization hardly matters. As omissions are corrected and lacunae filled, it may become more of one.

Additions and correction appreciated.

• Meta
  • Fifty Contemporary Political Ideologies (pro-click)
  • Really Meta
• Right
  • Neoreactionary
    • Neoreactionary Canon
    • Library of the Dark Enlightenment (mostly books, but some accessible)
    • Avante-Garde Reactionary Book Collection
    • Anti-Reactionary FAQ
      • Anti-Anti-Reactionary FAQ
      • Monarchy FAQ Part One and Two
  •  Nationalist, Alt-Right, and Paleo
    • A Conservative Reading List
    • Pro-Western Christian Reading List
    • National Anarchist Reading List, FAQ, and manifesto
    • Nationalism FAQ
    • HBD Fundamentals and FAQ (curator is liberal)
      • Anti-Racialist Q&A (right-libertarian)
    • Holocaust Revisionist FAQ
      • Nizkor Project FAQs (ant-revisionist)
  • Traditionalist Catholic
    • Traditional Catholicism 101
    • Monarchism FAQ
    • Distributist FAQ and reading list
• Lib
  • Right-Libertarian and Ancap
    • Libertarian (with paleo bent)
    • Libertarian (with ancap bent)
    • A Reading List for Anarcho-Capitalists
    • Reading List in Austrian Economics and Libertarianism
    • Anarcho-Capitalist FAQ
    • Libertarian FAQ
      • Non-Libertarian FAQ
    • Critiques of Libertarianism (including FAQ)
  • Left-Libertarian and Mutualist
    • Left Libertarian Resources
    • Market Anarchist FAQ
    • Mutualist FAQ
    • Geolibertarian FAQ
    • Another Geolibertarianism FAQ
  • boring centrist garbage (j/k they seem like nice ppl)
    • The Case for Open Borders
    • Liberal FAQ (web 1.0 as fuck)
• Left
  • Leftist Study Guide Project (components not necessarily high quality, but would be remiss not to include)
  • MIA Subject Archive (some sections more usefully organized than others)
  • Ancom and Left Communist
    • Anarchism Reading Guide and FAQ (relatively more sympathetic to Marxism)
    • Anarchist FAQ and Library (relatively less so)
    • Left Communist Recommended Reading (see sidebar)
  • Leninist
    • Basic Marxism-Leninism Study Plan
    • Marxist-Leninist Study Guide
    • Education Plan (Trotskyist)
    • the Weapon of Theory (Maoist-Third Worldist)
    • RAIM 101 Study Guide (Maoist-Third Worldist, some overlap with above)
    • Onkwehón:we Rising Recommended Reading (also MTWist)
    • Arm the Spirit Archived Readings (MLM)
  • Feminist (see also several subsections of the above)
    • Feminism 101
    • Women and Feminism Reading Guide (ancom)
    • Women’s Liberation and Super-Exploitation (mtwist)
  • Green
    • Deep Green Recommended Resources
    • Voluntary Human Extinction Movement FAQ
• Not necessarily political but arguably in the same spirit
  • Consequentialism FAQ

Daniel Dennett says somewhere or other that the weak points in an argument are frequently betrayed by the appearance of rhetorical questions, and IME this heuristic has considerable value. One not-quite-an-argument popular among biological racists is expressions of flat incredulity – sometimes in the form of rhetorical questions, sometimes in charges of “liberal creationism” or “evolution stopping below the neck” – towards natural selection resulting in native intellectual equality, or, to use the preferred racist term, “human neural uniformity.”¹ To interpret the claim charitably, it would be that native intellectual dissimilarity – and, particularly, human native intellectual dissimilarity across regional groups – is an antiprediction. Would it not be an extraordinary coincidence for natural selection, that most unforgivingly Tigerest of Mothers, to install the same abilities in everyone everywhere, when the tradeoffs between intelligence (or whatever else is under discussion) and other adaptive goods must surely (except by extraordinary coincidence) vary by climate and social structure? Does HNU not rest on the razor’s edge of probability?

Continue reading →

One of Marx’s primary criticisms of the classical political economy in which he swam was that that it overfocused on the sphere of exchange – whereas the real action is in the sphere of production. This is yet truer of the marginalist economics (especially in their vulgar form) that has by and large replaced the classical tradition: its natural sphere of thought is in exchange, where subjective valuation rules. If our default model consists of people bartering at a sort of trading post divorced from time, deducing exchange-value from (agent-relative, ordinal-but-we’ll-pretend-cardinal-when-convenient) use-values is trivial.

To put it another way, in this very short run, “supply” in the colloquial sense (how much of this thing is on the market?) is vertical, and in the more technical sense is regulated by use-value to the seller (which may be negligible.) With static quantities, the supply-demand chart is in fact an Edgeworth Box.

Neoclassical economics is smart enough to recognize, of course, that people do produce things. Hence, moving from the short to the medium run, the supply curve comes to incorporate costs of production.

(Likewise, as we move from imagining peasants exchanging surplus production or nerds trading Magic cards to capitalist firms producing commodities to be sold, the use-value to the seller becomes less and less a regulator. Subjectivism can be retained within the production-regulated supply curve inasmuch as we think of labor supply as governed by the disutility of work. This approach, following Smith, has obvious merits for certain questions, such as the analysis of compensating differentials in different occupations, but on the whole I would guard against extending it too much. The fact that modern capitalism has stabilized around the 40-hour workweek – where long-run production appears to be maximized – implies to me that the availability of labor isn’t limited so much by its disutility as by its opportunity costs in other labor.)

Of course this medium-run approach is still marginalist; that is, the supply curve is still a curve, and its slope reflects the diminishing returns present in, if not vendor consumption (which have already been exhausted,) the application of resources to the production of the good in question, as less and less appropriate inputs are employed: after raiding my pantry of cookies, I raid it for eggs and cookie mix, which take additional time to prepare, at a certain point I may need to start employing my radiator as a substitute oven, &c.

However, just as the supply curves rotates clockwise as we move from the short to the medium term, it also does so as we move from the medium to the long, precisely because the conversion of input-yielding things into other input-yielding things is time-lagged. Market production of specialized equipment, and the educational system’s production of specialists, responds to the price rise of the commodity in question as much as anything else in capitalist civilization. Going further, infrastructure and culture adjust as well. I could add technology, and perhaps that’s cheating, but the bottom line here is: time erodes input heterogeneity in a way that makes a marginalist world look increasingly look like a classical one. And in fact classical political economy was already aware of the difference between these time scales, using as it did “supply” and “demand” to refer to shorter-term fluctuations occurring in a world where adjustment to equilibrium is time-lagged. (To use the newer meanings of the terms, a classical world’s horizontal supply curves mean that supply determines price while supply and demand jointly determine quantity.)

Abstracting from the time period within which all matter-energy is converted to fungible grey goo, of course, there remain input heterogeneities which demand the existence of diminishing returns in production (albeit not to the extent of actually precluding increasing marginal returns in practice – consider how researchers tend to be more productive the more of them are geographically clustered together, or how the 10,000th widget is almost always easier to produce than the first, &c.) Zinc isn’t copper, and dogs make better security guards and therapists than bricklayers or physicists. At this point there arises a sympathy between {right|left}-wing philosophical anthropology and {right|left}-wing value theory: to the extend that heterogeneities between labor-exuding things are the product of biology rather than culture, substitution must occur at the pace of evolution rather than of history. (I was about to write “deep sympathy,” but that is not so: advances in biotechnology may well soon compress biological timescales to or beneath historical ones. It is because of this that I would be pleased to learn that hereditarian are correct, however much I presently doubt that they are.)

My instinct here, as should be obvious, is to deploy this as an apologetic cudgel for Marxism against neoclassicism (or, rather, against non-classical neoclassicism, as classical political economy is a special case of neoclassicism in the same way that neoclassicism is a special case of game theory.) But more objectively, the point seems to be that the appropriateness of different price theories (and, hence, ways of conceptualizing market civilization generally) depends upon the term within which you are asking your question.

Whereas emancipation in Haiti was slave-led and violent, and emancipation in the British West Indies bourgeois-led and peaceful, emancipation in the United States was bourgeois-led and violent. It also, moreso than anywhere, came about as a result of a comedy of errors where actors exploited temporary opportunities to result in escalating crises.

It’s customary today to think of slavery and the genocide of the land’s original inhabitants as America’s two founding racist sins. It’s not odd for us to think of them together, and it wasn’t odd for Americans a century and a half ago to think of them together either. But they thought of them together in a different way than we do now: for many northern whites, the primary sin of slavery was that it was going to grab westward land that rightfully belonged to them.

The settler alliance between north and south had been shaky from the very beginning, resulting in awkward compromises like the bicameral legislature. Changes in trade patterns would cause them to unravel: over the first half of the nineteenth century, the customers of Southern cotton would increasingly shift from the northern United States to Britain. At the same time, the Midwest grew increasingly “tamed” in its overall social structure, imitating the pattern of mass smallholding that was being replaced in the East by burgeoning industrialization, while shifting its own “exports” from the South to the North. In other words, the pattern of trade would shift from this:

to this:

At the same time, the West represented a safety valve to the high-density East, allowing its wages to remain high and its civil order secure through the option of homesteading. But the South had other interests in the West: unlike other slave systems, because the United States’ peculiar institution was based primarily on cotton, its limiting factor of production was not persons but land. To be sure, sugar had led to considerable soil depletion in the West Indies as well, but the cultivation of cotton was (relatively speaking) kinder to bodies and harsher to land. The South, then, was hungry to expand Westward as well – indeed, more so, since its ruling class had less ambivalence on the question.

With the Mexican-American War of the 1840s and economic collapse of the continent’s other slaving empire, the Comanches, in the 1850s, military barriers to the incorporation of that land disappeared rapidly. The result was an escalating political crisis over whether new states (with their Senators and Representatives, and moreover general social structure) would enter the growing nation “slave” or “free.” When the question was to be put to a vote in the territory of Kansas, activists pioneered new election techniques, seeking to reduce each others’ electoral base by the most direct means available. One legislator nearly beat another to death on the Senate floor. Pretty soon Lincoln was elected, and we all know how that turns out.

The historical actors themselves didn’t, however. What both sides imagined would be an easy victory turned out to be an interminable and costly conflict, claiming more American lives than all others put together. It is unlikely that either side would have been willing to bear the cost had it known in advance, but war, once entered, is a dollar auction.

The unexpected transformation of the Civil War into a total war expanded the ambit of Northern aims from the political to the social sphere. Not all slave states had joined the rebels, and their support of the political war had ensured their social peace. But the question of what to do with the slaves in the territories reclaimed by the Union posed both a strategic and tactical problem. The tactical opportunity was faced and on variously exploited by military leaders on the ground. As Du Bois recounts it:

The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President, and the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within their lines. They came at night, when the flickering camp-fires shone like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon: old men and thin, with gray and tufted hair; women, with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt,—a horde of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable, in their dark distress. Two methods of treating these newcomers seemed equally logical to opposite sorts of minds. Ben Butler, in Virginia, quickly declared slave property contraband of war, and put the fugitives to work; while Fremont, in Missouri, declared the slaves free under martial law. Butler’s action was approved, but Fremont’s was hastily countermanded, and his successor, Halleck, saw things differently. “Hereafter,” he commanded, “no slaves should be allowed to come into your lines at all; if any come without your knowledge, when owners call for them deliver them.” Such a policy was difficult to enforce; some of the black refugees declared themselves freemen, others showed that their masters had deserted them, and still others were captured with forts and plantations.

As the war dragged on, the tactical calculus became a strategic one. To win a brush war against the South it ought only have been necessary to show the plantocracy that they could retain more as loyal citizens of the Republic than as rebels, but having demonstrated their valor and intransigence, the question became one of destruction. Lincoln chose to burn his ships by Proclaiming the slaves (not in the Union) free, forgoing the possibility of a negotiated surrender. Instead, he won over half the population of the South to a now-revolutionary class alliance. With this and the adoption of scorched-earth tactics by General Grant, the Confederacy was defeated, and over a disenfranchised rebel population, the war’s legitimacy was capstoned by the Reconstruction amendments. The Confederates had hoped not entirely implausibly for intervention by their British trading partners, but the Empire had too much of their legitimacy invested in antislavery, and reversing that position would likely harm their terms of trade against the Iberian colonies even while preserving it in the case of the American. Thus began the further battle, which would determine the status of labor – free, unfree, or otherwise – in the South.

Once again, the fundamental dispute was over land and the determinant was the constellation of class forces at play: The Haitian state had expelled the military basis of the previous coercive state apparatus (the white militia) and become internationally encircled, and was thus powerless to realize its ambitions of becoming a developmental state. The British government faced almost no credible opposition to its aims, and being committed to formal state neutrality before the market, the relations of production found themselves determined by the supply of and demand for land. The Union sought a permanent peace in an area in which the non-planting white population was much larger.

Though only a small minority of whites numbered among the planting class, which had owned the great majority of slaves and land, around a quarter of white families had owned slaves at all, and though aspiration to the neo-aristocratic ranks would have been unreasonable for them, entrance into that lucky quarter was not. Every white had at least the opportunity to become a kulak with a servant or two to raise his crops or merely aggrandize his name, and this possibility had formed the basis for white solidarity that had stood toe-to-toe, for some time, with the overwhelming industrial superiority of the North. Though the basis of white solidarity would necessarily transform, it would, after the interregnum of military occupation and stillborn social revolution, again form the military basis for the social order in the South.

After the First World War, groups of patriotic young men who had braved death and danger together, especially with the leadership and initiative of junior members of the aristocratic officer corps – the squadristi in Italy, the Freikorps in Germany, the American Legion in the United States – would assist in the suppression of labor uprisings and eventually make up the vanguard force for fascism. So it was in the American South. After the decisive political victory of the North, the labor question remained in many respects a military one, and so the defeated went about immediately organizing paramilitary organizations: the Klan, the White Leagues, the Red Shirts, the “bulldozers,” and so on. At the same time, black militias formed as well, affiliated with the Union Army and Republican Clubs – though these would be among the first organizations to be disassembled after the end of Reconstruction, and with their inferior materials and drill did not constitute a credible threat to their opponents when that time came.

As such, it passed through several phases, dependent on the military situation; but the ultimate solution the process converged on was sharecropping, or what in other parts of the world was called métayage: land rented in-kind for a portion of the output. Whatever the level of exploitation, sharecropping can be recognized as a compromise form: centering on the family rather than work gang as basic locus of production, cash crops rather than food for family consumption, and (at least theoretical) proletarian “double freedom” of the worker to leave and be separated from her land. Wallerstein, noting that this had been the dominant form of land tenure throughout much of early modern southern Europe, has characterized it as a classically semiperipheral productive relationship. In explaining why it became dominant in these regions, he asks:

Why sharecropping however and not tenantry on the one hand or coerced cash-crop labor [such as slavery] on the other? Although sharecropping has had the disadvantage, compared to coerced cash-cropping, of greater difficulty in supervision, it had the advantage of encouraging the peasant’s efforts to increased productivity, provided of course the peasant would continue to work for the seignoir without legal compulsion. In short, when labor is plentiful, sharecropping is probably more profitable than coerced cash-cropping.

As for tenantry, no doubt this logic is more profitable still than cash-cropping. However there is a proviso. Tenants have fixed contracts and gain at moments of inflation, at least to the extent that the contracts are relatively short-term. Of course, the reverse is true when the market declines. Sharecropping thus is a mode of risk-minimization. It follows that sharecropping is most likely to be considered in areas of specialized agriculture where the risks of variance outweight the transaction costs. [1] 

Moreso than southern Europe, the American South’s export-oriented cash crop economy was vulnerable to price fluctuations. But land density had not changed with the war, and so as elsewhere, planters sought alternative means of restricting the mobility of labor. For the Radical Republicans, at least, the objectives were the same as those of the British government had been: that, per the report of the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission, “[t]he natural laws of supply and demand should be left to regulate rates of compensation and places of residence.” [2] This was not true of all northern policy imposed during the war. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas, issuing orders for labor regulations in occupied Missippi, which would soon be copied elsewhere, explained that

These regulations are based upon the assumption that labor is a public duty and idleness and vagrancy a crime… That portion of the people identified with the cultivation of the soil, however changed in condition by the [abolition of slavery], is not relieved from the necessity of toil, which is the condition of existence with all the children of God. The revolution has altered its tenure, but not its law. [3] 

The “indigenous” (legal) response to the question would arrive in the form of the Black Codes, to (as the Mississipi legislature put it) make the labor-power of the freed “available to the agricultural interests of the state.” [4] The Black Codes were “designed to limit the mobility of labor, drive blacks out of towns and back onto the plantations, reduce competition among planters, restrict the employment opportunities of freedpeople, enforce contractual obligations, and ensure the continued subordination of black people in the South.” [5] Proscriptions were offered not only for blacks directly, but for emigration agents as well. During Reconstruction such codes were voided, but with its ending they immediately resurfaced.

The exclusion of blacks from urban labor reflected not only the interests of white agricultural capital but also white urban labor. Like their northern brethren, white proletarians in the South were part of a nascent labor aristocracy occupying a relatively privileged position in the international economy, and like their northern brethren their strategies relied on a strategy of exclusion. This was expressed at the legislative level by segregation and at the firm level by the policies of white unions. The class interests of white labor in the South also exercised veto power over one of the planters’ attempted solutions to the labor problem, which being the imitation of “successful” transitions in islands such as Trinidad through the mass importation of foreign labor.

What the former Confederacy was not able to do was maintain the aspect that laborers found most degrading – gang labor. Even confined to a narrow choice of employers, freedfolk were unwilling to work under the whip again, wages or no. Planters expressed aggravation about this, but were unable to successfully reinstitute it outside situations of maximal coercion (for instance, through the growth of the prison population.) But they also knew no other methods of inducing work. Agricultural labor was not like an assembly line, where the motions of the different workers were so integrated that they were kept in motion by the production process itself; and direct monitoring (and inducement) of the pace of work was precisely what the workers objected to. Sharecropping, then, arose essentially as a form of piecework. It came about as a result of the struggle between the black rural workforce, the white labor aristocracy, white agricultural capital, and (at least for a time) northern industrial capital – the means each was able to employ and the terms to which they were able to submit.

Thus, not only were free peasantries formed in the wake of emancipation, but serfdoms, loosely speaking, as well. Once again, I think this should unsettle our conception of any particular relation of production being essentially “premodern.”

[1] Wallerstein, Modern World System, p. 105
[2] Final Report of the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission to the Secretary of War, p. 382
[3] U.S. War Dept., “Orders No. 9″
[4] cited on p. 63, Edward Royce, Origins of Southern Sharecropping
[5] ibid., pp. 63-64

According to the law of value, commodities exchange for their equivalents in value, or the amount of labor typically required to produce them – or at least they do so in equilibrium. After all, any time they do not, this creates arbitrage opportunities: if a teacup takes two hours to produce on average and a basketball one, and they both sell for $1, then smart capitalists will move production from teacups to basketballs until the increasingly (decreasingly) crowded basketball (teacup) market causes their value-price ratios to equate. Of course the real world is never in equilibrium, but there is always a hypothetical market equilibrium which we can describe actual prices as deviating from and tending towards, and at this teleological point in price space, price is equal to average socially necessary labor time. Right?

Not quite.  Continue reading →