Digressions&Impressions

On Foucault's Discipline and Punishment & Chicago Economics

It is understandable that the criticism of the public execution should have assumed such importance in penal reform: for it was the form in which, in the most visible way, the unlimited power of the sovereign and the ever-active illegality of the people came together. Humanity in the sentences was the rule given to a system of punishment that must fix their limits on both. The ‘man’ that must be respected in the sentence was the juridical and moral form given to this double delimitation.
But, although it is true that reform, as a penal theory and as a strategy of the power to punish, took shape at the point of coincidence of these two objectives, its stability in the future was due to the fact that, for a long time, priority was given to the second. It was because the pressure on popular illegalities had become, at the period of the Revolution, then under the Empire, and finally throughout the nineteenth century, an essential imperative, that reform was able to pass from the project stage to that of an institution and set of practices. That is to say, although the new criminal legislation appears to be characterized by less severe penalties, a clearer codification, a marked diminution of the arbitrary, a more generally accepted consensus concerning the power to punish (in the absence of a more real division in its exercise), it is sustained in reality by an upheaval in the traditional economy of illegalities and a rigorous application of force to maintain their new adjustment. A penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them all.--Michel Foucault (1975) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison] translated by Alan Sheridan, pp. 88-9 [in the Vintage & Penguin classcis edition]

The passage quoted from Discipline and Punish (hereafter D&P) caught my attention because the final sentence expresses an idea that later in the (1979) lecture series, Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault associates with the 'Chicago' (that is, Becker and Stigler) approach to crime. Let me explain.

At the end of the second lecture of 17 January 1979, with an explicit nod to Beccaria, Foucault had summarized  the"new regime" of "the well-known principle of mildness of punishment appears:" "...government is basically no longer to be exercised over subjects and other things subjected through these subjects. Government is now to be exercised over what we could call the phenomenal republic of interests." (p. 49) In fact, in 1979, Foucault here explicitly denies that this change has anything to do with a new humane sensibility.

He then returns to the theme of crime as a major subject (recall this post) in his tenth lecture of 21 March 1979, which is the second one devoted to American (Chicago) neoliberalism (in context he explicitly mentions Ehrlich, Becker, and Stigler).* There he starts his discussion by claiming that "Their analysis of criminality at first appears to be the simplest possible return to the eighteenth century reformers like Beccaria and especially Bentham." (248)+ He then goes on to summarize a kind of synthesis of the reformers as follows (and uses Coase-ian language):

A good law is necessary and almost sufficient, was nothing other than the desire for what could be called, in economic terms, a reduction in the transaction cost. The law is the most economical solution for punishing people adequately and for this punishment to be effective. First, the crime must be defined as an infraction of a formulated law, so that in the absence of a law there is no crime and an action cannot be incriminated. Second, penalties must be fixed once and for all by the law. Third, penalties must be fixed in law according to the degree of seriousness of the crime. Fourth, henceforth the criminal court will only have one thing to do, which is to apply to an established and proven crime a law which determines in advance what penalty the criminal must suffer according to the seriousness of his crime. An absolutely simple, apparently completely obvious mechanics constitutes the most economic form, that is to say, the least costly and most effective form for obtaining punishment and the elimination of conducts deemed harmful to society. (p. 249)

So, in 1979, Foucault implies that the late eighteenth century penal reformers (Beccaria & Bentham) invent the economic analysis of the law in terms of transaction costs and cost benefit analysis. It is worth noting that this reflects a modest change from Discipline and Punishment, where Beccaria is not treated as a progenitor of law and economics, and where (with nods to Capital) Bentham is treated as someone who helps create or constitute the homo economicus through a 'disciplinary mechanism' (D&P, pp. 205-209), but does not take homo economicus as given (in the way, say, Chicago economics does). This change, reflects a rethinking on Foucault's part of the role of interest (and of a decrease of Marx's significance and an increase of Hume's significance to his overall argument), but about that some other time more.

Now, in the passage quoted from p. 249 it seems as if Foucault allows that the 18th century reformers allowed for the complete elimination of conduct deemed harmful to society. But recall (again here) that this will come at a cost. And so, de facto, the way Foucault introduces the eighteenth century reformers is that in their law & economics of crime, one can calculate a kind of optimum crime rate at the lowest cost to society. And, after explaining that the reformers did not have a pure law & economics, this is, in fact, the view he ends up attributing to Stigler as "the objective of a penal policy: “The goal of law enforcement,” he says, “is to achieve a degree of compliance with the rule of prescribed behavior that society believes it can procure while taking account of the fact that enforcement is costly.” This is in the Journal of Political Economy in 1970." (256; as the editors note, this is a reference to “The optimum enforcement of laws,”) And then Foucault glosses Stigler's point as follows: "Consequently, good penal policy does not aim at the extinction of crime, but at a balance between the curves of the supply of crime and negative demand. Or again: society does not have a limitless need for compliance. Society does not need to conform to an exhaustive disciplinary system." (256)**

That a "penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them all" is, thus, a key insight of Stigler (1970), and Foucault makes a point of emphasizing this in his 1979 lecture where he treats it as a return to the reformist sensibility of the late 18th century (before it was, as it were, corrupted by criminology's search for the anthropology of the criminal). Foucault thinks this is highly significant because, looking forward, "On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals." (259-260, emphasis added on the Hayekian, 'rules of the game'). While I would not go so far as claiming that Foucault endorses this horizon in normative fashion, I do think he is intrigued by the opportunities this affords.

Before I conclude. You might think I have made way too much of Foucault's claim that the "penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them all" as an anticipation of his analysis of Chicago law & economics. After all, the quoted paragraph leading up to it does not seem very law & economics at all. Fair enough. However, in his own gloss, he goes on to write the following:

Shift the object and change the scale. Define new tactics in order to reach a target that is now more subtle but also more widely spread in the social body. Find new techniques for adjusting punishment to it and for adapting its effects. Lay down new principles for regularizing, refining, universalizing the art of punishing. Homogenize its application. Reduce its economic and political cost by increasing its effectiveness and by multiplying its circuits. In short, constitute a new economy and a new technology of the power to punish: these are no doubt the essential raisons d'etre of penal reform in the eighteenth century. (D&P, 89)++

So, it's clear that in 1975, Foucault understands the significance of the late 18th century penal reformers in terms of a political economy. And he presents them as anticipating the very point that in 1979 he attributes to Stigler (who he treats as returning to the best insights of the reformers). And this theme is really introduced as early as D&P p. 82, so it's not a mere  throw away remark.

Let me conclude with two speculations. First, it is not impossible that Foucault was familiar with Stigler's work before he published Discipline and Punish. There is an annotation on Stigler 1970 in his hand (see here). After all, Foucault was enmeshed in prison reform activism, so not just doing historical research on prisons in the early 1970s. This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that Stigler 1970 is absent in Lepage (1978), which is often treated as Foucault's source to Chicago neoliberalism.** So, if that's right, Foucault was already interpreting his source material in light of some familiarity with the Chicago approach to crime.

Second, it's also possible, of course, that Foucault's familiarity with Stigler and the Chicago approach to crime came after he wrote Discipline and Punish. And then that opens up the possibility of not just an epynomous disovery (a term coined by George's son, Stephen Stigler), but also a kind of convergence between Foucault and Chicago economics on a non-trivial issue. This suggests that Foucault's purported late affinity with American neoliberalism (a much debated issue among Foucault scholars) may have roots in his own intellectual development in reflecting on the role of crime and punishment in society.

 

Weber, Bellamy, and Burnham on Power and Truth

In contrast to these older forms, modern bureaucracy has one characteristic which makes its inescapability much more definite: rational specialization and training. The Chinese mandarin was not a specialist but a gentleman with a literary and humanistic education. The Egyptian, Late Roman or Byzantine official was much more of a bureaucrat in our sense of the word. But compared to the modern tasks, his were infinitely simple and limited; his attitude was in part tradition-bound, in part patriarchally, that means, irrationally oriented. Like the businessman of the past, he was a pure empiricist. The modern official receives a professional training, which unavoidably increases, corresponding to the rational technology of modern life. . . . Whenever the modern specialized official comes to predominate, his power proves practically indestructible since the whole organization of elementary want satisfaction has been tailored to his mode of operation. A progressive elimination of private capitalism is theoretically conceivable. . . . What would be the practical result? The destruction of the steel frame of modern industrial work? No! The abolition of private capitalism would simply mean that the management of the nationalized or socialized enterprises would become bureaucratic. Are the daily working conditions of the salaried employees and the workers in the state-owned Prussian mines and railroads perceptibly different from those in big business enterprises? In truth, there is even less freedom since every struggle against a state bureaucracy is hopeless and since, in principle, nobody can appeal to an agency which would be interested in limiting it, contrary to what is possible in relation to a private enterprise. That would be the whole difference.

State bureaucracy would rule alone. The private and public bureaucracies which now work next to, and potentially against, each other and hence check one another to a degree would be merged into a single hierarchy. This would be similar to the situation in ancient Egypt, but it would occur in a much more rational and inescapable form.--Max Weber (1917) excerpted in State and Society: A Reader in Comparative Political Sociology, edited by R. Bendix, p. 301-302.

Richard Bellamy partially quotes the passage on p, 193 in his excellent (1992) Liberalism and Modern Society: A Historical Argument in his chapter on Max Weber. (Recall my more critical post here.) While Bellamy's book is not obscure it is somewhat unfairly rarely mentioned in the contemporary revival of so-called 'political realism.' The chapter on Weber and the critique of late twentieth century what he calls "neutralist liberalism" are both very nicely done and repay close reading. My favorite feature of Bellamy's book -- and the aspect that has not lost any significance at all -- is Bellamy's close attention to liberal thought in the context where survival of liberalism cannot be taken for granted (something true, I hasten to add, of liberalism everywhere and at all times).

Bellamy quotes the passage from Weber in the context of explaining Weber's views on the significance of the balancing of counter-veiling bureaucracies in industry and state in the service of Weber's larger argument against a fully planned economy. And it shows how prescient Weber was relative to Marxist revolutions to come. But also, that after the first world war, as well as the development of the cartelization of the German economy (something Lenin had also commented on), Europeans had already sufficient experience with the nature of (at least partially) planned economies to understand some of its structural political and economic weaknesses. I return to that below.

It is kind of amusing - in light of the recurring tendency in our philosophical self-understanding to treat empiricism as something noble and sophisticated --  that Weber identifies 'pure empiricism' with a kind of irrational orientation toward reality to be contrasted with a (modern) skilled control over one's environment in the context of the advanced division of labor (and rule-following). To what degree his comparative account of bureaucracy can survive scholarly scrutiny I leave to others. But it is important to see that for Weber modernity is characterized by the omni-presence of bureaucratic organization. It is an interesting question to what degree modern information technologies allow for a de-skilling of the bureaucracy (in the private and public sectors). 

Now, in the quoted passage, Weber clearly anticipates Burnham's thesis defended in the Managerial Revolution (and in a different way, Galbraith). I don't recall Burnham crediting Weber. I don't mean to suggest that Burnham plagiarized Weber; it's pretty clear that they were both familiar with Mosca, Pareto, and Michels (who work through related ideas). But Weber turns their diagnoses into an argument for maintaining the market as a site of countervailing powers. And this anticipates the ORDO-liberals' emphasis that while power in the marketplace is dangerous (and certainly to be guarded against) it can also be a partial check on state power (even if it also increases danger of rent-seeking). I don't think these passages suggest that Weber 'idealized capitalist relations to a certain extent' (a partial concession Bellamy makes to a criticism by Marcuse) because Weber's analysis relies on a kind of 'least bad' style argument.

Thus, Weber grasps -- and again this makes his analysis all the more salient today -- that relatively unchallenged and unaccountable rule by technically sophisticated administrators can itself be a species of despotism (which anticipates, again, the Hayekian attack on Saint Simonism as much as it does Graeber & Wengrow). And part of the despotic nature of pure rule by the technically sophisticated bureaucrat is that she does so in the name of, and drawing on, rationality. And it is incredibly difficult to oppose reason without looking and becoming irrational. (This is all the worse if the reason the bureaucrat is instantiating understands itself as ethical.) Again, this is all quite prescient.

Interestingly enough, Weber does not slide into conservatism (away from liberalism) and the valorization of elite rule (familiar from Burnham and his followers), but rather -- as Bellamy emphasizes --, into thinking about the ways in which institutions and procedures can redistribute power and to allow for at least a "plurality of competing values in society" (Bellamy 1992: 216). That is, such plurality of competing values is both an effect of the advanced division of labor and competing interests and, in turn, a means to check any ideal from becoming an oppressive ideology. Rather than, for example, promoting a marketplace of ideas as a means toward consensus/truth, the marketplace of ideas becomes another vehicle for permanent disagreement (anticipating Mouffe and Berlin to some degree) and a check on power that presents itself as truth. This is, of course, Foucault's great theme.* 

 

A note on Foucault and Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions, and Adam SMith & Stigler.

And thus, in fragments here and there, political economy is thought to have been silently bringing into position its essential themes, until the moment when, taking up the analysis of production again in another direction, Adam Smith is supposed to have brought to light the process of the increasing division of labour, Ricardo the role played by capital, and J-B. Say some of the fundamental laws of the market economy. From this moment on, political economy is supposed to have begun to exist with its own proper object and its own inner coherence.
In fact, the concepts of money, price, value, circulation, and market were not regarded, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in terms of a shadowy future, but as part of a rigorous and general epistemological arrangement. It is this arrangement that sustains the 'analysis of wealth' in its overall necessity. The analysis of wealth is to political economy what general grammar is to philology and what natural history is to biology. And just as it is not possible to understand the theory of verb and noun, the analysis of the language of action, and that of roots and their development, without referring, through the study of general grammar, to the archaeological network that makes those things possible and necessary; just as one cannot understand, without exploring the domain of natural history, what Classical description, characterization, and taxonomy were, any more than the opposition between system and method, or Tixism' and 'evolution'; so, in the same way, it would not be possible to discover the link of necessity that connects the analysis of money, prices, value, and trade if one did not first clarify this domain of wealth which is the locus of their simultaneity.--Michael Foucault The Order of Things (1970) {1994, Vintage Books Edition} Translated by Alan Sheridan* (original Les Mots et les Choses, 1966), pp. 166-167.+

In a correspondence shortly after Structure of Scientific Revolutions first appeared, Thomas Kuhn reminded the future Nobel laureate and Chicago Economist, George Stigler, that in Structure he considered economics as a mature science. The passage Kuhn refers to is one that illustrates Kuhn's argument for rejecting a definition of science. 

Furthermore, if precedent from the natural sciences serves, they will cease to be a source of concern not when a definition is found, but when the groups that now doubt their own status achieve consensus about their past and present accomplishments. It may, for example, be significant that economists argue less about whether their field is a science than do practitioners of some other fields of social science. Is that because economists know what science is? Or is it rather economics about which they agree?--Kuhn Structure (Second, enlarged edition), pp. 160-161.

What's notable about Kuhn's position here is that he ties essentially sociological and political criteria and concepts (viz., groups, status, consensus) to help identify if not characterize that we're in the presence of a scientific community. Undoubtedly this is familiar to my readers. But it's worth adding that the agreement isn't merely over the present, but also about the past. A few pages later Kuhn shows that it is textbook that generate such consensus over the past (pp. 165-167), and he is quite explicit that the textbook account of the past is outright fabrication: "the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character of Orwell's 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the power that be." (167)

In Kuhn, the maturity of science and consensus are tightly intertwined and Kuhn is clear that both are, in part, the effect of textbook education (see also. p. 10). Now, I don't think Kuhn ever uses the language of 'immature' science (for it would be characterized by disagreement and so by definition is no science). But he does identify paradigmatic science with maturity, and so it is natural to treat what Kuhn calls as 'pre paradigm' period as the immature era which is, after, all  characterized by disagreement. In context Kuhn alerts the reader to the significance of this comment to "those concerned with the development of the contemporary social science sciences." (p.167)

As an aside, in "What is Enlightenment," Kant associates the progressive possibilities of intellectual autonomy, that is Enlightenment, with maturity. And the periods of authority over individual thought as immaturity. And there is interesting work to be done on the subtle shifts in and appropriations of Kantian commitments in Kuhn (and those that shaped Kuhn's philosophy.)

Before I return to Foucault, it is worth noting two features of Kuhn's position (that are textually connected in subsequent sentences, although I have reversed the presentational order). First, not all criteria that help identify a science are sociological or political in character. In particular, for Kuhn what makes consensus possible is the establishment of a paradigm (more about that below). And a paradigm is characterized by and makes "possible" what Kuhn calls "normal puzzle-solving research." (Postscript from 1969, p. 179) This seems very much internal to scientific practice, and undoubtedly can be characterized, in part, in epistemic terms.

However, and this is my second observation (and it is Foucault-ian in character), Kuhn explicitly assumes that there is no progressive puzzle-solving research in eras that are characterized by disunity of paradigms. Here's how Kuhn puts it: "The members of all scientific communities, including the schools of the "pre-paradigm" period, share the sorts of elements which I have collectively labelled 'a paradigm.' What changes with the transition to maturity is not the presence of a paradigm but rather its nature." (Postscript from 1969, p. 179) It's nature is that makes progressive puzzle-solving possible. So, paradigms make forward looking progress possible; and from the perspective of the paradigm, it's characteristic of the pre-paradigm era to exhibit "initial divergences" (17) of methods, evidential standards, and even what the subject matter really is.

It's quite odd that Kuhn doesn't notice that conceptually (and historically) it's quite possible that during disunified 'immature' eras the paradigms of the competing 'schools' (his term) can be progressive and be (or in virtue of their) puzzle-solving. (I actually think this is true even of cases central to his account of the scientific revolution in 17th century physics, but let me leave that aside here.) Since crisis eras of mature sciences are explicitly likened to pre-paradigmatic eras (72/84/101) -- and in crisis eras  of mature science there is still progressive puzzle-solving despite the anomalies - it is odd that Kuhn does not reflect on this.

Before I get to Foucault one important point as background. That there is a distinction between mature and immature sciences, and that they are seperated by intellectual revolutions of some sort, was widely held view among economists in the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth centuries. This is, in fact, a point that Stigler kind of makes in his side of the correspondence with Kuhn. And he encloses a number of papers that show this. In addition, that consensus is a marker of such maturity is also present in economics. (I have done some scholarship to establish these points, too; see here; and here.) My own speculative view is that Adam Smith's essay on the History of Astronomy is the source, within nineteenth century and twentieth century economics of the existence of these proto-Kuhnian ideas within economics. (That he held such views see here.) But other intellectual sources are possible.

Okay, if we now look at the passage quoted at the top of the post, we see that in the first paragraph Foucault describes what he takes to be a common view on the transition from a fragmented prior era, to a mature unified intellectual discipline. It's easy to recognize a narrative that involves transition from a pre-paradigmatic stage to a paradigmatic stage here. Once there is a ruling paradigm, after all, a field has a coherent forward motion and a clearly defined subject matter (this is, in fact, the constitutive nature of a paradim). In fact, the narrative is common ground among economic textbooks and Marxists (who have a story about the developmental relationship between pre-classical and classicale economics).

I don't mean to suggest the common view is intended as a characterization of Kuhn's position. It's also more likely that Foucault is targeting a kind of whiggishness that is quite common in the writing of the growth of knowledge/science from within and about the sciences. But I don't think the distance between the two is as large as we often now understand it in post Kuhnian philosophy of science. While Kuhn rejected the idea that there was a telos within or of science (he is fond of comparing it to the undirecteness of Darwinian evolution), he still inscribes a soft teleology into his account in virtue of the way the mature/immature, diverging/consensus, and pre-paradigm/paradigm (all seperated by a revolution) distinctions (and the associated network of concepts) operate in his account. Kuhn has gone  native (and so as a matter of Kuhn interpretation he is right to reject the extreme relativists/constructivists in science studioes that have presented him as their progenitor).

But in the second quoted paragraph Foucault goes on to reject the common view. For him the pre-Smithian (and pre-classical) political economists were not different in kind with those that followed Smith-Ricardo-Say. They held very different kind of views and with different methods, but that is because the thought of the age was structured by a very different kind of set of conceptual background conditions (episteme).  These conceptual background conditions can be stable over considerable time and act on and through many different intellectual disciplines at once for Foucault. (Part of the excitement of Foucault's book is his analysis of the structural analogies of different disciplines in the same era (defined by an episteme). I leave aside here the mechanisms of how this is supposed to work.

Now, crucially for my present concerns Foucault recognizes ruptures between successive eras (epistemes) and within disciplines within eras.* These can coincide, when ruptures within disciplines lead to a new era. Interestingly enough, as it happens (and I return to this some other time) Adam Smith's work is a vector of such micro rupture in a field that also happens to inaugurate a much larger set of shifts. (I am not ascribing to Foucault a causal account here because I want to avoid discussing here his account of large scale change between epistemes.)**

So, in Foucault's account, from the perspective of a later time (within a discipline), especially in a later episteme, the earlier work will, when intelligible at all, seem childish or disunified. Very much the way Kuhn describes immature, pre-paradigm eras. But on Foucault's own all things considered view, this is a kind of optical illusion, itself the effect of unexamined teleological commitments. One is literally unable to see what he calls 'the link of necessity that connects' the conceptual structure and practices of those in an earlier age. And because Foucault doesn't use consensus as a marker of scienticity or disciplined knowledge he can actually analyze how it works -- and since he is interested in human sciences -- and how such knowledge works on humans on its own (contested) terms.**

To be continued.

That Renegade Kautsky, and the fate of Capital and Liberalism

In the matter of defining imperialism, however, we have to enter into controversy, primarily, with Karl Kautsky, the principal Marxist theoretician of the epoch of the so-called Second International—that is, of the twenty-five years between 1889 and 1914. The fundamental ideas expressed in our definition of imperialism were very resolutely attacked by Kautsky in 1915, and even in November 1914, when he said that imperialism must not be regarded as a “phase” or stage of economy, but as a policy, a definite policy “preferred” by finance capital; that imperialism must not be “identified” with “present-day capitalism”; that if imperialism is to be understood to mean “all the phenomena of present-day capitalism”—cartels, protection, the domination of the financiers, and colonial policy—then the question as to whether imperialism is necessary to capitalism becomes reduced to the “flattest tautology”, because, in that case, “imperialism is naturally a vital necessity for capitalism”, and so on. The best way to present Kautsky’s idea is to quote his own definition of imperialism, which is diametrically opposed to the substance of the ideas which I have set forth (for the objections coming from the camp of the German Marxists, who have been advocating similar ideas for many years already, have been long known to Kautsky as the objections of a definite trend in Marxism).

Kautsky’s definition is as follows:

“Imperialism is a product of highly developed industrial capitalism. It consists in the striving of every industrial capitalist nation to bring under its control or to annex all large areas of agrarian [Kautsky’s italics] territory, irrespective of what nations inhabit it.” 

This definition is of no use at all because it one-sidedly, i.e., arbitrarily, singles out only the national question (although the latter is extremely important in itself as well as in its relation to imperialism), it arbitrarily and inaccurately connects this question only with industrial capital in the countries which annex other nations, and in an equally arbitrary and inaccurate manner pushes into the forefront the annexation of agrarian regions.

Imperialism is a striving for annexations—this is what the political part of Kautsky’s definition amounts to. It is correct, but very incomplete, for politically, imperialism is, in general, a striving towards violence and reaction. For the moment, however, we are interested in the economic aspect of the question, which Kautsky himself introduced into his definition. The inaccuracies in Kautsky’s definition are glaring. The characteristic feature of imperialism is not industrial but finance capital...The characteristic feature of imperialism is precisely that it strives to annex not only agrarian territories, but even most highly industrialised regions (German appetite for Belgium; French appetite for Lorraine), because (1) the fact that the world is already partitioned obliges those contemplating a redivision to reach out for every kind of territory, and (2) an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony....

Kautsky refers especially—and repeatedly—to English writers who, he alleges, have given a purely political meaning to the word “imperialism” in the sense that he, Kautsky, understands it. We take up the work by the English writer Hobson, Imperialism, which appeared in 1902, and there we read:

“The new imperialism differs from the older, first, in substituting for the ambition of a single growing empire the theory and the practice of competing empires, each motivated by similar lusts of political aggrandisement and commercial gain; secondly, in the dominance of financial or investing over mercantile interests.” 

We see that Kautsky is absolutely wrong in referring to English writers generally...We see that Kautsky, while claiming that he continues to advocate Marxism, as a matter of fact takes a step backward compared with the social-liberal Hobson, who more correctly takes into account two “historically concrete” (Kautsky’s definition is a mockery of historical concreteness!) features of modern imperialism: (1) the competition between several imperialisms, and (2) the predominance of the financier over the merchant. If it is chiefly a question of the annexation of agrarian countries by industrial countries, then the role of the merchant is put in the forefront.

Kautsky’s definition is not only wrong and un-Marxist. It serves as a basis for a whole system of views which signify a rupture with Marxist theory and Marxist practice all along the line. I shall refer to this later. The argument about words which Kautsky raises as to whether the latest stage of capitalism should be called imperialism or the stage of finance capital is not worth serious attention. Call it what you will, it makes no difference. The essence of the matter is that Kautsky detaches the politics of imperialism from its economics, speaks of annexations as being a policy “preferred” by finance capital, and opposes to it another bourgeois policy which, he alleges, is possible on this very same basis of finance capital. It follows, then, that monopolies in the economy are compatible with non-monopolistic, non-violent, non-annexationist methods in politics. It follows, then, that the territorial division of the world, which was completed during this very epoch of finance capital, and which constitutes the basis of the present peculiar forms of rivalry between the biggest capitalist states, is compatible with a non-imperialist policy. The result is a slurring-over and a blunting of the most profound contradictions of the latest stage of capitalism, instead of an exposure of their depth; the result is bourgeois reformism instead of Marxism.

...

The reply seems quite plausible, but in effect it is a more subtle and more disguised (and therefore more dangerous) advocacy of conciliation with imperialism, because a “fight” against the policy of the trusts and banks that does not affect the economic basis of the trusts and banks is mere bourgeois reformism and pacifism, the benevolent and innocent expression of pious wishes. Evasion of existing contradictions, forgetting the most important of them, instead of revealing their full depth—such is Kautsky’s theory, which has nothing in common with Marxism....

“From the purely economic point of view,” writes Kautsky, “it is not impossible that capitalism will yet go through a new phase, that of the extension of the policy of the cartels to foreign policy, the phase of ultra-imperialism,” i.e., of a superimperialism, of a union of the imperialisms of the whole world and not struggles among them, a phase when wars shall cease under capitalism, a phase of “the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital.” 

...

Kautsky’s utterly meaningless talk about ultra-imperialism encourages, among other things, that profoundly mistaken idea which only brings grist to the mill of the apologists of imperialism, i.e., that the rule of finance capital lessens the unevenness and contradictions inherent in the world economy, whereas in reality it increases them.--Lenin (1917) Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Chapter VII

Much of Lenin's argument in his Imperialism, The Highest State of Capitalism is directed against that 'renegade' Kautsky's position. But Kautsky's own stance has not generated much enthusiasm nor, it seems, interest from subsequent scholarship (which tends to read Kautsky (1854 –  1938), a major theorist of the second International, explicitly or implicitly, through Lenin's perspective). It is pretty clear why it was important to Lenin's leadership and strategic ambitions to disqualify Kautsky and why, perhaps, there is a sense in which Kautsky's stance on imperialism is not echt Marxist (I have no stake in that debate). But Kautsky's account treats uncorrupted liberalism as the pathway into modern (nineteenth century) imperialism. If Kautsky is right about this (to be explored below) this would be highly salient to the liberal tradition's self-understanding. For, by contrast, Lenin and Hobson put rent-seeking elites at the core of their explanations of such imperialism (even if they diverge on the details--with Lenin ((recall; and here) singling out monopoly capitalism as the late stage of capitalism, while Hobson (recall) points to a too limited franchise that facilitates elite rent-seeking). 

Now, characteristically Lenin does not  literally misrepresent Kautsky. But through his omissions one ends up missing the significance of Kautsky's definition of imperialism quoted above. Kautsky's underlying position is this: once post Cobden, industrialized/industrializing European societies embrace free trade and invest in their comparative advantage in industry and through technological innovations escape the Malthusian trap with growing populations (also, as Kautsky explicitly notes, through immigration from agrarian countries), they will start to need to import a growing number of agricultural goods. Under a regional federation or in pacific times, this state of affairs is splendid with all sides gaining from trade. 

But in the context of great power rivalry the effects of such a liberal free trade policy makes one vulnerable to food blockades or other ways in which the need for food imports can be weaponized. (The risks associated with the experience of the blockade of grain shipments from Ukraine's ports this year was all too common during the nineteenth century.) And so, what Lenin treats as Kautsky's definition of imperialism is de facto a description of the effects of free trade on industrialized wealthy states in an imperfect security environment (or a Hobbesian state of nature in international affairs). And so they will try to control agricultural zones in order (and I quote Kautsky's (1914) Ultra-Imperialism) "to force them to restrict themselves entirely to agricultural production."

As hinted above, what's important about Kautsky's approach to imperialism, is that it foregrounds how as liberalism's political fortunes rise -- as it manifestly did in the middle of the 18th century -- with a peak moment the 1860 Cobden–Chevalier Treaty (an Anglo-French free trade agreement, including most favored nation clauses that facilitated more such agreements) -- it generates the seeds for imperialism, absent a wider political settlement. To the best of my knowledge only Kautsky noticed how liberalism's political success generates a dynamic that threatens to become self-undermining. (I don't mean to suggest the lesson wasn't later learned and applied!)

That is to say, domestic liberal economic policies require, once implemented, transnational political responses in order to be managed. And is clear from Lenin's description, Kautsky anticipates this point. I don't mean to suggest Kautsky is the first to notice the need for transnational liberal institutions -- Kant, Mazzini, and others had argued for it --, but rather Kautsky recognizes that such institutions will be needed to solve the political problems that are the effects of embracing free trade.

Here, too, Lenin's approach to Kautsky is literally true, but turns out to be misleading through his omissions. What's key to Kautsky's analysis is not the possibility of international cartels who manage trade in the way Deutsche Bank manages German industry, but rather (and now I quote Kautsky directly), "the result of the World War between the great imperialist powers may be a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race." (Recall also here my discussion of Luxemburg's criticism of Kautsky; and especially here where I discuss Kautsky's 1911 proposals). Such a federation would also turn the zero-sum political environment into a context in which the gains from trade would generate mutual prosperity and security. 

And in so far as international institutions like the IMF and World Bank act as 'cartels' for capital/finance, then these, too, serve the same interest. Either way, from a liberal perspective Kautsky points the way toward the future, and turns out to be quite prescient and even helps explain why the internal contradictions of capitalism have not been the ultimate undoing of liberalism, so far.*

 

 

Hobson, Mancur Olson, Lenin, and Laissez-faire democracy

Seeing that the Imperialism of the last three decades is clearly condemned as a business policy, in that at enormous expense it has procured a small, bad, unsafe increase of markets, and has jeopardised the entire wealth of the nation in rousing the strong resentment of other nations, we may ask, “How is the British nation induced to embark upon such unsound business?” The only possible answer is that the business interests of the nation as a whole are subordinated to those of certain sectional interests that usurp control of the national resources and use them for their private gain. This is no strange or monstrous charge to bring; it is the commonest disease of all forms of government. The famous words of Sir Thomas More are as true now as when he wrote them: “Everywhere do I perceive a certain conspiracy of rich men seeking their own advantage under the name and pretext of the commonwealth.”

Although the new Imperialism has been bad business for the nation, it has been good business for certain classes and certain trades within the nation. The vast expenditure on armaments, the costly wars, the grave risks and embarrassments of foreign policy, the stoppage of political and social reforms within Great Britain, though fraught with great injury to the nation, have served well the present business interests of certain industries and professions.

It is idle to meddle with politics unless we clearly recognise this central fact and understand what these sectional interests are which are the enemies of national safety and the commonwealth. We must put aside the merely sentimental diagnosis which explains wars or other national blunders by outbursts of patriotic animosity or errors of statecraft. Doubtless at every outbreak of war not only the man in the street but the man at the helm is often duped by the cunning with which aggressive motives and greedy purposes dress themselves in defensive clothing. There is, it may be safely asserted, no war within memory, however nakedly aggressive it may seem to the dispassionate historian, which has not been presented to the people who were called upon to fight as a necessary defensive policy, in which the honour, perhaps the very existence, of the State was involved.

The disastrous folly of these wars, the material and moral damage inflicted even on the victor, appear so plain to the disinterested spectator that he is apt to despair of any State attaining years of discretion, and inclines to regard these natural cataclysms as implying some ultimate irrationalism in politics. But careful analysis of the existing relations between business and politics shows that the aggressive Imperialism which we seek to understand is not in the main the product of blind passions of races or of the mixed folly and ambition of politicians. It is far more rational than at first sight appears. Irrational from the standpoint of the whole nation, it is rational enough from the standpoint of certain classes in the nation. A completely socialist State which kept good books and presented regular balance-sheets of expenditure and assets would soon discard Imperialism; an intelligent laissez-faire democracy which gave duly proportionate weight in its policy to all economic interests alike would do the same. But a State in which certain well-organised business interests are able to outweigh the weak, diffused interest of the community is bound to pursue a policy which accords with the pressure of the former interests.--J.A. Hobson (1902) Imperialism, A Study, Chapter IV

Hobson claims that from the perspective of both liberalism ("laissez-faire democracy") and socialism a public, cost-benefit analysis of imperialism would find imperialism wanting. The mystery, then, is why it survives. And the mystery resolves once one realizes that imperialism benefits and greatly benefits concentrated, special or "sectional" interests. (He avoids the more Millian phrase, 'sinister' interest.)

Depending on one's training and disciplinary formation, it is incredibly difficult not to read the quoted passage and not think immediately of Mancur Olson's treatment of interest groups. And if I understand Paul Krugman's criticism of Adam Tooze correctly (see here), it's actually a good thing if that were to happen to you.

Or perhaps, if you are primed to see rent-seeking here, you think of Tullock and Krueger. The problem is that this literature is focused on tariffs, import licensing, and monopoly not imperialism (which tacitly is relegated to mere historical interest). That's not quite fair to Tullock, who is widely read and explicitly interested in vindicating "the classical economists;" and whose recurring mention of Gladstone in his short paper may well lead one to believe that the question of imperialism is lurking in the informal background of his treatment. After all, the implied lesson of Tullock's paper is that there are political costs from rent-seeking not well captured by a purely economic focus. And if this seems all too Straussian to you, Tullock has a known interest in Hobson (recall; see here 1963).

Hobson himself does not claim originality (his analysis is Smithian through and through) and evokes Tomas More. Some playing around with Google convinced me Hobson relies on a relatively late (1808) translation (Dibdin's revision of Raphe Robinson) of Utopia. But here I am not interested in tracing lineages. (That was the hook.)

As I have noted before (recall; and here) many people come to Hobson's Imperialism via Lenin and the tacit reception of Lenin in contemporary political economy and intellectual history. And once one has read Lenin, the crucial issue in Hobson's argument is Hobson's diagnosis of domestic underconsumption and over-saving as a driver of the export of capital. Imperialism then becomes a search for new markets (recall Duncan Bell's interpretation).

And from the Leninist-Marxist perspective domestic underconsumption is best understood as an effect of monopoly capitalism. There are, indeed, passages in Hobson that seem to evoke and anticipate this diagnosis. For example, in Chapter VI, Hobson writes,

It is not industrial progress that demands the opening up of new markets and areas of investment, but maldistribution of consuming power which prevents the absorption of commodities and capital within the country. The over-saving which is the economic root of Imperialism is found by analysis to consist of rents, monopoly profits, and other unearned or excessive elements of income, which, not being earned by labour of head or hand, have no legitimate raison d'être. 

But as Hobson's wording suggests, his treatment is normative ("legitimate"). He does not think monopoly capitalism inevitable or necessary. In fact, as his analytic categories ('complete socialism' and 'laissez faire democracy') suggest he thinks alternative polities can be coherently thought. And that's because for Hobson imperialism is the effect of political decisions not the necessary outcome of economic laws. As he puts it (also in chapter VI), his economic analysis "dispels the delusion that expansion of foreign trade, and therefore of empire, is a necessity of national life." In so far as there are monopolies, these are themselves the effect of tariffs and political decisions. 

Moreover, for Hobson, the search for new markets does not drive imperialism. (Simply put, he shows that the gains from new markets tend to be negligible. This does not deny some imperialist projects are pursued in the service of expanding markets.) For Hobson, while many interests benefit from imperialism, and sustain it, and while he recognizes all kinds of ideological commitments that promote it, imperialism is fundamentally a mechanism to protect high risk (and so high interest) investment income of creditors from political risk; as he puts it in Chapter VII:

The political conditions of my country are taken into calculation at the time of my investment. If I invest in consols, I fully recognise that no right of political interference with foreign policy affecting my investment is accorded to me in virtue of my interest as a fund-holder. But, if I invest either in the public funds or in some private industrial venture in a foreign country for the benefit of my private purse, getting specially favourable terms to cover risks arising from the political insecurity of the country or the deficiencies of its Government, I am entitled to call upon my Government to use its political and military force to secure me against those very risks which I have already discounted in the terms of my investment. Can anything be more palpably unfair? 

That is to say, imperialism for Hobson is analytically connected with finance capital and its manipulation of the political process (and national public opinion).* If you pursue high risk, high reward investments, which effectively price in some defaults, you have no claim on socializing the downside risk.

On this view imperialism does not disappear with de-colonization, but is still exhibited in the gains from market turbulence -- "every oscillation of public credit short of this collapse, every risky enterprise in which public resources can be made the pledge of private speculations" -- and financial bailouts of the potential losses suffered by European and American creditors abroad. 

I do not mean to deny that for Hobson protecting the political risks faced by a creditor class abroad isn't a peculiarly modern phenomenon. As he puts it:

To a larger extent every year Great Britain is becoming a nation living upon tribute from abroad, and the classes who enjoy this tribute have an ever-increasing incentive to employ the public policy, the public purse, and the public force to extend the field of their private investments, and to safeguard and improve their existing investments. This is, perhaps, the most important fact in modern politics, and the obscurity in which it is wrapped constitutes the gravest danger to our State.

What is true of Great Britain is true likewise of France, Germany, the United States, and of all countries in which modern capitalism has placed large surplus savings in the hands of a plutocracy or of a thrifty middle class. 

And this gives rise to the modern phenomenon of competitive imperialism.+ But rather than treating such large saving surpluses as intrinsic to late stage capitalism, Hobson treats them as an effect of political decisions.  For, Hobson does not subscribe to an economic destiny; he respects the primacy of what he calls "statecraft." And this means such saving surpluses are also correctable by political decisions. For as he puts it in Chapter VI:

If, by some economic readjustment, the products which flow from the surplus saving of the rich to swell the overflow streams could be diverted so as to raise the incomes and the standard of consumption of this inefficient fourth, there would be no need for pushful Imperialism, and the cause of social reform would have won its greatest victory.

It is not inherent in the nature of things that we should spend our natural resources on militarism, war, and risky, unscrupulous diplomacy, in order to find markets for our goods and surplus capital.

Of course, diagnosing the desirably of an alternative political outcome is not the same as diagnosing the existence of a political coalition or a feasible pathway that can generate it.

Smith did not hold a labor theory of value.

It's worth noting that passage...when quoted in full, explicitly involves a qualification that shows a circumstance prior to the invention of money and the development of property/rent: "IN that early and rude state of society which precedes both the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land." (WN 1.6.1, 65) So, [it] involves a situation where nominal prices are absent, and where capital and rent are absent! It's akin to an early Lockean state of nature. In Marxist terms, if Smith holds a strict labor theory of value [LTV] as a measure of exchange value, then it is only well before the stage of primitive accumulation not in a capitalist economy. This illustrates my claim that the LTV gets introduced only in the context of thought experiments that go on to make more complex claims.--Eric Schliesser "Smith's Labor Theory Thought Experiment," @AdamSmithWorks

I don't have a lot of time for blogging this week. But, coincidentally, a relatively short essay appeared (here) in which I explain why it is a mistake to attribute to Adam Smith a Labor Theory of Value. (It's based on a twitter thread that went viral over the Summer, but  slightly refined and more carefully argued.) 

Foucault, Lepage, Anarcho-capitalism and anti-Marxism

In his fifth lecture of 7 February 1979 Foucault introduces "American anarcho-capitalism" as a synonym for "contemporary American liberalism." (The Birth of Biopolitics p. 104.) In context, the intended contrast is with German Ordoliberalism and Hayek's Austrian liberalism. In the next lecture, of 14 February, 1979, Foucault contrasts "contemporary American anarcho-capitalism" with the "classical liberalism of the nineteenth century." (p. 133) Later in the sixth lecture, Foucault claims that "American anarcho-capitalism" develops from the rejection of "Keynesian economics, and others from the Beveridge plans or European social security plans." (pp. 144-145) Foucault doesn't use the phrase "Anarcho-capitalism" again. He does use 'anarcho-liberal' (and its cognates) a few times (p. 117; p. 161) as apparent synonym. 

It's pretty clear, however, that he is thinking of the Chicago school, especially the strand inspired by Henry Calvert Simons (1899 –1946). Because Foucault makes clear that that "Simons drafted a number of critical texts and articles, the most interesting of which is entitled: “The Beveridge Program: an unsympathetic interpretation,” which there is no need to translate, since the title indicates its critical sense." (p. 216) In addition, Foucault had just introduced Simons to his audience as follows, "The first, fundamental text of this American neo-liberalism, written in 1934 by Simons, who was the father of the Chicago School, is an article entitled “A Positive Program for Laissez-Faire.” (p. 216) And, in fact, Foucault explicitly identifies 'anarcho-liberalism' with the Chicago school (p. 161).

Foucault's adoption of the phrase 'anarcho-capitalism' is a bit strange because Simons is no anarchist. And, in fact, to the best of my knowledge most real anarchists (Left and Right) would not treat any Chicago economist as an anarchist (since they tend to accept non-trivial state institutions). Milton Friedman's defense, for example, of central banking often gets him criticized by certain libertarians and anarchists alike. 

Unusually, the editorial team of The Birth of Biopolitics is silent on Foucault's use. I mention that not to criticize them. For, in a note attached to a cryptic remark by Foucault -- "The ideas of North on the development of capitalism, for example, are directly in line with this opening up made by the neoliberals" -- in lecture of 14 February 1979 they call to "H. Lepage, Demain le capitalisme (Paris: Librairie Générale Francaise, 1978; republished “Pluriel”) p. 34 and chapters 3 and 4 (this book was one of the sources used by Foucault in the last of these 1979 lectures)." Lepage treats North at length in this fascinating book, translated by Sheilagh C. Ogilvie* as Tomorrow, Capitalism: The Economics of Economic Freedom (Open Court, 1982).

Lepage introduces the term 'anarcho-capitalism' near the end of the first chapter ("The New Economists") in a section, "The Libertarians," as follows:

This renaissance in modern economic thought has given rise to the appearance on the American political chessboard of a new ideological movement—the Libertarian movement. It does not yet represent more than an intellectual fringe, but it embodies an astonishing reconciliation between a distinctly controversial social libertarianism (favoring legalization of drugs, moral freedom, freedom from military conscription, international neutrality, suppression of the CIA, abolition of the corrupt ‘‘military-industrial complex’’) and an economic libertarianism that calls for a radically laissez-faire capitalist society in which a maximum of transactions would take place through voluntary contractual exchange.

Often having close ties with the ‘‘radical”’ philosophy of the New Left and mostly less than 40 years of age, these libertarians are the direct descendants of the great libertarian revolt of the 1960s. They hold the very existence of the state to be the supreme evil that is to be actively resisted. Opponents of all manifestations of Gulag, down to the least offensive, their objective is to abolish the state in favor of a social system in which all public functions would be made private. This has given them the name ‘‘anarcho-capitalists,’’ a name assumed by certain of their leaders such as David Friedman, son of Milton Friedman, also a professor of economics, now at UCLA and formerly at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg." Lepage Capitalism, Tomorrow, p. 25

A few pages later Lepage clarifies that "Milton Friedman, for instance, passes for “‘libertarian’’ in most circles, but he is not recognized as libertarian by militants of the Libertarian Party such as his own son." (p. 27) And a few lines down, he is equally clear that "not all Chicago school adherents or the new economists are libertarians." (p. 27) It's natural to read this page as suggesting that Nozick and David Friedman are anarcho-capitalists. In the section on anarcho-capitalism (near the end of chapter 7) only David Friedman is mentioned and quoted (and no Chicago economist).+ 

I suspect Foucault gets the term 'anarcho-capitalism/liberalism' from Lepage. And it is pretty clear that Lepage's discussions of Becker, Stigler, and North shape Foucault's analysis (about this some time soon more). But Foucault does not follow Lepage slavishly (or may have conflated Milton and David Friedman). Another important difference between Foucault and Lepage is that while Lepage identifies Simons as one of the founders of the "Chicago tradition," he treats Knight (correctly) as the "true founder." (p. 5) Lepage devotes no space at all to discuss Simons (who was long dead when Lepage wrote his book). By contrast Foucault largely ignores Knight and focuses on Simons. 

Okay, Capitalism, Tomorrow (Demain, le capitalisme) is a superb survey of anti-Keynesian economics and political philosophy of the 50s-70s. (It was a bestseller in France.) In his "foreword" to the English translation, James Buchanan notes that Lepage visited in September 1976. Throughout the foreword Buchanan treats Lepage as a "journalist." But I understand from Guillaume Yon that Lepage wrote important policy briefs for the regulatory framework of French electricity industry. And in France Lepage quickly became associated with 'new economists' and 'anarcho-capitalism.' And I suspect that Foucault used 'anarcho-capitalism' to alert his audience that he would be talking about the whole ensemble of characters that Lepage discusses in his book, rather than conflate the more narrow work of David Friedman with the much broader movement that Lepage discusses.

One reason Douglass North is so important to Lepage's argument, and why I think Foucault mentions him in that otherwise obscure passage when he first introduces 'anarcho-capitalism,' is that running through Lepage's book are a whole number of set-pieces in which known criticisms by Marxists of capitalism, markets, and/or liberalism are answered (if not refuted) rather thoroughly. As Lepage puts it in his introduction, "capitalism and economic freedom cannot be defended successfully...[without] new theoretical and scientific insight into the economic bases and implications of their own political philosophy," (p. 3; emphasis in original.) In fact, Capitalism, Tomorrow would still work very well in an 'intro to PPE' course or as the right-wing response to (say) Polanyi's The Great Transformation (or some such book) or as an introduction to economic way of thinking.

An example of this occurs right at the start of the book. After briefly introducing the significance of human capital theory and the new theory of consumer behavior to his audience, Lepage writes,

Formulated separately by Gary S. Becker at Chicago and Kelvin J. Lancaster at Columbia, the new theory of consumption sees the consumer as an individual who not only consumes but also ‘‘produces’’ his own satisfaction, using inputs consisting of his market purchases and his time. This is in itself—as we shall see'’—an intellectual revolution, yet despite its controversial political implications it is still practically unknown outside economic circles. Its new view of consumer demand finally makes it possible to reply effectively to the critics of capitalism who base their view of society on a supposed distinction between ‘‘true”” and ‘‘false’’ needs. In their view, advertising, by changing people’s desires, makes consumers the slaves of the producers, and the proliferation of new products becomes proof of the wasteful and suicidal nature of consumer society. But consumer behavior can be explained convincingly without invoking ‘‘false needs’’ or consumer irrationality. (Capitalism, Tomorrow, Chapter one, pp. 9-10, emphasis added)

My present point is not to endorse Lepage's claim that the new theory of consumption does respond adequately to the Marxist criticism. To evaluate that we will need to explore the details of his argument (in the very near future!) But rather that responding to anti-capitalism systematically is clearly Lepage's purpose. And I suspect this is what made the book attractive to Foucault, who, as is well known, runs with the idea that what is distinctive about American neoliberalism (as exemplified by Becker and Stigler) is the "programming of policies of economic development, which could be orientated, and which are in actual fact orientated," toward the development of human capital. (Birth of Biopolitics, p. 233) And this programming can, as Foucault clearly discerns, be developed through social policy and one's own activities.

Finally, Becker's move is at odds (recall; see also here) with Frank Knight’s position who claimed that “wants which impel economic activity and which it is directed toward satisfying are the products of the economic process itself.” (This is a view that is not just Marxist, but goes back to Smith and Rousseau and probably Aristotle.) Arguably this is one of the central oppositions between 'old' and 'new' Chicago.  TBC.

 

 

Why Does Socialism have no autonomous governmentality; Foucault, Duncan Kelly (and Wendy Brown), and a hypothesis

Viewing the contemporary problems of European socialism through ordoliberal lenses allowed him to suggest there is no "autonomous socialist governmentality." Socialism remains too statist, beholden to ideological dogma, and therefore too utopian to be effective as a contemporary strategy. Socialism in effect has become a model of the total state for Foucault, [not] unlike Nazism, in fact, and this makes its analysis of power problematic, because of "power is not a substance." Alongside revisionists accounts of modern socialism that has had been repurposed since the 1959 Bad Godesburg decisions of the SDP, Foucault thought that such revisionism was no sort of betrayal, but a necessary update providing an entry point into the liberal game of modern politics. Willy Brandt, too, offered a new kind of German realism about modern politics and modern liberalism, and the French left needed to learn from it.--Duncan Kelly (2019( Foucault on Phobie d’État and Neoliberalism." in Foucault, Neoliberalism, and Beyond, (edited by Stephen W." Sawyer and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins), p. 117. [I inserted a 'not' above, but nothing that follows turns on it.--ES]

Kelly's essay on Foucault is very interesting because it clarifies the significance of Kant and Weber to Foucault's 1979 lectures published as Birth of Biopolitics. And I also agree with the claim that according to Foucault the SDP's stance at Bad Godesburg -- which (in the tradition of Bernstein) basically rejected revolution and accepted the ordoliberal social market economy as legitimate (this involved planning for the market, but no more than necessary) -- was no "betrayal." So, Foucault here, as elsewhere in the Birth of Biopolitics, rejects a Marxist historiography and lens. So what follows is a relatively minor disagreement with Professor Kelly.*

I am not convinced, however, that the explanation for Foucault's claim that there is "no autonomous socialist governmentality" is that it is "too statist," as Kelly suggests. To be sure, one may well think this is plausible because one may assume that the term/concept 'governmentality' is introduced in order to distinguish it from a kind of direct exercise of power by way of command and control; and rather to describe government practice, as Wendy Brown argues, as the "power of conducting and compelling populations "at a distance."" (Undoing the Demos, p. 117; recall also this post). If Brown is right then 'governmentality' anticipates what has come to be known as 'governance.' (Since she is primarily interested in 'governance' my disagreement with her is irrelevant to her argument.)

I don't think Brown is correct here. For Foucault also applies 'governmentality' to police states (which have their own kind of governmentality); that is -- and this is central to my disagreement with Kelly -- on Foucault's account statist doctrines do have their own governmentality. Now, to be sure, Foucault means quite a few things when he uses 'governmentality' and sometimes these do involve a process of compulsion at a distance. But these are just one way governmentality is exercised. In 1978 he stipulated that one of his uses of 'governmentality' meant "The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target: population, as its principal form of knowledge: political economy, and as its essential technical means: apparatuses of security."** There is no mention of 'distance' here. And this, for good reason because the security state is rather invasive.

Let's look at the passage that Kelly quotes:

In any case, socialism offers an economic rationality just as it puts forward an historical rationality. We can also say that it possesses, and has shown that it possesses, rational techniques of intervention, of administrative intervention, in domains like those of health, social insurance, and so on. So, it is possible to recognize the existence of an historical rationality, an economic rationality, and an administrative rationality in socialism, or, at any rate, let’s say that we can argue about the existence of these rationalities in socialism and we cannot eliminate all these forms of rationality with a wave of the hand. But I do not think that there is an autonomous socialist governmentality. There is no governmental rationality of socialism. In actual fact, and history has shown this, socialism can only be implemented connected up to diverse types of governmentality. It has been connected up to liberal governmentality, and then socialism and its forms of rationality function as counterweights, as a corrective, and a palliative to internal dangers. One can, moreover, [reproach it, as do liberals],* with being itself a danger, but it has lived, it has actually functioned, and we have examples of it within and connected up to liberal governmentalities. We have seen it function, and still see it function, within governmentalities that would no doubt fall more under what last year we called the police state, that is to say, a hyper-administrative state in which there is, so to speak, a fusion, a continuity, the constitution of a sort of massive bloc between governmentality and administration. At that point, in the governmentality of a police state, socialism functions as the internal logic of an administrative apparatus. Maybe there are still other governmentalities that socialism is connected up to; it remains to be seen. But in any case, I do not think that for the moment there is an autonomous governmentality of socialism. Foucault-Birth of Biopolitics, Lecture four, 31 January 1979, p. 92 [See also the material from the same lecture I quoted here a few years ago]

I think this passage is really incompatible with the idea that socialism lacks a governmentality in virtue of its statist orientation. If anything, Foucault's claim isn't just that (i) socialism lacks a governmentality of its own, but also (ii) that when socialism is in power it relies on governmentalities it borrows from others (including rather statist orientations), and (iii) socialism does have a administrative rationality. To put the point sharply, for Foucault the Leninist-Stalinist art of government is de facto a police state while relying on bureaucracy (which can follow socialist principles [as Lenin himself suggested]).

Now, there is no doubt -- and the secondary literature is in broad agreement over this -- that Foucault is rather polemical against Marxism in these lectures. (And remember he had first hand experience not just with the French communist party, but with really existing communism in Poland and social democracy in Sweden.) The real scholarly disagreement involves to what degree Foucault was searching for a a non-socialist 'left' governmentality or to what degree he kind of endorsed a neoliberal governmentality in 1979. I will take no position on this disagreement.

If Kelly is incorrect, as I have argued, why then would Foucault claim that socialism lacks its own autonomous art or practice of government? I have a speculative suggestion. True socialism in the Engels-Leninist tradition involves the abolition of the state. And when it arrives, there is no need for a governmentality at all. Governmentality is only required in the transitionary phases (involving the dictatorship of the proletariat or, say, the party's leadership, etc.) when the state is supposed to be made to wither away. But in the transition phase ruling and governing cannot really be done on socialist principles. This is why during the transition it borrows from other intellectual traditions and practices (and so the lack of autonomous governmentality). I can't prove this is what Foucault has in mind, but I think it makes good sense of his position. For, as he goes on to say, "In short, whether or not there is a theory of the state in Marx is for Marxists to decide. As for myself, I would say that what socialism lacks is not so much a theory of the state as a governmental reason, the definition of what a governmental rationality would be in socialism, that is to say, a reasonable and calculable measure of the extent, modes, and objectives of governmental action."

 

Milton Friedman (Schumpeter, Foucault, Dicey, and Hayek) on the Possibility of a Free Society

THERE IS A STRONG TENDENCY for all of us to regard what is as if it were the “natural” or “normal” state of affairs, to lack perspective because of the tyranny of the status quo. It is, therefore, well, from time to time, to make a deliberate effort to look at things in a broader context. In such a context anything approaching a free society is an exceedingly rare event. Only during short intervals in man’s recorded history has there been anything approaching what we would call a free society in existence over any appreciable part of the globe. And even during such intervals, as at the moment, the greater part of mankind has lived under regimes that could by no stretch of the imagination be called free.

This casual empirical observation raises the question whether a free society may not be a system in unstable equilibrium. If one were to take a purely historical point of view, one would have to say that the “normal,” in the sense of average, state of mankind is a state of tyranny and despotism. Perhaps this is the equilibrium state of society that tends to arise in the relation of man to his fellows. Perhaps highly special circumstances must exist to render a free society possible. And perhaps these special circumstances, the existence of which account for the rare episodes of freedom, are themselves by their nature transitory, so that the kind of society we all of us believe in is highly unlikely to be maintained, even if once attained.--Milton Friedman (1962) "Is a Free Society Stable?" New Individualist Review.

In yesterday's post, I said something about the intellectual significance of New Individualist Review to the political development of what came to be known as 'fusionism' Stateside and its Hayekian context (and so the mainstreaming of neoliberal ideas, 'neoliberal' in its historical sense, that is). I also suggested that Friedman's essay (I quoted the first two paragraphs above) should be understood in context of the surprisingly critical reception of the Road to Serfdom thesis in this context. (Friedman's friend and colleague, Stigler, savages it.)

I wish I had read Friedman's essay before I blogged on Graeber and Wengrow's recent Dawn of Everything because one way to understand the significance of their book is that it challenges the idea that a genuinely free society is rare. Now, obviously Friedman and Graeber/Wengrow don't mean the exact same thing with a 'free society.' While Friedman is a right or 'individualist' libertarian he is clearly not an anarchist, so it's not the case that Graeber/Wengrow refute Friedman's claim here. (And it's pretty clear that Graeber & Wengrow would not accept Friedman's claim that we're living in a free society.) But since Graeber/Wengrow and Friedman agree that legally sanctioned coercion is itself generally problematic (in ways that mainstream liberals often think not, alas), my suggestion is not altogether farfetched. Because it's pretty clear that the many urban polities that Graeber and Wengrow admire are open to commerce while rejecting state organized/sanctioned/rent-seeking (etc.) capitalism (which is what draws Friedman's ire, too).

So, one way to react to Friedman's set-up of his argument is that he is (tacitly) working with a biased sample or a historically limited data-set (something Friedman may well appreciate given his kind of research in monetary history) because, and this is the interesting part, he is drawing on a literature (shared by Marxists and certain classical liberals alike) that presupposes something like an idea of progress (that has already occurred) and that is distinctly Eurocentric/Western. This can be checked because Friedman's main source is Lectures on Law and Public Opinion in the Nineteenth Century (1905) by A. V. Dicey. Dicey clearly impressed Friedman because he also frames Friedman's argument in his important earlier (1952) essay "Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects” that I have discussed here.

What makes Friedman's "Is a Free Society Stable?" interesting are  two important observations. First, and this one (I am pretty sure) he has repeated elsewhere but here clearly credits Dicey with noticing, is that the consequentialist arguments that tend to support classical liberalism all violate what we might call 'naïve empiricism' or 'lived experience' because they require a kind of statistical or aggregate perspective:

The argument for a free society, he goes on to say, is a very subtle and sophisticated argument. At every point, it depends on the indirect rather than the direct effect of the policy followed. If one is concerned to remedy clear evils in a society, as everyone is, the natural reaction is to say, “let’s do something about it,” and the “us” in this statement will in a large number of cases be translated into the “government,” so the natural reaction is to pass a law. The argument that maybe the attempt to correct this particular evil by extending the hand of the government will have indirect effects whose aggregate consequences may be far worse than any direct benefits that flow from the action taken is, after all, a rather sophisticated argument. And yet, this is the kind of argument that underlies a belief in a free or laisser-faire society.

So, that also means (and this is Dicey's initial observation) that arguments for a free society have a kind of utopian quality ahead of their existence. And even while such societies exist, given the abstracted/philosophical nature of the argument it is "says Dicey...really amazing and surprising...that for so long a period as a few decades, sufficiently widespread public opinion developed in Britain in favor of the general principle of non-intervention and laisser-faire as to overcome the natural tendency to pass a law for the particular cases." (The natural tendency is, thus, rooted in what I called the naïve empiricist assumption which is attributed to ordinary life.) Obviously, as an aside, Marxists would take Dicey's argument, if they cared to take it seriously, and suggest that it is violence (and then ideology) that has to do the job to get people to accept a free society.

I don't mean to suggest such utopianism is required. For, as Friedman notes there is another route that is at least partially ground in experience:

one of the factors that led Bentham and the Utilitarians toward laisser-faire, and this is a view that is also expressed by Dicey, was the self-evident truth that if you wanted to get evils corrected, you could not expect to do so through the government of the time. The government was corrupt and inefficient. It was clearly oppressive. It was something that had to be gotten out of the way as a first step to reform. The fundamental philosophy of the Utilitarians, or any philosophy that puts its emphasis on some kind of a sum of utilities, however loose may be the expression, does not lead to laisser-faire in principle. It leads to whatever kind of organization of economic activity is thought to produce results which are regarded as good in the sense of adding to the sum total of utilities. I think the major reason why the Utilitarians tended to be in favor of laisser-faire was the obvious fact that government was incompetent to perform any of the tasks they wanted to see performed.

So, you might say that on Friedman's view Bentham and the radicals that followed backed themselves into laisser-faire as a kind of second best (or n-th) best option. What's undoubtedly correct here is that there is no intrinsic connection between free society and Utilitarianism. But Friedman ignores how important Adam Smith (and Hume) is to Bentham's intellectual development and the more important political radicals.

The second really interesting observation by Friedman is set up by him noting that "Dicey’s argument is enormously strengthened by an asymmetry between a shift toward individualism and a shift away from it." (For all his admiration, Friedman doesn't mince words about a kind of Victorian complacency in Dicey.) By contrast, in virtue of accepting the rarity of a free society (and a kind of explanatory parsimony), Friedman treats the mechanisms one might posit in a road to serfdom thesis as symmetrical (even potentially identical) with those that lead to a free society. Friedman is motivated to do so, also, by his reflection on Schumpeter's acceptance of the Marxist idea that capitalism is doomed to failure (but with this twist that "[W]hereas Marx’s view was that capitalism would destroy itself by its failure, Schumpeter’s view was that capitalism would destroy itself by its success."). 

As an aside, if you accept my claim that Hayek is Friedman's real target in his 1962 article (which I claim is plausible on contextual grounds), what's neat about this is that he inscribes the road to serfdom thesis in a larger debate, inspired by Marxism, about the historical necessity of capitalism, and its subsequent demise. And in Friedman (recall here and here) not unlike Foucault in Lecture 7, The Birth of Biopolitics, 21 February 1979. Birth of Biopolitics, Schumpeter is crucial for linking the debates about monopoly capitalism and the road to serfdom thesis. (And unlike Foucault, Friedman, in turn, treats Schumpeter as a variation on Veblen and Burnham as a variation on Schumpeter--it is really a virtuoso performance by Friedman.) Some other time I will address Friedman's criticism of Schumpeter's thesis.

The mechanism, which has some unacknowledged roots in Marx's analysis, is as follows:

the development of laisser-faire laid the groundwork for a widespread respect for the law, on the one hand, and a relatively incorrupt, honest, and efficient civil service on the other, both of which are essential preconditions for the operation of a collectivist society. In order for a collectivist society to operate, the people must obey the laws and there must be a civil service that can and will carry out the laws. The success of capitalism established these preconditions for a movement in the direction of much greater state intervention.

But then Friedman adds:

The process I have described obviously runs both ways. A movement in the direction of a collectivist society involves increased governmental intervention into the daily lives of people and the conversion into crimes of actions that are regarded by the ordinary person as entirely proper. These tend in turn to undermine respect for the law and to give incentives to corrupt state officials....the erosion of the capital stock of willingness to obey the law reduces the capacity of a society to run a centralized state, to move away from freedom. This effect on law obedience is thus one that is reversible and runs in both directions. It is another major factor that needs to be taken into account in judging the likely stability of a free system in the long run.

And this argument is directed against both Marxist necessity and the road the serfdom. Because countervailing forces are naturally developed as one goes down the road to serfdom: "Once government embarks on intervention into and regulation of private activities, this establishes an incentive for large numbers of individuals to use their ingenuity to find ways to get around the government regulations." (And this, in turn, starts to swallow up time of the more earnest government officials, etc.) Friedman recognizes his claims are speculative (much more historical work is needed), but a reader of Friedman comes away thinking that free societies are rarely stable, if one means by that, in equilibrium; that is, they are always in some kind of crisis (again this anticipates Foucault's idea that liberalism is co-constituted with crisis); but these crises of a free society have, on the whole also a self-correcting quality over the medium term.

It's easy to mock Friedman's position as I have reconstructed it as a kind of providential optimism. But perhaps such providentialism is required within political life; the great danger of it is that encourages complacency about the possibility of a crisis that fatally undermines a free society.

 

 

The Culture Wars, the Contradictions of our Age, and the Liberalism of Reparations.

Once upon a time the United States of America was a de jure racist society. As was much of the world beyond its borders, controlled as it was by racist European empires. There was a broadly understood and explicitly codified and enforced racial organisation of who could live where, of how individuals could interact, of what sort of jobs were appropriate for whom, of how law and order would operate — or wouldn’t (Wells-Barnett 1895). The science (Morris 2015), sport (Rogosin 2007), and artistic culture of the day (Cooper 1892), were largely carried out in conformity with, if not support of, racist norms. Gross or subtle as it may have been in any given instance, the colour line ran through everything and one crossed it only at great personal peril (Du Bois 1904, 530).

But mountains crumble and rivers disappear, new roads replace the old, stones are buried and vanish in the earth. Time passes and the world changes. So it was that eventually this de jure racist system went the way of all things. The civil war overthrew the slave regime. Racial immigration laws were repealed. The civil rights act made various sorts of explicitly racist laws and practices impermissible. By the latter half of the 20th century it was clear an officially endorsed de jure racial caste system was no longer to hold sway in American life. Likewise abroad the great European empires fell, and in their place sprang up a plethora of nations governed by formerly colonised peoples. All things considered, the 20th century saw de jure racism suffer a world-historic defeat...

Whatever else changed, the people who have the stuff still tend to be white, and blacks must still sell our labour to them if we are to get by.

In this way American domestic politics mirrored the broader global trends of a post imperial world (Táíwò 2022a, ch.2). The European empires despoiled and depopulated nations (Davis 2002, Marschal 2017). What they left in their wake were often under-developed economies (Rodney 1972) and institutional structures ripe to be taken over by local elites who could simply continue the pattern of authoritarian wealth extraction (Fanon 1961, ch.3; Acemoglu & Robinson 2012). But the end of formal colonisation did not generally lead to reparations. For the most part agents based in the former colonial metropoles retained ownership of key resources and even infrastructure (Nkrumah 1965), and if anything inefficiencies in the credit market have led to a net capital flow from the former colonies to the former colonisers (Picketty 2015, 58). Neither domestically nor internationally did a change in cultural attitudes and legal permissions correlate with a change in racial patterns of ownership. As such, many of the material patterns of inequality from the bad old days of de jure racist regimes have survived the demise of their former ideological superstructure.

Returning to the US, these persistent material inequalities have consequences for occupational inequality....

And the political intelligentsia are still largely white, which has arguably affected the content and focus of their work (Mills 2017). This then is where history has placed us. The maddening ambiguity of our position is what leads to the titular white psychodrama. One cannot reconcile oneself to this society because it constantly pulls in two directions - it presents one with an ideological narrative that speaks of equality, and a material structure that witnesses rank inequality. At some level this society just does not make sense to itself, its own ideology out of whack with the plain facts of its own existence. There are those who are tempted to focus only on the positives, and see in this a story of triumphant progress towards racial justice or a post-racial future. And there are those who are inclined to see in it a story of eternal recurrence, racism ever reinventing itself. But both of these perspectives are too tidy to capture the phenomenon. For this story is of a world and a nation in contradiction with itself.

...How then do people respond to the facts relayed in this historical narrative, and what does it mean for their ability to reconcile themselves to their own social order?--Liam Kofi Bright (2022, forthcoming) "White Psychodrama" Journal of Political Philosophy. [Emphasis added]

Kofi Bright introduces his paper (with nods to Hegel and Rawls) with a methodological aspiration: "One might hope that [i] philosophy could reconcile ourselves to our social world and [ii] each other. To entertain this as plausible is to think [iii] there is some perspective one could reach via philosophical inquiry that [iv] shows our life and society to be as they are for good reason, [v] allowed us to see it all as in some sense rational." (Numbers added to facilitate discussion.) And while I have a growing self-awareness that many of these digressions are modest impressions on or an occasional, recalcitrant modest 'yes but' to Liam Kofi Bright's evolving oeuvre, I have never thought of philosophy as a means to [i-v]. Maybe I am too angry or vain to become identical with such a thought, but neither 'reconciliation' nor 'rationality' ever become applied to my conceptualization(s) of our lives and society. And this, alongside my close vicinity to (if not outright membership in) the "political intelligentsia," makes me suspect with growing dread that I may well be (one of the minor cogs that is) the subject matter of "White Psychodrama."

The methodological aspiration that introduces the paper is partially echoed in the question that closes the block quote at the top of this post (which is the culmination of a section titled, "A Narrative Of How We Got Here.") But there philosophy and 'us' are absent. So, lurking in Liam Kofi Bright's paper is a soft opposition, perhaps it's just a matter of degree, between the orientation characteristic of philosophy and that of the political intelligentsia. Both are thought to reconcile themselves to the world, but only in philosophy can we come to understand the world as rational. That is to say, lurking in Liam Kofi Bright's analysis is a traditional (familiar from Plato, Al-Farabi, Smith, Madison, Arendt, etc.) distinction between the opinions (or ideology) of the political intelligentsia and the episteme (or theodicy rationalizations) of the philosophers.

I don't mean to suggest that Liam Kofi Bright engages in the fallacy of the overlooked alternatives. He recognizes "there may not be such a perspective. Perhaps to see the world aright is to recognise it as a jumbled mess, with no progressive tendency towards greater coherence, and no satisfaction to be had in achieving superior insight. Perhaps there is no good end we are collaboratively working towards, no possible reconciliation with each other; maybe we are perpetually on the brink of descending once more into a Hobbesian nightmare." But what's important about this explicit recognition is that it suggests we're in a high stakes context: the inability to even conceptualise reconciliation is to be some way down a slippery slope toward murderous anarchy. Despite the British spelling, there is no option of mere muddling through (or exiting to a desert island) in his set up. Given that the explicit background is slavery, empire, and genocide, this may be fair enough.

Of course, the way the methodological aspiration is formulated might suggest a quietist attitude. But that would be misleading, Liam Kofi Bright also emphatically claims, "We ought then make the social world worthy of reconciliation." Let's call this the 'revolutionary impulse' in his argument. And, perhaps, my alertness to this impulse is my occasion to highlight the claim that the world and nation is in contradiction with itself. In material dialectics such a diagnosis of self-contradiction is, of course, the funnel toward certain kind of revolutionary action. As he puts it (echoing MLKjr's comments to Harry Belafonte, but unusually in a paper dense with references without citation,) "We cannot and ought not reconcile ourselves to a society wrapped up in its own contradictions, no more than we should seek to integrate into a burning house."

Now at this point one may well suspect that one is listening in on a conversation that may not include everyone as agents in the earlier 'we'. I don't think that's right, but it is worth quoting the full passage to see how easy one can misread the essay:

Here I am interested in how our peculiar socio-economic conditions shape the contours and possible points of resolution in the cultural debate around issues of race. It shall be seen that characteristic responses to our social order, which I shall describe through stylised character archetypes, make it impossible for any lasting reconciliation to be had for participants in the culture war. Instead our responses both generate and constitute a kind of racialised psychopathology, that I describe as white psychodrama. Given this analysis of the social order and its sources of psychic incoherence, I will suggest a way forward. My hope is that this will at least help people of colour caught in the midst of this work towards a world we can live in, and by seeing ourselves as so working reconcile ourselves to our actual present social activities. We cannot and ought not reconcile ourselves to a society wrapped up in its own contradictions, no more than we should seek to integrate into a burning house. But we can come to see ourselves as knowingly and self-consciously working to resolve those contradictions, quenching that fire, and laying the foundations for a better structure that we may all live comfortably therein.

One may well think that the intended audience of 'we' here, is "people of colour" or "the PoC intelligentsia." And, if one reads hastily, one may well wonder if all of this isn't just a call to burn it all down.

But I don't think it's the only audience or that the content of revolution here is destructive. After all, Kofi Bright is not advocating letting the fire consume the house, rather he is explicit in calling for the fire to be quenched. And that quenching and rebuilding is only possible, if I understand him correctly, after reparations.* 

Now, at this point -- knowing my bourgeois, liberal proclivities -- you may suspect I will denounce the revolutionary ardor of Kofi Bright. But I don't view reparations or compensation for injustices suffered as a illiberal, a category error, or a radical step too far. After all, (recall) the Federal Republic of Germany, then governed by (relatively conservative) Ordo-liberals explicitly recognized the ideal of reoperations as the start of a proper response to the genocidal atrocities of Nazism and to make living in a common home, however imperfectly, possible. From the liberal perspective, reparations are the ground zero for massive historical injustices in order to make non-zero-sum interactions available to all of us.+ 

As an aside, Rawlsianism and (even more) utilitarianism have a tendency to privilege forward-looking theorizing and to encourage a kind of forgetting of the past. (This is a feature not a bug in much liberal philosophy.) And this leads them to the familiar sophisms that block reparations in their analyses;  that the status quo provides the solid foundations for the future.

So, clearly there is a possible task for the white political intelligentsia lurking in Kofi Bright's analysis and rhetoric: that is, it is to reject the Repenter stance (who leaves structures alone and only focuses on individual racial improvements) as much as the Represser stance (who would like racial bygones to be bygones). Now, from a Marxist perspective this is an invitation to be a race traitor. (There is no doubt that successful revolutions require them.) And one may well suspect that there are many incentives that despite the effectiveness of Liam Kofi Bright's rhetoric prevent the move from Repenter/Represser to pro-reparations (and "to realise racially egalitarian group ideals.")

But to make integration in the same house possible is, as Lea Klarenbeek (building on Haslanger's ideas) has shown, a two-way process. This process is, thus, much easier when the pie that is to be divided is being enlarged (and so liberalism and markets get a toe-hold back in). How to do so without worsening the climate crisis is a real challenge technologically, economically, and politically. But the task of the bourgeois intelligentsia is not to be a source of diversion, but to articulate the real social problems and to amplify the solutions that experts and social movements devise which will strengthen the survival of democratic self-government and rule of law.

So, while I agree that my kind is primarily engaged in "a conflict over how to psychologically manage the results of living in a materially deeply unequal society," I view reparations as the right thing to do and a sine qua non reformist move to make such stress much better manageable. Material and political inequalities are, I suspect, part of the human condition, but partially repairing the past as a means to more solid foundations is in our power, even now. And if advocating reparations is treated as Repenter-on-steroids-syndrome, I accept the moniker.