As part of the (now indefinitely canceled) Philosophy at the Movies series I run at my institution I showed the phenomenal 2006 Cuarón movie Children of Men (based on the P.D. James novel “The Children of Men”). It’s a great movie that touches on a lot of different topics, but one thing that struck me on this re-viewing was the overwhelming presence of animals in the film.
We see this not only in the number of animals that people keep around (Jasper’s dog, the cows at the farm, the animals kept in the refugee cities, the zebras in the London palaces, etc.) but also in the number of dead animals that we see (e.g. burned horse carcasses in the fields). I think there are only a few scenes in which there are no animals around. It’s obvious that these were explicitly put in the movie on purpose (after all, one doesn’t just “accidentally” put a zebra in one’s film). But why are they in there? What are the writers and directors trying to tell us?
I have two theories. The first is that we’re being reminded that even in a world without children, we don’t lose the instinct to take care of other living beings. However, this interpretation is complicated by the fact that the presence of these animals is in a world in which people don’t care about other people. One might very reasonably wonder what good it is to remind us that we’ll still be inclined to take care of goats, sheep, and dogs in context in which we put foreigners in concentration camps and murder our comrades in cold blood. In this light, it seems that the presence of animals in the film is just a way to highlight a tragic quirk of human psychology.
This might be correct, but I think there’s a bit more to this reading that that. In particular, I think we can get a better grasp of the film if we qualify the object of care in this circumstance. Namely, it’s not that people will continue to care for any living being in the event of an apocalyptic crisis, but that they will continue to care for what they perceive to be innocent living beings. To the people in the film, the camps, the quarantines, the violence is all justified (rightly or not) by the assumption that the other is someone that must be controlled, arrested, and killed if one is to survive. The refugees must be put in camps because otherwise they would destroy the last remaining bit of a stable social life in England; likewise, comrades must be murdered if, when, and because their plans interfere with the organization’s bigger political plans. In that sense, other living human beings are presented as a threat and tainted by the fact that they have their own interests and their own projects that might interfere with one’s own.
The same can’t be said for animals in this context. And importantly, even outside of this context (like our own), the same can’t be said for children. Both animals and children are not simply living beings, but more importantly, they’re innocent living beings–ones that are either impossible to mark as threatening, or that are not yet marked as such. And in a world without children, it is only animals who have that status. Thus, it’s possible that the presence of animals in the film could be a reminder of our instinct to search for and nurture innocence.
The second theory, which I find more interesting, is that their presence is there to draw a stark contrast between animals and humans as a way to get us to focus on some distinctively human features.
Let me explain. It’s clear that both groups ostensibly inhabit the same physical environment, yet, the tragedy of global human infertility is only a problem for one of those groups. Why the same event don’t affect the animals in the movie in the same way as the humans can obviously be explained in two ways: first, the animals aren’t themselves infertile (or at least we have no reason to think they are), and second, most animals just aren’t the kind of creatures that care or can care about things like this. This might seem like an obvious and stupid thing to point out, but bear with me for a moment. Jasper’s dog, the refugee’s goat, the chicken in the camp, etc. not only don’t care (or are incapable of caring) that humans aren’t having babies, but, presumably, they aren’t capable of caring whether they’re having babies either. One can imagine that tomorrow all dogs (cats, sheep, etc.) could be rendered infertile and nothing would change for them (though, of course, it would be a tragedy for us). There would be no desperation on their part, no depression, no suicides, no doggy alcoholism. They simply don’t seem to be the kinds of creatures that are consciously bothered by the fact that they can’t have children.
Nor does it seem that they’re they the kinds of creatures that can come to think that their lives are pointless in light of something like their collective infertility. This is not to say that animals don’t live very rich internal lives, nor that they can’t be depressed or despondent as a result of certain events. But it does seem correct to say that they don’t reflect on what their life means as a whole in light of a pandemic, and that they don’t deliberate on whether it’s worth it or not to continue living.
The same is not true for us. Even though we are also animals, we are the kinds of creatures who can and do reflect on whether it’s worth continuing. One of the underlying themes in the movie is a constant background sense of nihilism and dread in the prospect of a childless future. This miasma is handled in two ways by the population: medication to keep going (presumably some kind of anti-depressant) and euthanasia to stop (as presented by the ‘Quietus’ drug which not only promises you the freedom to ‘decide when’ to go, but also grants your next of kin 2000 pounds and is actively encouraged to be used by ‘illegals’). The very decision to continue or to stop is something that appears to be a uniquely human phenomenon and a uniquely human problem. This, I believe, is why there are so animals in the film.
So, on that light note, remember to wash your hand, stock up on beer, and stay safe.
[P.S. My remarks on animal cognition are obviously not empirically verified and are not supposed to be authoritative on the matter. If it turns out that animals do face such internal struggles, then this second interpretation can still hold, but only at the expense of being a poor representation of animal psychology. Which, of course, happensallthetime.]
I was set to give a talk in New Orleans this week on a topic that I’ve been kicking around in the background. Sadly, the COVID-19 worries and the fact that NC issued a state of emergency this morning means that the talk had to be canceled. That’s a bummer for all sorts of reasons, but it’s better that I don’t serve as a vector for disease for people who might be at risk than to do go and possibly harm some folks.
In light of all that, I’ve decided to put up the written version of my talk here so at least somebody can see it. At this stage this is very much a work in progress, but I’m curious to get some feedback on it. Here it is:
I. Intro
What does it take to have ‘class consciousness’ in the Marxist sense? Is it a matter of knowing a certain set of propositions (“Capitalism is rooted in exploitation of the proletariat”; “No war but class war”; etc.)? If so, of which propositions? Those identified by Marx? Lenin? Lucaks? Is it a matter of being conscious of the existence of class? Of its importance? Or rather, is it the case that consciousness is a property of the class? If so, what is the relation between the consciousness of the class and the individual? Is the former a function of the consciousness of the latter, or is it independent of it?
In this brief talk, I will argue that we can think of class consciousness as a kind of Marxist virtue along roughly Aristotelian lines, and that when we do so, the answers to these questions become apparent. In arguing for this claim, I don’t mean to imply that Marx necessarily envisioned class consciousness as such—in fact Marx only talks about class consciousness indirectly and doesn’t explicitly define it (in contrast to, say, the concepts of ‘socially necessarily labor’ or ‘means of production’). For obvious reasons, I also don’t mean to imply that Aristotle would have (or should have) included ‘class consciousness’ as one of the virtues. Rather, my claim will be the much more modest one that when we apply Aristotle’s method of defining the virtues, we can make better sense of the concept of class consciousness and its importance.
II. Aristotle’s Function Argument
Although this is likely to be frustrating I won’t start with a definition of class consciousness for reasons that I hope will become clear soon. Rather, I want to begin with a short little recap of Aristotelian virtues as discussed in the NicomacheanEthics. The specific details here are less important than the overall structure, so don’t worry, this won’t be too painful.
The Ethics begins, as many of you might remember, with a search for and specification of that summum bonum towards which all crafts and deliberate actions aim. This end, we know, is what we call ‘happiness’; this much, Aristotle thinks, is uncontroversial. However, without knowing what happiness is, or what it takes to be happy, our agreement that happiness is the greatest good is of little use.
To get a better grip on what the content of happiness is Aristotle offers us his famous function argument. The idea here is as follows: when it comes to things that have a function—whether they be arts, crafts, of other activities—the good lies in the fulfilment of that function (or functions). Furthermore, we also know that it is by virtue of fulfilling such functions that we call things excellent of their kind, and they are such because they possess certain virtues that allows them to fulfil their function well. Thus, we can say, for example, that the function of a flute player (qua flute player) is to play the flute; that an excellent flautist is one that performs this function well (i.e. plays the flute well); and that they do so well because they have the virtues that allow them to do this (i.e. good finger placement, breath-control, etc.).
Crucially, Aristotle believes that if human beings in general have a characteristic function associated with a certain kind of activity, then the fulfilment of that function through the doing of that activity well might be the good for human beings.[1] Engaging in such activities would also make people who do so excellent qua human beings, and they will be such because they possess certain human virtues that allow them to fulfil their functions well.
Aristotle claims that human beings do indeed have such a unique function, and that it is related to the exercise of rationality. It is with respect to this function that we are set apart from all other living things. Plants and animals may live by engaging in the activity of nutrition and perception (for animals), but it is we alone who live by structuring and directing our actions based on our reasoning. And if acting in accord with reason is indeed the proper function of human beings, then it follows that living well and being happy will be a matter of exercising our rational faculty, that we will be excellent human beings when we engage in such activity well, and we will do so just in case we possess the virtues that allow us to exercise reason.
What follows in the rest of the Ethics after this functional argument is an exploration of the different virtues of character and virtues of intellect and how to acquire and cultivate them. What’s important for our purposes, however, is the general structure of the functional argument and how the virtues fit therein. Specifically, the structure requires that we first posit a telos or end towards which all human actions aim and which constitutes living well for human beings (happiness); this end is then considered in connection to a uniquely human function, the satisfaction of which amounts to living well and being an excellent human being (acting in accord with reason); and the human virtues are those traits the possession of which allows one to live well (courage, moderation, practical wisdom, etc.).
It should be clear from that has been said that the general schema pointed out in the previous paragraph can be employed to analyze matters apart from the summum bonum. We did this partially when discussing the flautist but we can list other examples as well. We posit an end towards which all doctoring actions aim and which consists in doctoring well (e.g. producing healthy bodies); this end is then connected to a function of the doctor (e.g. preserving health), the satisfaction of which is just amounts to doctoring well and being an excellent doctor; and the doctoring virtues are precisely those traits the possession of which allows one to doctor well (being attentive, informed, compassionate, etc.). Likewise, we can posit an end toward which all foot-racers aim and which consists in racing well (e.g. winning the race); this end is connected to a function of the runner (e.g. coming in first), the satisfaction of which amounts to running well and being an excellent runner; and the runner’s virtues are just those traits that allow an individual to run well (having the required stamina, knowing how to pace oneself, etc.)
In fact, we don’t even have to change all the variables to re-apply the schema. We could still posit, for example, that the end result towards which all actions aim is happiness, then say that the unique function of the doctor as it relates to that end is still that of promoting health, that he’s an excellent doctor when he does this well, and that it’s possession of the doctoring virtues that allow him to do that well. Granted, this kind of application of the schema won’t tell us much about what non-doctors should do to be happy—but on the assumption that the doctor does what he does for the sake of happiness (a safe assumption given that happiness just is that for which all deliberate actions are done), it would tell us what virtues one must cultivate to be happy qua doctor.
III. Marxian Telos
If this is true, then I suggest we can take the general schema relating ends to function to excellence and to virtue, and apply it to Marx’s philosophy. When we do this, class consciousness comes out as one of the virtues. In turn, thinking of it as a virtue allows us to give some content the very concept of class consciousness.
We can begin by noting that Marx, too posits both a telos for humanity—which, while not quite the Aristotelian end of eudaimonia, is not far removed from it either—as well as a characteristic proper human function. The latter is most clearly laid out in Marx’s remarks in the 1844 Manuscripts and specifically in the section on alienated labor where he is rather explicit that the characteristic function of humanity is that of productive labor. Thus, Marx says that “The productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species—its species character—is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species character…The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of its will.” (pg. 113 italics in original)
Although other living beings interact with nature and modify it, it is human beings alone who do so purposefully and creatively in accord with their will. Not only so, but unlike other animals, the labor that man puts into modifying nature is not only reserved for his own preservation and reproduction, but for the preservation and needs of others.[2](“Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom.” Ibid) It is when engaging in this activity of freely laboring that human beings behave qua human beings; it is their proper characteristic function.
At least part of Marx’s criticisms of capitalism then follow from the effects that the capitalist mode of production has on the worker and their ability to engage in this activity. Specifically, under capitalism, the worker still labors, but his labor becomes alienated—he no longer puts his labor forward freely and creatively, but now works meaninglessly, repetitively, and monotonously for the capitalist so that he can make a profit. Labor no longer serves as the means by which man self-actualizes, but now becomes the means by which he is tormented: “The worker who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc.—does he consider this twelve hours spinning, drilling, turning, building, shoveling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life, as life? On the contrary life begins for him when his activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed.” (Wage Labor and Capital). In short, capitalism takes the proper characteristic function of human beings and frustrates it, prevents it from being fulfilled.
In light of this criticism (and others) Marx advocates for an economic, political, and social arrangement that allows for people to engage in just this very characteristically human activity. This is, of course, communism, under which people’s creative energies and labor are freed and put to use for the entire species rather than solely for the benefit of the capitalist. Still, one might wonder why a system in which this function is fulfilled would be preferable to the capitalist one. The answer is simple and implied in what has already been said: it is under the condition of fulfilling this function that people are happy. If its torment to live one’s life with this function frustrated—if the alienation of labor turns life into misery—then, presumably, restoring the ability to engage in that activity will allow for the possibility of happiness, and, crucially, engaging in that activity will be at least part of (if not the totality of) what constitutes happiness. Thus, we see that the end that Marx posits for people looks very much like the end that Aristotle posits as well: happiness.
If all this is correct, then we can say that Marx has provided us with two of the pieces of the previously discussed schema. The end towards which human action aims is happiness and the proper function of human beings as it relates to that end is engaging in productive labor freely and creatively. In turn, an excellent person is one who is able to do that activity well, and they will be able to do so if they have certain virtues that let them do this. The question before us now is what these virtues are.
IV. Class Consciousness as a Virtue
Undoubtedly, some of the virtues that will allow someone to engage in productive labor well will be the same as those pointed out by Aristotle given that the two share the common end of happiness. But others are going to be different based on the fact that the unique function of human beings has changed. So, we have to look at what virtues are necessary to do that function well.
I want to suggest that at least one of the things that allows one to do so is the virtue of class consciousness. The reason for this is rather straightforward in the Marxist context and has partially been stated: under capitalism, engaging in productive labor freely and creatively is virtually impossible. Part of getting to the point in which one can engage in productive labor is understanding that one’s happiness is related to productive laboring, and understanding the conditions under which one is and is not able to engage in such laboring. It involves understanding, for example, that the kind of wage labor that most workers are engage in in service of the capitalist is not the same kind of labor as free, creative, and productive labor, and that one is deprived of the ability to do the latter when engaging in the former.
To put the matter a different way, class consciousness allows one to engage in the function of productive labor well and is hence a virtue by providing individuals with the ability to recognize the importance of one’s labor, what frustrates it, and what facilitates it. This, in turn, allows an individual to direct one’s actions so as to properly engage in productive labor when possible and, hence, to be happy.
But what does this have to do with class? After all, in describing class consciousness, I’ve talked only about how it relates to one’s labor, and said nothing about class. This might appear counter-intuitive since one might have reasonably thought that class consciousness has something to do with class. This is true, but the tension can be worked out easily: on the Marxist view, what prevents the vast majority of people from engaging in productive labor is the very existence of classes—the fact that workers can’t engage in productive labor is due to the fact they are oppressed by a class whose interest requires them to do rote, repetitive, ‘unproductive’ labor for profit. Thus, a recognition of the importance of one’s labor and its relation to the individual’s happiness naturally leads to a focus on class and its role.
That being said, we also know that Marx also thinks that after the revolution there won’t be any classes since at least one of its goals is specifically to eliminate them. Thus, it might be better to say that under capitalist conditions having class consciousness is de facto a matter of understanding the role that class has in preventing people from engaging in productive labor. However, following the revolution, when classes no longer exist, the virtue of class consciousness will remain a matter of recognizing the importance of one’s productive labor as it relates to one’s happiness, but the focus on the role of class in frustrating productive labor will drop out.[3]
Let’s return to our main topic, though, and fill out the content of class consciousness a bit more—I won’t be able to give a full account given the time constraints, but I hope at least a few preliminaries will be sufficient to give a general picture. In any case, at least part of the content has already been supplied since we’ve worked out that class consciousness is concerned with matters of productive labor and specifically with what frustrates and facilitates it. If class consciousness is a virtue, then, it is a medial condition concerned with these matters. Its excesses and deficiencies don’t have names, but we can say that a person who is excessive in this respect sees more things as relevant to engaging in productive labor than there really are, and one who is deficient in them sees fewer. Thus, a person who sees nothing about the capitalist mode of production as interfering with productive labor is deficient in matters of class consciousness (they may, in fact, lack it!). And similarly, a person who thinks that everything is relevant to productive labor is excessive in these matters. The medial condition between these is, of course, that of recognizing which things really are relevant to productive labor in the proper way, and that we can call being class conscious or having class consciousness. When it comes to erring the person who sees more things as relevant is closer to the mean that the person who sees fewer.
Crucially, like all the other virtues class consciousness is not just a matter of simply knowing which things matter to productive labor, but the use of that knowledge in practice. Just as the courageous person isn’t such simply by virtue of knowing what things are to be feared and to what degree but their ability to put that knowledge into practice and to endure those things, so the person who has class consciousness is able to employ their knowledge of what matters in productive labor to act appropriately. What this means in practice will depend on the situation, of course, but we might say that a class-conscious person will be one who, for example, supports strikes when they will be affective to making labor be more productive (in the Marxist sense, not in the capitalist’s) and opposes them when they would be destructive (e.g. they wouldn’t support a strike called by an agent provocateur). Similarly, the class conscious person is able to distinguish between those reforms that are merely opportunistic and afford a temporary advantage and those that would truly liberate labor. And so on.
V. Brief Closing Remarks
Finally, I’d like to close out by showing how adopting this view gives us some straightforward answers to the questions with which we began.
Is having class consciousness a matter of knowing certain propositions? As we already discussed, the answer is no. But this doesn’t mean that those propositions are not important since they are necessary in order to act appropriately.
Is class consciousness a property of a class? Yes, but only insofar as it is a property of the individuals who make it up (just as courage can be a property of a combat battalion by virtue of the courage that each of the soldiers in the battalion). Thus, class consciousness is reducible to the consciousness of the individuals, but not to the propositions that the individuals know.
[1] The qualifications here are necessary because it’s both possible that our search is abortive, or that whatever the function of the human being is, it is so much at odds with what we normally take to make people happy that we have to reject it.
[2] Birds and spiders produce, but they only produce what they need to survive. They can’t make a pen-knife or a jacket. Man, by contrast, can produce anything (including bee hives for bees and webs for spiders!).
[3] We can draw an analogy of this case with a different virtue like courage. We know that courage is the medial condition dealing with fears and that helps one live well insofar as it helps one properly handle situations in which one has to confront fearful things. In the wildly implausible scenario in which the fear of death is removed, but not, say, the fear of spiders, the virtue of courage will remain relevant to dealing with the latter situation, but for the most part its importance will be significantly reduced. Something similar can be said about the virtue of class consciousness.
This week’s ‘controversial’ topic on the moderate left concerns the endorsement of Bernie Sanders by famous bald-man and podcaster Joe Rogan. I don’t know much about Rogan, I don’t listen to his podcast, and I still primarily think of him as the host of NBC’s FearFactor (in turn, I only remember this show because it was on the air right around the time I first developed a fear of vomit and the idea that someone would purposefully make themselves sick and televise it absolutely horrified me; I’ve since made my peace with that concept and most of the NBC family programming).
This is how I’ll always remember him
From what I know about the ongoing dispute two facts are relevant. First, Rogan’s podcast is incredibly successful and his endorsement of Sanders is likely to have some sway with his very large audience. And second, Joe Rogan is kind of a piece of shit. He’s not only given a platform to well-known dangerous idiots like Alex Jones and Gavin McInnes (hell, throw in space fascist Elon Musk in that group as well), but he’s also said some pretty fucked up racist and transphobic things as well.
The dispute, then, is about whether Sanders should have accepted the endorsement by someone as shitty as Rogan (he did). Two general arguments are levied on either side: those supporting Sanders’ decision cite the size of Rogan’s audience and what an endorsement like his can do for helping Sanders win the nomination; those opposing the decision (which, I assume includes at least a few of Sanders’ supporters as well) claim that accepting such an endorsement is a kind of dirty deal and is tantamount to a tacit agreement of Rogan’s own shitty views.
Fortunately for me, I won’t be trying to settle this dispute, so those reading who might have been anxious that I’m about to drop a hot take can relax. Rather, what I want to talk about is an article by Vox’s Dylan Matthews about that dispute and what I take to be a really, really bad argument.
Matthews’ CoreArgument
Matthews’ argument rests on the fact that anti-endorsement and pro-endorsement arguments mentioned above can be roughly thought of in deontological and consequentialist terms respectively. In other words, those approving of the endorsement (or holding their nose at it) justify their support by referencing the consequences that such an endorsement would have for a successful Sanders campaign. By doing this, they (implicitly or explicitly) argue that the goodness of those consequences outweigh the badness of being endorsed by someone like Rogan. By contrast, those categorically opposing the endorsement (or being critical of it) justify their opposition by appealing to some principle of morality that does not take into account the consequences of the action done.
Crucially, Matthews takes this difference to be indicative of deep, dividing fissures between ‘leftists’ and ‘liberals’ with each taking a different school of thought in presenting their arguments (this is a short, and I believe, charitable reading of the claim; the specifics are much, much weirder as I point out below). Roughly, Matthews thinks that when it comes to certain issues, liberals and leftists are speaking past each other with each group using different moral standards of assessment for different contexts. Matthews doesn’t make a judgment on which side is correct (which I commend him on since I’ve decided to take the same route!) in this meta-debate, but believes this is a serious phenomenon that we should be aware of.
Well known liberal, Immanuel Kant (kidding, not even Matthews calls him that)
Why the Argument is Garbage
But let’s stop for a second and ask whether this is so. What’s the evidence provided that there is such a deep fissure between leftists and liberals? The most obvious bit of evidence seems to be a collection of tweets that offer some principled objection to Sanders accepting Rogan’s endorsement coupled with Matthews’ claim that principled objections to certain actions are the purview of ‘liberals’ (“Most liberals have what I would characterize as a deontological opposition to discrimination. That is, they think that discriminating against or maligning someone on the basis of membership in a protected class — women, trans people, black people, and other racially oppressed communities, etc. — violates a rule that should be inviolable.”) The implication seems to be that those ‘socialist-identified’ Bernie supporters do not make take such stances but that they’re primarily driven by consequentialist considerations.
Now maybe Matthews hasn’t spent enough time in ‘leftist’ circles, but principled opposition to a position is decisively not the purview of liberals (ask a leftist what they think about opportunism and you’ll hear about an hour’s worth of anti-consequentialist polemics). The fact of the matter is that leftist politics full of principled stances (some say too many!) and it’s not even clear that the tweets that are used as evidence in this argument are even coming from liberals–I can easily see some of my leftist comrades criticizing Sanders’ endorsement precisely on the grounds that the left shouldn’t take any endorsement from anyone even remotely right-wing. It literally seems that the only thing that has convinced Matthews that this is a liberal position is his impression that it’s liberals that are in the business of offering deontological arguments!
Even if Matthews is right that liberals use deontological arguments sometimes (I agree with him there!), it’s just not true that leftists don’t use them as well. He might be in a better position if he could defend the claim that liberals make such appeals more frequently than leftists, but this is a different claim from the one offered and one for which I’ve seen zero evidence.
Likewise, things might be different if he could show that leftists use consequentialist arguments more often than liberals. But not only is there no support for this, but precisely where you would expect there to be some such support the argument gets super weird. After showing that some people oppose Sanders’ endorsement on principled grounds Matthews gives us a brief gloss of consequentialism and offers the following:
Here’s how that disagreement plays into the Rogan controversy. Shortly after the Rogan controversy broke out, Sanders fans started pulling out references to Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state and arguable war criminal whose counsel Hillary Clintonwelcomed in 2016. The objection is straightforward: Kissinger was responsible for the deaths of at least hundreds of thousands of innocent people over the course of his career, between his complicity in the Bangladesh genocide of 1971, his push to carpet-bomb Cambodia, and his support for brutal dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. Surely that’s worse than whatever Rogan has said, no? So is it really fair to condemn Sanders for trumpeting Rogan’s support when Clinton trumpeted her connections to a morally far worse individual?
I can’t say this strongly enough: the argument presented by “Sanders fans” is not a consequentialist argument! It is a charge of hypocrisywhich is something entirely different. What they’re saying is not “the consequences of having this endorsement will be better than the consequences of taking the principled line that you advocate” but rather “you are a hypocrite by taking issue with Rogan but not taking an issue with Kissinger” or “you weren’t so principled when your favored candidate was being endorsed by shitty people.”
Matthews is right that they may also claim that on top of that that side was willing to get an endorsement by someone who’s responsible for hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, but this doesn’t make the argument a consequentialist one. Rather what this points to is the depth of hypocrisy. The same thing can be said about the back and forth about Colin Powell. How Matthews misses this is, frankly, confusing.
All this is to say that there’s nothing in here that should convince anyone of the claim that leftists are more likely to engage in consequentialist arguments. We’re still left with just Matthews’ impression that this is just what leftists do.
This is Dr. Henry Killinger who has certainly been responsible for fewer deaths than Kissinger
Let’s Give Him the Data
Let’s engage in some fantasy and give Matthews the data. Suppose Matthews had gathered a representative group of tweets on one side by explicitly self-identified liberals who give explicitly deontological reasons against the endorsement, and a representative group of tweets on the other side by explicitly self-identifying leftists giving explicit consequentialist reasons defending the endorsement. Hell, let’s make it even more robust and say that instead of tweets, Matthews did a proper controlled social psychology experiment that showed a correlation between being a leftist and supporting a consequentialist argument in this case and being a liberal and supporting a deontological argument in this case. Wouldn’t this show that there’s a deep philosophical fissure between leftists and liberals?
No! At best it would show that when it comes to the question of Bernard Sanders’ acceptance or rejection of an endorsement some people favor consequentialist reasoning and other people favor deontological reasoning. To support the more robust claim one would have to show that there’s a strong correlation between being a leftist and reasoning consequentially and being a liberal and reasoning deontologically in general.
Now, some people have tried to argue something analogous with studies about how people reason in trolley cases, but these, too, face some serious problems. Most notably, it’s notoriously difficult to prove that those studies tell us anything more than how, say, conservatives and liberals reason differently in trolley cases. One can willingly accept that some groups might be more sensitive to consequentialist reasoning when it comes to deaths by train, but it’s a further step to the broader claim that those who reason in such a way in those cases reason the same in all other moral cases.
Likewise, even if we could say that there’s a political divide with respect to this issue that can be boiled down to philosophical differences (something, which, to stress again, has not been proven), it doesn’t follow that there’s anything even close to a deep fissure along these lines (which is not to say that such a fissure doesn’t exist). For all we know, leftists and liberals reason morally in every single other domain. It’s doubtful, but nothing about this article should make anyone think otherwise.
Some Speculation of my own
I’ve been pretty hard on Matthews for not providing support, so let me make some speculative claims of my own for which I’ll provide zero empirical evidence (or really any kind of argument).
I think Matthews’ hot takes are the result of certain general view that there are profound, deeply different ways of moral reasoning that map onto different political views. I don’t know why people find this view to be appealing (though I suspect Jonathan Haidt’s work is at least partially to blame; though, I should say I’m not familiar enough with it to comment here). I bristle at any kind of essentialist views about politics and this is no exception.
However, I can imagine that such a view might be comforting to the extent that if it’s right, then the things that divide us politically can be seen as a kind of misunderstanding or speaking past each other (“Oh, you’re just sensitive to the consequences and I’m sensitive to the rules!”). If that’s right, then the solution to our deep political issues become a matter of tinkering, clarifying, and ironing out and not of any fundamental class conflict, racism, or bigotry. And while I would love for this to be the case since it makes good work for moral philosophers, I’m just skeptical.
Part of why I’m skeptical is that this view requires that people have some pretty clear and consistent moral views. Leftists have to always (or most of the time, or consistently, or…) reason by appeals to the consequences; liberals have to always (or most of the time, or consistently, or…) reason by appeals to principles. And I just don’t think this is true.
I suspect that the majority of people don’t have coherent, systematic ways of morally reasoning that can be mapped to their political views. Rather, like Thomas Nagel says in his “War and Massacre” piece, I think that all people who are not trying to win an argument or acolytes of Kant of Mill are generally sensitive to both consequentialist and deontological reasons. I’ve personally never met a single person who only reasoned in one way or found only one way of reasoning convincing (and I hope I never do!)
Furthermore, I believe that we’re kind of pluralist and opportunistic about when we employ different kinds of reasoning and why. Sometimes we offer deontological reasons in support or against a particular view, and other times we employ consequentialist reasons. This isn’t to say that this necessarily makes for bad reasoning. Indeed, I’m more inclined to think that both kinds of reasoning might be necessary to truly understand the depths of our moral landscape and that it’s the moralist who fetishizes systematicity that is likely to get things upside down. But I think it should push us away from these essentialist psychological views.
I went to see Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite last month and came out of the theater absolutely pumped. I’ve seen more than a few great movies this year, and this one definitely ranks among the top. I meant to put down my thoughts about the movie on paper much sooner, but the end of the semester grading (and my previous commitment to finishing The State and Revolution) kept me from doing it sooner. In any case, what follows below are a couple of things that I really liked about the film (and one thing that I didn’t care for too much). Plenty of spoilers follow.
What I Loved:
Perhaps the thing I liked most about the film is its focus on the impact and importance of the material conditions on the two families. This is, of course, most clearly demonstrated in the difference between the homes of the Kim and Park families. The Kim family lives in a small, cramped, smelly, sub-basement apartment in a poor part of town. The audience gets the impression that this is less of an apartment for people as much as it is a kind of negative space that’s occupied by people (much in the same way that the space underneath the fridge is the space that happens to be occupied by cockroaches). It is distinctively and oppressively urban.
By contrast, the Park family lives in a spacious, elegant, beautifully designed house elevated above the city. Its landscape is so carefully manicured and maintained that when one looks out of the massive Park house windows one can imagine that they’re not anywhere near an urban center. The house not only suggests a life of elegant opulence, but also one of privacy–every family member has their own separate space and there are no drunks peeing in sight of the dinner table.
In fact, there’s a glut of privacy in the Park house. Only in a house like that could a man live underground without ever being noticed; only in a house like that could so many secrets be kept. The Kim family is able to trick the Parks because each of them can occupy a role that fills a space within their house. In turn, by playing that role well enough and occupying that space, they can slip by unnoticed. Clearly, the same thing could never happen in the Kim house.
These most-obvious material differences are important, but they merely scratch the surface. After all, it’s not uncommon for movies to bring the viewers’ attention to great disparities in wealth and if the most notable thing about the movie were to make us notice that some people live comfortably and affluently while others don’t, then it wouldn’t be worth writing about.
What Parasite does especially well is explain how these differences in material conditions have massive effects on the psychologies of the characters. And it does so without resorting to a kind of moral caricaturizing. Let me explain by starting with this latter point and working backwards.
a. No Moral Caricatures
First, it’s clear that the Parks aren’t pure incarnations of evil. It’s true, they do live an affluent lifestyle, but they’re never shown to do anything particularly heinous. Mr. Park doesn’t work as, like, an arms dealer, and although Mrs. Park is shown to be a bit naïve and childish, it’s clear that she clearly loves her children and wants the best for them. Their relationship with the Kim family isn’t particularly warm (they are, after all, ‘the help’ and the Parks frequently talk among themselves about Ki-taek’s smell), but they’re neither cold nor particularly imperious. In short, they perfectly embody a kind of familiar elite aloofness which, in general, is not enough to make the audience hate them.
By contrast, it is equally clear that the Kims are not paragons of virtue. In the first place, they are willing to lie to and manipulate the Parks in order to get what they want: Kevin is not a tutor, Jessica is not an art therapist, Ki-taek is not a professional driver, and Chung-sook is not employed by an elite house-keeping service. These deceptions are not terribly serious since the members of the Kim family are more than capable of doing what the Kims need them to do–they may have lied about their qualifications, but they do their jobs well.
[That being said, the Kim children also do some pretty objectionable things: Kevin almost immediately initiates a romantic relationship with the much younger girl he’s meant to be tutoring, and it’s not obvious whether Jessica’s ‘art therapy’ is really helping the young Da-song.]
Much more objectionable are the lengths to which the Kims go to secure their position with respect to the other working-class people. First, in order to get her father hired as Mr. Park’s driver, Jessica gets his previous driver fired by implying that he’s having sex in Mr. Park’s car. And, of course, in order to get Chung-sook hired as the housekeeper, the family causes her to have a sever allergic reaction which could have killed her (indeed, later, they do just that).
The Kims’ motivation throughout the movie is exclusively self-centered. What matters to them is that they’re able to get what they think they’re able to get. That doesn’t mean that they’re willing to do anything—they never intend to kill the Parks’ former housekeeper—but the audience gets the sense that the welfare of people outside the family matters very little to them. In short, they’re selfish, opportunistic, and largely amoral. Of course, that doesn’t make them monsters, but it does make the audience’s perception of them much more complex, and, in my experience at least, much more realistic.
b. Material Conditions Shape Psychology
By refusing to make the Parks and the Kims into opposing moral caricatures the director is able to move beyond a naïve picture that explains the characters’ actions and psychology through a purely moral lens. Neither the Parks nor the Kims do what they do because they’re simply good/evil people who are naturally moved to be selfish, or cruel, or indifferent to the suffering of others. This, in turn, draws the audience’s attention to the alternative explanation: namely, that the families’ respective psychologies and motivations are shaped precisely by the material conditions in which they live.
This is perhaps the most important theme in the movie and one that I think was done fantastically well. One scene to note here is the scene in which the former house-keeper and her husband are discovered by the Kim family as they squat in the Park family house. The two families mirror each other here: both are destitute, both are desperate, both are trying to alleviate their suffering by living off the scraps of the Parks, and neither is willing to give up their temporary gains for the benefit of the other. They are, in short, both parasites (THAT’S THE NAME OF THE MOVIE! GET IT?!?!). Crucially, their recognition of equality in this situation makes the two of them competitors for those scraps. Both families realize that their relative well-being is contingent on the zero-sum gains they’ve been able to attain behind the Parks’ backs, and that the opposing family is in a position to ruin their setup by alerting the Parks. This realization culminates in the fight between the two families, and, ultimately, in the death of the former house-keeper and the imprisonment of her husband in the underground lair.
This scene (as well as the scenes in which the Kims succeed in getting their positions in the Park house) is a metaphor for the broader phenomenon in which the conditions of poor people force them to turn against one another in order to get the scraps left by the rich. It’s not the case that the Kims hate the former house-keeper and her husband—they don’t set out to kill her—and vice versa. But the situation they’ve been presented with is one in which they must either fight each other and preserve what they’ve gained, or give that up for someone else to grab while they return to their previous lot. Scarcity and poverty are what motivates the families’ behavior and what explains their actions, not anything about their inherent moral character or worth.
The psychological warping of the individual in this setting is most clearly seen in the behavior of Geun-sae, the former house-keeper’s underground dwelling husband. His subterranean life has led him to see Mr. Park as a kind of God-figure to whom reverence and submission is owed. Far from seeing his life as the manifestation of a gross injustice in which a select few get to enjoy the finest things in life while the many fight over scraps, Geun-sae sees himself as a beneficiary of a blessing bestowed to him by Mr. Park. In that sense, Mr. Park doesn’t appear to him as another human being, but rather as a supernatural entity with the power to give and take away life.
This reification of the wealthy is a familiar phenomenon and is at the core of capitalist ideology. In that ideology, the capitalist appears almost as a force of nature who produces value from nowhere for the benefit of others, and who, of course, grabs a share of those benefits in the process. Thus, the capitalist is seen not as someone who grows fat off the exploitation of others, but as someone who is the source of all that is good in life.
Now, this is quite literally the case for Geun-sae for whom day-to-day survival depends on the well-being and success of Mr. Park. But the same phenomenon is found in a lesser degree in the way ordinary people and politicians treat the rich as ‘job creators’; in the way the ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ is idolized; in the belief that influx of wealth ‘fixes’ neighborhoods; and so on. Indeed, there is a general dogma (at least in America) against doing anything that might disrupt or go against the interest of the rich since to displease them would cause them to withdraw their blessings from the people. Sacrifices must be made to the Gods of Capital–taxes must be forgotten, credit extended, markets opened, communities destroyed–so that something worse, we are told, doesn’t happen; viz. so that Amazon doesn’t move its headquarters to Northern Ireland, so that Carrier doesn’t close its plants in Ohio, so that Blue Cross/Blue Shield doesn’t lay off a thousand workers. This is just Geun-sae’s supplicating attitude to Mr. Park writ large.
c. Luck, Rationality, and Contingency
Perhaps the most interesting aspect in how differences in material conditions affect individuals’ psychology is in the realm of rationality. This can be seen in one of the film’s pivotal scenes in which a deluge washes over the city, flooding the Kim family’s basement apartment, destroying all their belongings and leaving them homeless.
In the first place, this scene is interesting for the contrast between the way the same contingent event–the rainstorm–affects the Kim and Park families. For the Kim family the storm is unquestionably devastating. In the span of a couple of hours, while fantasizing about the kind of lives they’ll have if they continue to hold their positions in the Park household, all of their belongings are completely destroyed and they’re forced to take shelter in a relief center for the foreseeable future. By contrast, for the Park family, the rainstorm is a blessing that clears away the pollution and freshens the air.
This by itself is interesting, but it points to an even more serious point. Namely, it shows how absolutely devastating the role of luck can be in how well one’s life goes. Let me back up a little bit. Aside from fetishization of the wealthy, another lynch-pin in American capitalist ideology is the myth of the self-made man as the product of rational calculation and prudent risk. As it goes, the rich do not make their money through exploitation, but first by diligent saving and then careful study and investment in what the market needs. In short, successful rich folks are those who have an ability to suppress their immediate desires and delay gratification in a rational matter that maximizes their yield. In contrast, the poor are often seen as irrational, lazy, or chronically incapable of suppressing their immediate urges for the sake of greater future gains.
This is what’s in the background when people claim that poor people are that way because they spend all their money on cars, clothes, and toys rather than saving it and investing it (this, and, most of the time a hefty dose of racism, too). Indeed, I’ve even heard it said that poverty is perpetuated because poor people buy coffee from Starbucks or eat fast food rather than making either at home! In short, poverty is seen as an inability to manage a budget, and managing a budget is seen as an exercise in rational planning for the future. (For more on this kind of argument and why it’s wrong, see UNC’s own Jennifer Morton’s work on poverty and rationality)
The deluge scene in Parasite shows just how stupid this line of reasoning is in light of the actual material conditions on the ground. In one of the best scenes in the movie, Kevin asks his father in the shelter what the plan is. Ki-taek responds (paraphrasing) that the plan is the one that succeeds every time: namely, the one that isn’t made. Ki-taek’s point is, of course, not an endorsement of a kind of irrationality, but rather the very prescient one that the norms of rationality that the myth of the rational capitalist endorse only make sense under certain background conditions. Specifically, they only make sense if there’s a certain kind of security against these absolutely devastating contingencies that can completely destroy your life in the span of a few hours. It simply doesn’t make sense to live the kind of life that looks years, months, or even weeks in the future if tomorrow a rainstorm can take everything away.
Now, it’s true that, in a certain respect, we are all subject to the whims of fate. Both I and Jeff Bezos can be crushed by a falling piano tomorrow; we may both be struck by lightning; and we may both develop some rare, terminal disease. No amount of rational planning will guarantee that these things won’t happen and this is something that is shared by all of us regardless of wealth or economic status. At that level, we’re both equally vulnerable to luck. Nevertheless, at every level below that, the difference become astronomical. An unexpected root canal won’t force Jeff Bezos to take out high-interest loans; a family member falling ill won’t make a difference as to whether he’ll be able to work; etc. With respect to most (though not all!) contingencies, Bezos is protected while I’m not. What this means, of course, is that he can discount certain events when making certain decisions and that certain actions are rational for him that wouldn’t be rational for me.
Much further down the line are the Kim family. The question that their situation raises is about how one should live when virtually anything can ruin any plan that you have in the future. Is it even rational to spend the energy to form plans when you live in that kind of world? Ki-taek’s answer is, of course, no. Not only is there no sense in planning under such circumstances, but it’s absolutely a waste of time. Instead, these conditions suggest that one should live with the short-term in mind–with getting fed today; with getting to work today–rather than with some unattainable and implausible future further on.
This is something many people who haven’t actually been poor have a hard time understanding, and it’s something that I think the movie presents very well.
d. The Central Question
All of this serves to highlight what I take to be the central message of the film. The title naturally invites the viewer to repeatedly ask the question of who are the ‘parasites’ in this film, and, in turn, to wonder whether they are justified in ‘feeding’ off others. But these questions are not the most important ones. With respect to the first, there’s no question that the Kim family (and the former house-keeper and her husband) are the parasites–in that respect the metaphor is almost too on the nose. The second question is a bit more interesting, but the points I’ve brought up–specifically, the fact that none of the characters can be caricatured as people who ‘deserve’ their lot, and the effect that the material conditions have on their psychologies–suggest to me that the question of individual justification is, in a way, beside the point.
What matters more than whether or not the Kims are justified in doing what they do or whether the Parks are justified in living the kind of lives they live is less important than the question of what kind of society allows for the existence of parasites, and the question of the grounds on which such a society can be justified. These questions are, of course, not new questions (especially to those of us on the left), but it’s been a hot minute since I’ve seen them brought up so forcefully in a popular film. And I’m glad for that.
What I didn’t Care for
Perhaps the only thing I really didn’t like about the movie is the very last ten minutes. First and foremost, the fact that Kevin survives two massive blows to the back of the head from a thirty pound rock then wakes up in a hospital is absolutely absurd. It seems to me that the only reason he lives is to deliver the narrated anti-climax and, as everyone knows, making x happen to a character because y needs to happen is usually a bad reason for x to happen.
In the same vein, I thought the back and forth letter narration between father and son were a bit too heavy-handed and didactic (not to mention that there was no narration through the rest of the movie which makes this part of the movie stick out).
That being said, I get what the director is going for in showing us Kevin’s fantasy and why he included the scene. I understand that the final scene in which the family is reunited is an impossible fantasy that Kevin needs to indulge in in order to go on. Kevin won’t get rich, he won’t buy the house, and he will never see his father again. This fantasy is both a way of making sense of his life and its direction, and (seemingly) the only source of comfort he has in light of the events of the movie. It allows him to make sense of his life by giving him both an interpretation of what went wrong (he didn’t play by the rules! He thought he could get ahead quickly through subterfuge when he should have been working hard to become a millionaire!) and what he must do to set things right (he has to make a plan and stick to it and be perfect!).
This, of course, is just Kevin’s return to the neo-liberal capitalist ideology that underwrites and sustains the very system that makes it possible for there to be ‘parasites’ in society the first place.
The scene is tragic because despite everything that’s happened, Kevin simply can’t escape this ideology–his suffering has only driven him further into it. And we understand why this is the case. His material conditions prove his father correct–there’s no point in making long-term plans if something as simple as a rainstorm can completely destroy your life. However, to accept this and truly live without such long-term plans is, in essence, to live as an alienated impotent entity, simply reacting to the things that one is incapable of changing one way or the other. Arguably, that way of living is hardly worth living at all–it truly is to live opportunistically (like an animal or…a parasite). In such a situation ideology serves to smooth things over and play a conciliatory role: things aren’t really what they seem; the material conditions don’t make it impossible to live a good life; the world rewards merit, grit, and effort; justice and injustice are ultimately a matter of how individuals relate to one another. Kevin embraces this idea because it allows him to continue living as a human being. In the absence of an alternative way of making sense of things, who could blame him for going in this direction?
All this is to say I understand the importance of this last scene and I think the message conveyed is an important one. Nevertheless, I just didn’t like the narrative choice taken to deliver that message–reading it out through a series of letters just felt…I don’t know…artless (especially after the equally artless magical revival of the main character).
[The other side of me wants to fill in the other half of the leftist critique: the choice of the poor is not to either deny the reality of their material circumstances and escape to fantasy or to accept that reality and live in misery. One can accept reality and fight to change it. But I’ll leave it alone–no movie needs to do everything]
I’ve been thinking about a problem with how the robots power themselves in the movie “The Matrix.” Let me explain.
For a second, let’s assume that Morpheus is right and that if the machines got enough humans they *could* use them as a source of power. This is already controversial, but assume that there’s no energy loss from the little pods they’re grown in to the turbines or whatever that provide enough electricity for the machines. Even so, we know that the power they provide is power they get from the humans being kept alive in a vegetative state in those pods.
We know this because the way they get Neo out is by making the machine think that he’s dead and spitting him out (he’s no longer any good as a battery!) Obviously, to keep a human being alive–even in such a state–you need to feed them something. Morpheus confirms this: the live humans are intravenously fed the liquefied dead. (Ignore, for a moment why the machine spits Neo out when it thinks he’s dead rather than just liquefying him right there)
The average life of a singe human is about 72 years or about 26,000 days. If raised from birth (ignoring differences in caloric needs through different stages of life), a human being would need roughly 52 million calories. That would amount to about 412 dead human beings needed to keep one person alive for 72 years. Though, to stick with our average assumptions, let’s say that the machines only keep people alive until middle age.
So, let’s can say that we have a ratio of 206 dead needed to keep one alive. Currently, there are 7.7 billion people on the planet. Supposing they liquefy all of us, they would be able to maintain ~34 million people through middle age. If those people don’t reproduce they can sustain ~165,000 people, then ~800, then a little less than 4. In short, the reign of the machines can only last about 175 years.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: duh, of course they would reproduce us! Fine. Suppose that there is reproduction involved. This means that at in the limiting case we have a starting population of something like 1.16 billion women between 15-35. Assuming each one gives birth every 9 months (it’s a nightmare scenario in the post-apocalypse hell-world!) we have roughly 26 births per person (i.e. 20 years by 12 months divided by 9).
This gives us 28 billion more people from our initial cycle; factor in a .078 child death rate and you have roughly 26 billion people, 14 billion of whom would be able to give birth again. So maybe it’s not so bad for the machines!
However, this would only be possible after 15 years and those babies gotta eat during that time. Which means that the machines would need to reserve ~11 million calories per person for those 15 years, or, roughly 1.533e+17 calories (for the 14 billion born; double that for both male and female babies), which translates to about 1.2264e+12 people just to get to the next iteration. Now, obviously, that number is much greater than the 7.7 billion people available! So, this ain’t gonna cut it!
But suppose they just want to break even. Well, that won’t work either. We know that 7.7 billion people can, at max, sustain 34 million people. Which means that ~12 million will be able to reproduce, resulting in ~312 million births, half, of whom, again, would need a reserve of ~11 million calories each, which, obviously is still much, much more than the initial starting population. Suppose they just want 34 million people born–that would require 3.74e+14 calories or ~3 billion people. Which, of course, is apparent when we consider that 206 people are required to keep 1 person alive for 62 days and human beings can’t make 206 people 62 days after birth.
And this is all ignoring the fact that this is the amount of energy that’s just needed just to keep other people alive and that these human bodies are supposed to then produce extra energy that runs the machines themselves.
In short, this is a bad plan and the machines are idiots.
The end of the decade’s got me thinking about what I’ve done in the last ten years, what I’ve enjoyed, and what I’ve read. In that light, I decided to go back and re-read what I’ve always thought of as one of my favorite papers: Bernard Williams’ “Moral Luck” (you can find a pdf here–it starts on page 20).
Although I still like the paper quite a bit, I found myself more critical of it this time around than I have been in the past, and, given that apparently I have nothing better to do, I decided to put my thoughts down. In all likelihood, this will serve as lecture notes the next time I teach the paper.
I’ve given a brief summary of the setup of the paper and the relevant bits that I’m criticizing, but I don’t go into the whole thing. In fact, I stop fairly quickly into the essay (I don’t even get to Anna Karenina or the agent regret stuff). I might do a follow up post that covers the second part, but what I’ve written below is very long as it stands. I’ve also included little grey “justify it” boxes that make explicit some of the stuff that’s either in the background or that is important, but tangential to the central arguments or exposition of the post. Those who might not be familiar with Williams’ essay or with philosophy might find them useful–those who are familiar with both can skip them (although they do provide some insight into what I think is going in some tricky parts). Finally, those who are very familiar with Williams’ essay can feel free to just jump down to the criticism sections and see if those make sense. Okay, here we go.
Synopsis
The paper itself, like most of Williams’ work, is a difficult one and Williams does little to help his reader in some of the trickier parts. The ostensible thesis, however, is clear: the idea that moral value is immune to luck is a mistaken one.
Justify It Box 1: Why care whether moral value is immune to luck?
Here’s the brief argument that’s lurking in the background in favor of this mistaken view. We know that the good things in life can be stripped away by contingent forces: a tornado can destroy your gorgeous house; a dip in the market can cost you your excellent job; a car accident can take away your beautiful family; a clump of mutating cells can ruin your perfect health; and so on. We tend to think that we can plan ahead to prevent such things or, at the very least, to mitigate their effects when they happen, but, realistically, we know that there’s nothing that can be done to prevent all (or even most) such cases.
The problem, then is that if the good life is simply a matter of attaining the things in life that are good, and if those things are themselves vulnerable to luck, then it seems that the good life itself is a matter of luck. This, in turn, tends to bother people quite a bit since, if true, it suggests that one is more or less impotent with respect to how well one’s life goes. Arguably, only a person who is utterly indifferent to one’s well-being, one’s projects, and one’s life is completely unbothered by this prospect and there are very few people like that. For most human beings the effect on luck will have some troubling effect and its mitigation will be of some concern.
All that being said, the problem can be avoided altogether if first, there is something of value that is immune to luck, and second, if that thing of value is itself something that we can attain and which is substantial enough to form a life around. After all, if there were something of value that is immune to luck but which we couldn’t attain, then our predicament wouldn’t be improved (indeed, knowing about it might make it even worse!). And, if there were some such thing that we could attain, but which were of such negligible value around which someone couldn’t plausibly form a good life, then we’re still in the same boat (“Yes, it’s true, my kids are dead, but I finally saw the perfect shade of red and that can’t be taken away from me” doesn’t paint a picture of the good life to me even if we assume that seeing the perfect shade of red is of some value).
Many people have held that both of the requirements needed to solve the problem are to be found in moral value. The idea that morality is of substantial (if not supreme) value is neither an uncommon, nor an implausible view. The question, then, is whether it is immune to luck as well. Some philosophers–notably Kant, but one can make an argument for Plato as well–have argued that it is. Very simply put, for Kant, morality is a matter of exercising one’s rational nature in the proper way and such an exercise of one’s rational nature is not vulnerable to contingencies of luck. Furthermore, since all people have a rational nature that operates in the same way and to the same degree, all people regardless of circumstance are able to be moral, and hence, to live the good life; regardless of what happens, as long as one remains a person and has a rational nature, one can be moral, and, hence, one can live the good life.
If all this is right, then the problem that the good life can be take away from us due to luck falls to the side. At the very least, we can have a very good life by being moral, and, furthermore, if moral value is the supreme value, then we can get the best life by being moral.
Williams’ primary concern in the part of the paper that I want to talk about isn’t about showing that whether one acts or is even able to act morally is a factor of luck (that’s more Nagel’s aim). Rather, he wants to first focus on the role of justification and the conditions under which one can be justified in taking a course of action. It’s only near the end of the paper that he links together justification with morality. Williams’ stated reason for going this route is that the Kantian view mixes together the notions of rationality, morality, justification, and supreme value in such a way that it has the consequence that whether one is justified in acting cannot be a matter of luck (see below for more detail).
Justify It Box 2: Why does Williams think the Kantian view links morality with justification? This is one of the many frustrating places in which one wishes Williams would explain what he has in mind. I’m not a Kant scholar, and, admittedly, my understanding of Kant is not stellar. However, I believe what Williams has in mind here is something like the following: one figures out the right thing to do by by testing the maxim on which one acts for conformity with the Categorical Imperative. If the maxim passes the test, then acting on it is the right thing to do, and if it is the right thing to do, then, clearly, one is justified in acting upon that maxim since one is always justified in doing the right thing. In this respect, one’s justification for doing x and x being the right thing coincide. Crucially, whether a maxim is in conformity with the Categorical Imperative is entirely a matter of certain of its logical properties and structure, and as such, is a matter that’s entirely independent of anything about the agent herself, or anything that happens or might happen to her. In other words, the maxim fails or passes its test in the rational realm where luck is not a factor. Just as it can’t be matter of luck that 2 + 2 = 4, so it can’t be matter of luck whether a maxim is in conformity with the Categorical Imperative.
If this is the right picture, then it follows that it also can’t be a matter of luck whether one is justified in acting.
The strategy then is to show that whether one is justified can indeed be a matter of luck. If he’s able to show that successfully, and if justification, rationality, and morality are as tightly bound as the the Kantian picture presents them to be, then it seems to follow that rationality and morality will also be vulnerable to luck.
With respect to his methodology, Williams is mercifully clear:
My procedure in general will be to invite reflection about how to think and feel about some rather less usual situations, in the light of an appeal to how we—many people—tend to think and feel about other more usual situations, not in terms of substantive moral opinions or ‘intuitions’ but in terms of the experience of those kinds of situation.
pg. 22
So, he’s going to present us with some unusual cases which will pose problems for the Kantian view of justification he’s attacking, and he’ll argue that we should judge these cases on the basis of more ordinary cases in which our judgements, are, presumably, in agreement (and not because we have some theoretical commitment that makes us have those judgments). To that end he gives us the first of two cases:
‘Gauguin’
Modeled after the real Gauguin, our Gauguin is a creative artist who is considering foregoing certain real and urgent moral commitments in order to live a kind of life that he believes will let him pursue his art. More specifically, we can imagine that he is a married man with a spouse and children who need his support to have a minimally decent life, that he thinks he could be a fantastic painter if he didn’t have to support his family and could devote himself entire to his art, and that it’s impossible for him to achieve success as a painter while supporting his family. He is faced with a choice between two incompatible lives: one in which he supports his family and decisively fails to be a painter, and one in which he tries to succeed as a painter but in which he decisively fails to support his family. Furthermore, he’s someone who sees the demands of morality as important–he realizes that if he were to abandon his family he would be committing a serious moral wrong–but he doesn’t think that these demands are decisive.
We are to imagine that with all this in mind, our Gauguin decides to pursue the life that he holds will allow him to be a great painter and leaves his family. Crucially, in making this decision, he does not know whether he will be successful as a painter or not.
What are we to make of this case?
Williams’ claim is that in Gauguin’s case the only thing that could justify this choice is his success in his endeavor. It’s clear that if he fails in becoming a great painter, then he not only did the morally wrong thing in abandoning his family, but, crucially, that he was not justified in abandoning them when he did. Simply put, there is nothing to be said in favor of his being justified in making his decision the way he made it. However, Williams claims that if he’s successful, then there’s at least some basis for thinking that he was justified in doing what he did–a basis which, to reiterate, he would not have if he fails.
To put the matter another way, if he’s successful, then in response to being confronted with the claim that he was not justified in leaving his family, he can reply with something that has some pull on us; namely, “Yes, but look at the greatness I’ve achieved which would not have been achieved otherwise!” This might not be sufficient to completely exculpate him from being a total bastard (certainly not to his family!), but we’re supposed to have the intuition that it’s at least something which has some weight and which speaks in favor of his action.
Before we delve into whether Williams is right in making these claims it’s important to make note of two points: the first is that given how the scenario is set up, Gauguin does not know prior to making his decision whether he would end up being successful. In fact, he can’t know since whether he is successful is a matter of whether he makes the very decision that he’s deliberating about. Given that this is the case, it’s impossible that his actual success can factor in as a justification for trying to succeed–there simply is no actual success at that point but, at best, only the possibility of success. In other words, the justification of his success is something that can only occur retroactively. Crucially, this is one of the places where the wedge between justification and morality can be inserted.
The second point is that what matters in whether Gauguin is justified is not simply whether he succeeds or fails, but the source of the failure. Williams is explicit that a kind of external failure (e.g. a heavy crate crushing Gauguin’s hands while en route to Tahiti, preventing him from ever painting) would not be sufficient to demonstrate that he was unjustified in leaving. In such a case and others like it, the question is, I believe, essentially supposed to remain an open one since the claim that he could have succeeded had this event not occurred is likewise still open. What decisively shuts the door on Gauguin not being justified, then, is a kind of intrinsic failure of the project; as Williams puts it, it has to be the case not that the project fails but that he fails at the project.
Crucially, whether one Gauguin is the kind of man who really canbe a great painter is a matter of what Williams calls ‘intrinsic luck’. As he puts it: “it is not merely luck that he is such a man, but luck relative to the deliberations that went into his decision, that he turns out to be such a man: he might (epistemically) not have been. That is what sets the problem.” (pg. 25)
Justify It Box 3: What sets the problem?!
I admit, I find Williams’ claim about “luck relative to the deliberations that went into his decision” to be puzzling. The best I can make out of it is that he thinks luck factors doubly in Guaguin’s case. In the first place it’s a matter of luck whether Gauguin just is the kind of person that can be a great painter (see my brief criticism of that claim below); and in the second place that it’s a matter of luck that his very decision hangs on luck about his ability to be a great painter. That is, he’s (un)lucky insofar as whether he’s justified is a matter of something he can only know post facto.
I suppose this can be made sense of though if I’m correct, then, the latter strikes me as a kind of luck of circumstance and the former a kind of luck of character (loosely put–again, see my criticism below). Here, there may be some overlap with moral luck in Nagel’s sense. Specifically, I’m thinking of a case in which a person might fail to do the right thing by virtue of the fact that they have the dual bad luck of being in a bad situation for which they’re internally badly disposed to handle. Thus, one might imagine being unlucky in being the first responder to a car-crash and being unlucky in being naturally too cowardly to provide the necessary help. Why the situational kind of luck should be an intrinsic kind of luck, though, is a mystery to me. It seems more accurate to me that situational luck is extrinsic even if the situation in which I find myself is one in which intrinsic factors weigh heavily.
Alternatively, I suppose Williams could mean that the intrinsic factors are such that they cause one to be in a certain situation which they wouldn’t be in if but for certain matters of luck about who they are. In Gauguin’s case, the situation is the very one of deliberating about leaving his family and it’s caused by the fact that he currently doesn’t know whether he can cut it as a great painter. That is, if he could know that he wasn’t going to be a great painter, then he would never be in the situation in which he has to deliberate about something he can’t be ex ante justified. But he isn’t and in that respect he’s unlucky.
Again, I just find this stuff really hard to parse.
Criticism 1
Williams’ stress on intrinsic luck here makes up my first major criticism. Personally, I find the notion of intrinsic luck–especially with regard to something like artistic talent–to be pretty suspect if only because it seems to entail that things like artistic talent are just ingrained features of the person. Williams seems to hold the view that whether one is a great painter (destined to be one?) is some kind of intrinsic feature that one is either graced with it or not as a matter of luck and which one discovers through the course of their life. Not only is this not very g r o w t h m i n d s e t oriented (joke) but I also find it to be weirdly essentialist in nature. Maybe it’s something that comes of his broadly Nietzschiean commitments about human nature and determinism, but I see no reason to hold that view without something extra to back it up.
In any case, we can set the question of whether being a great painter is written in the stars and focus on a different matter. In particular, there’s tension between Williams’ claim that the only thing that could justify Gauguin is his success and the claim that he’s not unjustified if his project fails as a result of extrinsic luck.
It’s true, the two claims are not obviously inconsistent since not being unjustified does not amount to being justified so it remains possible that the only way to be justified is to succeed. However, the tension can be brought out if we reflect on what it must mean for him to not be unjustified. Williams’ direct quote is: “Irreducibly, luck of this kind affects whether he will be justified or not, since if it strikes, he will not be justified. But it is too external for it to unjustify him, something which only his failure as a painter can do.” (pg. 25) The only way I can make sense of this claim is to hold, as I do above, that the question of whether Gauguin is justified is theoretically still open. It’s not actually open since Williams admits that Gauguin has failed and that because of that failure he can’t be justified. But it’s still in some sense open since he’s not unjustified.
That all seems fine and well, but why wouldn’t he be unjustified? Suppose someone says to Gauguin “You really didn’t make it as an artist cause of all that hand crushing business, huh? In light of that it looks like your leaving your family was completely unjustified.” What would be said in response to make the point that he’s not unjustified? The most obvious answer seems to be that he’s not unjustified because he could have been a great painter if but for the hand crushing. I think this is right, but it looks to me that this means that the possibility of having been a great painter serves as some justification or some reason for claiming that one is justified. Granted, it’s not enough of a justification to count as justifying his action completely (although we should remember that even success doesn’t do this), but it’s enough to push him from being unjustified into not being unjustified.
Justify It Box 4: Aren’t you assuming some stuff?
I explicitly assume two things. First, I assume that the burden of proof is on Gauguin (or Williams) to explain why he’s not unjustified. That is, I assume that the abandoning of his family is pro tanto sufficient to hold that he’s completely unjustified unless he can offer some justification to push in the other direction. This seems like a reasonable assumption that (to stick with Williams’ own methodology) most ordinary people make. Second, I also assume that the shift from unjustified to justified is a matter of offering pieces of justification or reasons that speak in favor of one being justified (and vice versa–to move from being justified to being unjustified is to be presented with reasons that speak against one being justified).
Putting those two assumptions together with the claim that Gauguin is not unjustified because he could have been a great painter amounts to the claim that the possibility of being a great painter is itself a bit of justification for his decision (if, indeed, that is what Gauguin would say in response to his accuser–maybe I’m just completely wrong about that). So, it turns out that it’s not just his actual success that serves as some justification, but also his potential success or the possibility thereof that does too.
This might seem like small potatoes since all it means is that Gauguin now has another piece of justification available to him. However, I think it actually causes big problems for Williams. Let’s assume that Williams is right that if Gauguin were actually successful as a great painter then he would have some justification for leaving his family (more on that below) and that he can’t know if he’s justified ex ante. Even if this is true, it’s simply not true that the justification regarding the possibility of being a great painter can’t be known before making the decision. Indeed, that can be reasonably estimated and on that basis we can judge whether Gauguin is or is not justified in leaving.
Before I get into how we do this (the procedure will be familiar), I should say something about what kind of possibility we’re talking about when we say that the possibility of being a great painter is some justification for Gauguin. Clearly, it’s not some kind of logical, metaphysical, or nomological possibility that’s at play–if that were the case, then there would be justification for almost anything. There would, for example, be some justification for putting drain cleaner in your coffee because there’s some possible world in which it doesn’t kill you. No sane person would take this as any kind of justification. Rather, what we’re talking about is a kind of counterfactual possibility tied to a probability of success; i.e. if the crate hadn’t crushed his hands he would have had a decent chance of succeeding at being a painter or there would have been at least some likelihood of success.
Here, I think Williams is unfairly benefiting from the fact that we know that the real Gauguin really was successful as a painter and that we implicitly smuggle that in. Consider what happens if we mess with the likelihood of success in setting up the example. Suppose we stipulate that our Gauguin has never put brush to canvas in his life, or that instead of painting he wants to leave his family so he could train and beat the world record for the 100 meter dash despite never having run a day in his life. In other words, imagine that his aspirations are entirely unrelated to anything in his life that indicates he would have any success in achieving what he sets out to do–indeed, we might even point to factors that indicate that he’s highly unlikely to succeed (“Gauguin, my dude, beating a world record requires a lifetime of training that you just never had.”)
In these cases it makes sense to think that even if he can’t know whether he’ll be successful in beating the world record he has pretty damn good reason to think that he won’t be able to. This also seems like pretty damn good reason to think that he’s not justified in leaving and not because of any moral considerations, but precisely because he’s very likely to fail. Indeed, we can also have reason to think that he’ll failnot because of some external reasons, but precisely because the evidence points to the fact that he is not the kind of person who can do the thing he sets out to do. That is, we can argue that he’s likely to experience a kind of intrinsic failure. Most importantly of all, we can figure this out before he sets out to make his decision–there’s just not the kind of uncertainty that could only be closed by finding out later whether one is ultimately successful or not.
As stated above, this procedure is a familiar one and we do this kind of reasoning all the time. I might get the idea that I should abandon my studies to pursue a career in country music. In trying to figure out whether I would be justified in making this decision you might very well ask me if, for example, I know how to play an instrument or sing, whether I understand or even like the music, whether I have any ins into the business, and so on. In other words, you might reasonably ask whether I have any reason to think that I’ll succeed in this. When you find out that the answer to all of these questions is ‘no’ you might reasonably say that I’m not at all justified in doing this (and you would be right!).
All this is to say that Williams’ argument relies on the existence of cases in which the only justification that needs to factor into whether one should do something is available only post facto. I’ve been arguing that even in the Gauguin example this isn’t the case and that there’s always some other evidence available prior to making the decision that can settle the question of whether he’s justified in taking off or not.
Criticism 2
Nevertheless, Williams could take my comments aboard and say two things. First, he could claim that an even more schematized version of Gauguin’s case could be made in which we really can’t say that he’s unjustified prior to his making a decision. We might suppose, for example, that the odds are perfectly even that he could be successful or a failure, or that the situation is so ambiguous that it’s just impossible to confidently say one way or the other. I won’t have much to say about this other than that I suspect such cases would be extremely rare; if moral luck regarding justification can only appear at those fringes then I’m not terribly worried.
More importantly, however, he can still insist that even if Gauguin makes his decision to leave while being completely unjustified, if he were to nevertheless succeed he would still have some kind of justification available to him. And he could argue that this is really the important thing to note in this highly schematized example.
(It should be noted that the role of luck here has changed. It now strikes me that in the case that our Gauguin succeeds the luck is precisely in his success. But I’ll set that to the side.)
The question, then becomes whether a success like Gauguin’s really is any justification for having done what he did. Or more broadly, whether post facto justification makes sense. I don’t think it does and I think that it’s pretty easy to see why by looking at cases of negligence. This is my second objection.
Suppose, for example, that I, never having shot a gun in my life, come to think that I can become the world’s greatest marksman. As my first attempt to do this I take an apple and place it on my infant son’s head (don’t worry, I don’t really have any kids) and shoot the apple off. Prior to shooting it, most people, I hope, would think that I am not justified in taking the risk of missing the apple and killing my son (or of even exposing him to that kind of danger). Suppose, furthermore, that I actually hit the apple and my son remains unharmed. In that case I was successful and we can even say that my success is some evidence, however slight, that I am the world’s greatest marksman (after all, I did this on the first try with no practice!). However, I don’t think anyone would think that my success provides any post facto justification for having done what I did.
I might try to defend myself by saying that I have something to say in my defense (viz. that I shot the apple) which I wouldn’t have if I had failed and killed the boy since, in that case, nothing would have justified me. But this strikes me as unconvincing. That I didn’t kill the boy or that I succeeded in shooting the apple does not, in this case, serve as any kind of post-facto justification at all. We would certainly be right to say that I was lucky, but the central claim of Williams’ point is that this kind of luck can act as justification for having made the decision to shoot in the first place. And I simply can’t see why that should be the case.
Crucially, the example with my son, while extreme, is relevantly analogous to Gauguin’s case since I have opted for a choice that neglects pressing moral claims on me by my family in order to do something that exposes that family to serious risk. What’s under discussion is whether success under these conditions provides any justification for deciding in the way I did–Williams argues that the Gauguin case does and I insist that in the case with my son it adds absolutely nothing.
Justify It Box 5: But aren’t there relevant difference here?
It’s true, my example is not fully analogous since one might argue that nothing is gained by my putting my son at risk for my stupid dream of being the world’s greatest sharpshooter and succeeding while something is gained by Gauguin putting his family at risk and succeeding at being a painter. One might also say that the value of art is such that success in that domain does offer post facto justification while success in gun-play does not and that this is where the real difference lies.
This might be right, but this doesn’t strike me as something that Williams would take up. In the first place, this line of thought is almost explicitly consequentialist and Williams was no consequentialist. But even if he would avail himself to this kind of reasoning, I still think one could put pressure on the earlier claim that this kind of justification can only be known post facto since that simply isn’t true if one takes up this line. That is, it’s not the case that we don’t know anything about the value of art such that it can’t factor into our deliberations ex ante; it’s not like we discover upon my successfully shooting the apple off my son’s head that this stunt wasn’t valuable or in Gauguin’s case that art is valuable.
Maybe one would argue that at this point we’re at loggerheads–Williams claims one thing, and I claim another. However, I think more could be said in my defense. In particular, it seems to me that Williams is relying on the fact that people tend to think that if something has been accomplished, then its having been accomplished speaks in favor of it having been done in the first place. But it really does matter whether this way of thinking about the matter–regardless of whether it’s widespread–is a good way of thinking. And I just don’t see don’t see how it could be. Aside from the example I gave, one can construct countless others: the fact that I didn’t kill anyone driving drunk last night does not mean that I was justified in driving drunk in the first place; the fact that I successfully pulled out all my teeth does not mean that I was justified in pulling them out; the fact that the palace coup succeeded is not a reason to think that it was justified; etc. Let’s call the taking of a success in action as speaking in favor of the doing of that action the ‘fait accompli’ fallacy. Given the number of examples that one can generate to demonstrate that this way of thinking is pretty bad, it seems to me that the onus is on Williams to show that the when it is applied to the case of Gauguin this kind of reasoning is not fallacious. In other words, it must be shown that Gauguin’s success really does provide any kind of justification at all without just assuming that.
Now, the obvious rejoinder here is that, again, there’s something that can be said if Gauguin is successful that he wouldn’t be able to say if he failed. This is true, but it won’t cut it. If that ‘something’ that can be said is not a piece of justification (but instead a bit of fallacious reasoning) then the fact that it can be said is irrelevant. Likewise, the fact that one can affirm the consequent in the course of an argument is not a reason to think that that person is arguing well. Crucially, one can’t simply assume that whatever is offered in response to such cases is justification.
Still, it is true that at least sometimes people do commit the fait accompli fallacy and that we do say things like “well, everything worked out alright in the end!” to at least attempt to justify their actions. Why do they do this? I think one reason is to stop criticisms about what could have gone wrong in a situation–it’s no use yelling at me for taking a risk in doing x since it’s all over and what could have gone wrong is in the past now. Clearly, if the thing does go wrong, then one can’t say that one can’t be criticized about what could have happened since it actually happened. This, I think, is the ‘something’ that can be added only if one is successful in what they’re doing. Crucially, this is a move to stop a criticism, but the move itself does not stop criticism by showing that one was or is now justified, but one that relies on showing that further criticism would be fruitless. I think Williams confuses this bit.
Okay, let’s wrap this up. I’ve attacked two of Williams’ claims regarding justification in the Gauguin case: the first focused on the claim that in certain cases justification for one’s actions can only appear retroactively on the basis of whether one ends up being lucky in certain respects. I argued that even in those cases it’s just not true that the only justification is available retroactively and that we have pretty good ways of judging whether someone like Gauguin is justified on the basis of how likely he is to succeed in whatever he wants to do. I think we very frequently judge whether someone is justified in taking on a course of action in precisely this way. The second claim I attacked was the claim that being able to say something upon succeeding in an unjustified course of action provides some kind of justification for having done that action. I argued that this is implausible and that it rests on a bit of fallacious reasoning (what I called the ‘fait accompli’ fallacy). Given that there are plenty of easily constructed counter-examples in which success in taking an action adds nothing to whether one was justified in taking that action in the first place, the burden is to show why it should do this in Gauguin’s case. Finally, I closed with a short argument about what I think is actually going on when people make this fallacy.
Okay, I didn’t actually touch any of the stuff about morality or anything about agent regret. I might come back and do a follow up post at some point if I get bored again.
Justify it Box 6: Why are you writing this? Don’t you have other work to do?
I realize that reading through sixmassiveposts aboutthislittle pamphlet is probably asking too much for anyone who’s…well, sane. So, I thought I would sum up the book in a short, tidy little digestible post along with highlights of things that I found to be particularly interesting. If you want my in-depth takes on specifics, consult those massive posts. Here we go!
Main Argument
The central aim of the pamphlet is to provide an answer to the question “what should the Marxist’s stance to the state be?” Lenin’s answer is unequivocal: the goal of the true Marxist revolutionary should be to smash the bourgeois state and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat which amounts to a pseudo-state during the transition period between Capitalism and Communism. He argues that this is what Marx and Engels themselves advocate for, that this is backed by a proper understanding of Marxism, and that all alternative interpretations are opportunist distortions of scientific socialism.
What is the state?
Following Engels, Lenin’s position is that the state emerges to contain or suppress irreconcilable antagonisms between classes which arise through the division of labor and the distribution of excess production. By moderating conflict, it perpetuates the oppression of one class by another, and is hence, always a tool of the oppressing class.
How and why does the state oppress?
The state is able to function as such a tool because because it has special means of oppression at its disposal that are denied to the lower classes. Specifically, it is the only body that is granted the legitimate use of arms, violence, and imprisonment of individuals. These means of oppression are turned against the dispossessed majority in favor of the elite minority to keep class conflict from erupting into violence and to prevent the majority from taking what the minority keeps from them.
How does this happen? Well, in order for the state to operate, it requires the existence of a functioning bureaucracy peopled with officials who run it and who are placed above and apart from the rest of society. In turn, these officials are quickly bought off by the most economically advantaged class to work in its interests.
What is the fate of the state?
The proletarian revolution will seize the means of production, and, as a result, resolve all class antagonisms, and with that, remove the need for a state. The state will be ‘smashed’ during the revolution, and following that, the people will enter a transition period marked by the dictatorship of the (armed) proletariat during which the state will gradually wither away and disappear.
Will this entail violence?
Necessarily. In the first place, because the state is necessarily violent and will not relinquish its power willingly, overthrowing it and smashing it will require violence (and arms). And in the second place, because all oppression is a kind of violence and the bourgeoisie will have to be oppressed after the revolution, violence will also be necessary (they can, of course, avoid this, by relinquishing their private property and joining the revolution).
What does it mean for the state to ‘wither away’?
It means that the state qua bourgeois state–qua tool of class oppression–is immediately abolished but that a kind of husk of a state run by the proletariat remains in its place to guard against counterrevolution and to keep things running smoothly until the transition period between capitalism and Communism is complete.
Crucially, along with the withering away of the state, democracy will also disappear.
Why would democracy disappear?
Lenin here is speaking of democracy in two different ways. In the first way, he’s speaking of democracy as a kind of codified institution through which the state operates. This is the sense in which, for example, the United States is a democracy since it guarantees the right to vote and elect representatives to a Congress and so on. This kind of democracy will be overcome and disappear with the revolution. It will be so because this kind of democracy was never (and has never been) genuine democracy–it has always benefited some people over others and has never really been guaranteed fully to everyone (a look at the history and present state of the US is enough to confirm that). Rather, this kind of democracy has always been a symptom of bourgeois rule.
The second sense in which Lenin speaks of democracy could be called something like genuine or pure democracy of absolute rule by the people. This won’t disappear (because it’s never existed), but it will be something that can and will only be realized during Communism. For the transitional period of socialism, however, it, too, won’t be in effect. This is because full, genuine democracy applies to literally everyone, and the transitional period will be one of explicitly suppressing the rights of the bourgeoisie in the political arena. This is one sense in which the transition period will be marked by a dictatorship of the proletariat. And, obviously, if one is under a dictatorship, one is not in a democracy.
Once all bourgeois tendencies have been eliminated by expropriating private property and putting it in the hands of the proletariat as common property and socializing the next generation, democracy in the second sense will arrive on the scene.
When is the withering away complete?
This is a matter of several factors: technology, education, and habituation. Lenin holds that the pace of technology is such that it is set to make the running of any and all enterprises a matter of having basic literacy. Once that technology arrives and once the population is educated they will be able to harness the productive forces of capitalism for the good of all people. This period will still be overseen by the dictatorship of the proletariat since people will not be used to living in a way in which everyone governs. However, as a new generation is socialized and grows up under these conditions, its members will learn how to operate without any governance. When that happens, the state will completely wither away.
How long this would actually take cannot be known in advance. However, Lenin seems convinced that the technological advances needed to make this happen are already in place in Western Europe. If communists in that part of the world are able to have a revolution, then they can drastically reduce the transitional period in other countries as they share their knowledge elsewhere. In those places of the world in which the technology is not quite as advanced (i.e. Russia) there can still be a revolution, and there can still be a dictatorship of the proletariat, but, presumably, the transition period between capitalism and Communism will be much longer as the less-advanced countries try to catch up.
How is the state ‘smashed’?
I’ve put forward the argument that ‘to smash’ the state is to deprive it of its essential function–i.e. to smash the state is to prevent it from being a tool of class oppression for the bourgeoisie. This is primarily done by implementing four reforms: arming all the workers, abolishing the standing army, making all officials elected and subject to recall, and lowering their wages to those of working people.
By doing this, any privilege held by state actors will be removed; in essence, it will be impossible to improve one’s lot in life (by being bought off by the bourgeois) by going into state work. Furthermore, as stated before, technological advances of capital organization will make the running of any enterprise (including the state) so simple that anyone could be a state official, so, essentially, anyone and everyone will be capable of doing the work which is now used as means of turning the state into a tool of oppression.
[Translation aside: there’s a distinction in Bulgarian between ‘ Смачкан ‘ and ‘разбит’ where the former is more closely tied to being crushed or smooshed and the latter to destroyed or broken. Both could be arguably translated as “smashed” in English. Something that is crushed may still function in some respect, but something that is destroyed or broken, arguably, can’t. The English ‘smashed’ often implies more of the latter–to smash a vase is to destroy it completely. I wonder if there’s a similar distinction in Russian and if so, whether the original word Lenin uses is closer to ‘crush’ or to ‘destroy’]
What will the future of communism look like?
Impossible to say. The most we can work out is what the transition period of socialism will look like. Part of that picture has already been covered–there will be an armed dictatorship of the proletariat that suppresses the bourgeoisie and which seizes the means of production and makes all previously held private property into common property for the benefit of all; there will be a smashed state that will be peopled by the armed proletariat which will eventually wither away and whose function will be different from that of the bourgeois state.
However, we also learn three more things: first, that the main function of this new state (apart from keeping the interests of capital out) will be to oversee and account for the common goods, and whose task it will be to distribute them to where they’re needed. Second, we learn that the nation will be centralized such that all of its separate states/regions/departments will work towards the same central goal of providing for everyone. And, finally, we learn that with enough time people will get used to living in a world in which everyone governs collectively so that, eventually, even this kind of bureaucratic middle management won’t be necessary.
What about all the people who disagree?
They’re either anarchists, opportunists, or idiots.
What’s the difference between anarchists and Marxists?
The two groups have the same goal of abolishing the state, but whereas the anarchists are focused on simply destroying the state overnight with no plan to put anything in its place and no theory of how the power seized by the revolution will be handled, the Marxists are under no such delusions. Rather, Marxists recognize the necessity of a temporary period during which a smashed state is a practical and theoretical necessity and they offer a detailed plan about what should be done during that period.
In short, anarchists are too utopian and narrowly focused, while Marxists are practical-minded ‘scientists’ of history (or whatever).
Who are the opportunists?
Anyone who claims to be a Marxist but who argues for incrementalism, working within the bourgeois state for reform, or who rejects the need for a violent revolution. They’re opportunists because they either don’t understand Marx (in which case, they’re also likely to be put in the idiot category), or because they do understand him, but are willing to sacrifice the long term goal of Communism for a short-term goal of minor reform.
Who are the idiots?
Pretty much anyone who isn’t a Marxist or who has disagreed with Lenin (includes most of the previous two categories).
What should I do now?
I don’t know, man.
Some Key Takeaways
1: Lenin’s dependence on Marx and Engels
Virtually all of Lenin’s arguments rest on Marx and Engels’ (and here mostly Engels’) theory of the state. If Engels is wrong about the genealogy of the state, or if he’s wrong about its function, then most of what Lenin has to say about why the state must be destroyed and why it must be replaced with a dictatorship of the proletariat fall to the side.
If, for example, the state is not necessarily a tool of class oppression, then it might be possible to figure out under what conditions it ceases to be such. More moderate parties, then, could advocate for these kinds of reforms rather than for an armed insurrection against the state. This might leave them some breathing room on Lenin’s right flank.
Similarly, if it’s possible for the state itself to have its own interests apart from classes, then this might leave some room for opponents on Lenin’s left flank. Lenin is very heavily leveraged in the idea that cutting down the privileges of state functionaries in terms of prestige and financial remuneration is enough to keep the bureaucracy from being a focal point for corruption and class betrayal. However, arguably, he severely underestimates how prestige can still flow to an appointed position in terms of non-material privileges. If this is possible, then the state can still continue to be a tool of oppression–perhaps not one of oppression by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, but, say, one of the state against…well, anyone.
In short, Lenin’s view depends on he (and Engels and Marx) having the precise and correct understanding of how the state works. Little deviations in either direction make big difference to the plausibility of his argument.
2: Lenin’s view of psychology, bureaucracy, and technology
Lenin has some really weird empirical commitments about the complexity of bureaucracy, the nature of technological advances, and the psychology of people in general. They also tend to be pretty simplistic and kind of naive.
One of the assumptions about bureaucracy were touched on in the last section; viz. that it sets people who populate it apart from others by virtue of the financial opportunities it provides them and by virtue of the social advantages they gather thereby. However, he also assumes 1) that the complexity of bureaucratic tasks is a function of the amount of suppression needed, such that a very complex bureaucratic machinery is needed in order to suppress the majority by the minority (and conversely, that a very simple machine is needed for the majority to oppress the minority), and 2) that the complexity of bureaucratic tasks decreases as technological advances increase.
Both of these claims strike me as suspect. I suppose there’s some sense in which 1) might be correct insofar as a jail that houses 1 million people needs a much more complex infrastructure than one that houses ten people. But much more is needed to make that into a general claim regarding state bureaucracy.
Regarding 2), the only sense in which I can see it as unquestionably true is also the most trivial one. If we assume that the tasks that need to be done in the present are the only tasks that will ever need to be done, then it’s true–it’s much easier to do a census in the present day than it was a hundred years ago. But it seems obvious that new bureaucratic tasks constantly arise along with advances in technology. What Lenin needs is the further claim that we will eventually get to a point where the progress of technology will necessarily outpace the need for new bureaucratic tasks. But I haven’t seen an argument for that claim, and I’m not sure what it would look like (maybe some people who work in AI have a better sense of how that could happen).
His views on technology are similarly bizarre since they, too, assume a kind of unbounded frontier of possibilities and go hand in hand with his views on the nature of bureaucracy. I suppose they’re a bit more plausible given things like Moore’s Law of processing power, but I’m still skeptical that the problems that we face will always have a technocratic solution. Of course, Lenin’s claim is not that this will always be the case, but rather that the problems he faced in 1916 already had a technological solution that was available at the time. Nevertheless, the problem remains just in case there is a time in the future during which there is a problem that is not solvable through technological advances. This could happen if, as mentioned, there are certain specific problems that outrun the advance of technology, but also if there are other problems that are independent of technological solutions. Such problems may very well exist, and, as someone who’s steeped into a certain tradition of philosophy, I’m inclined to think that they do exist. Now, that by itself doesn’t show a fatal problem with Lenin’s view–maybe those problems aren’t important–but that has to be argued for and defended.
Finally, I’m also really skeptical about Lenin’s views of psychology. In essence, Lenin is a pure behaviorist about human psychology. He holds that anyone who has been socialized under certain conditions will accept those conditions as acceptable and come to see them as normal. While I do think that this view is closer to the truth about human psychology than, say, a view that claims there are substantial innate and immutable ways of thinking, I do think that the pure behaviorist view he has in mind (and upon which the future of Communism rests) cannot possibly be right. The big question, then, is whether the ways in which I think it’s wrong are at odds with the long-term plan Lenin envisions.
Here, I’m not exactly sure what to say. I don’t think that human beings are the blank slate that Lenin presents them to be. However, that doesn’t mean that I think the kind of transformation that Lenin takes to be necessary for Communism is impossible. Rather, I think if it’s possible, it’s going to take much longer than a generation or two to achieve. Human psychology is malleable, but it has a long shadow.
This, however, puts a certain amount of pressure on Lenin’s vision. Part of what makes his vision palatable is the fact that the transition from capitalism to Communism is, at least in theory, one that doesn’t have to be horribly painful (or long). If the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary, then, at the very least, it can also be mercifully brief. If the bourgeoisie doesn’t put up much of a fight, if the technology catches up pretty quickly, and if we’re able to socialize the next generation fairly quickly, then we’re looking at fifty years max. However, if all of these things take much longer…then things begin to look quite differently. Many people would be willing to work towards a future that their children can live for, but how many of us are so structured to suffer three, four, five (etc.) generations of a dictatorship of the proletariat for the promised land? Of course, the deal is made more palatable the sweeter that land of milk and honey is made to be, but there are limits…
(Consider that the return of Christ was supposed to happen within the first believers’ lifetime. Yet, 2000 years later they’re no closer to getting their messiah…)
3: Lenin’s urgency and his focus on creativity
I’ve been pretty hard on Lenin so far, but one of the most interesting and admirable things about his thought is just how aware he is of the urgency and the importance of the historical moment he finds himself in. Part of what’s so powerful about his writing is that he’s not interested in finding a way to compromise and collaborate with others. Rather, he has a certain vision that he not only defends, but on which he’s willing to act.
One of the most moving parts of the pamphlet is when he castigates his opponents who, ostensibly, agree with him about the evils of the capitalist mode of production, yet who remain wringing their hands, paralyzed by the fact that the ultimate end of the revolution remains undefined. If Lenin has convinced me of anything, it’s that, on the one hand, the revolution is not a matter of perfect rational planning that simply dictates action from start to finish; and, on the other hand, that this is not a reason not to fight for it. In that respect, he touches on something that will be picked up in France a few years later: to not make a choice is itself a choice; if you are not promoting the revolution, then you’re promoting the status quo (in saying this I don’t mean to imply that the French have a monopoly on this idea–Thoreau’s civil disobedience is a shadow of this, and I’m sure there are other, older texts that support it). In these cases, it matters what you choose, and that you choose–what happens may vindicate you and absolve you, but that’s not something you’ll be able to figure out a priori (Williams also looms in the background here, but, despite the fact that I love him, he, too, does very little but regurgitate old ideas for an analytic audience in a very British way).
Aside from that, I also found it quite interesting that much of Lenin’s plan relies on the fact that the future is something that we have to build together. Despite the fact that so much of Marxism (and Marxism-Leninism) is grounded in this deep belief of uncovering the logical course of history scientifically, it’s important to note that this claim, too, has limits. Namely, we can’t figure out what the Communist future will be like because what that future looks like will have to be something that we negotiate in terms that are not yet available.
In a sense, this is something that is almost trivial. Imagine asking the very first thinkers who were working on breaking the bonds of feudalism to explain what life would be like in 2019. What could they tell you about the problems that we face today? Nothing! Why should be expect more from a guy writing in the 19th century? Why should we expect more from anyone past a certain point? From this perspective, intellectual modesty shouldn’t be that impressive. Yet…
(I know that there are people who still harbor the idea that the secrets of our present predicament are to be found in Plato, Christ, Hobbes, or, God help them, Adam Smith. They think that these thinkers had everything figure out and that our biggest problems rest in how far we deviate from their original thought. Maybe the Christians have something there since they’ve got omniscience built into their guy’s theory, but I pity the rest. At least Marx had the sense to say that he can only see so far…)
This focus on the uncertainty and the need for human collaboration and creativity in the face of that uncertainty is something that I think tends to get pushed aside when discussing a figure as forceful and commanding as Lenin. Still, I think this was a central part of how he understood what he was fighting for, and it’s an important part of how we should understand him.
4: Historical Cohesion
Finally, I think there’s something of value in the fact that one can get a much better understanding of the history of the Soviet Union through Lenin’s theoretical commitments. Philosophical question aside, reading The State and Revolution has given me a much better understanding of why events during the Russian revolution happened as they happened.
For example, I completely understand why the Bolsheviks were so insistent on arming the workers given how central the goal of combating the armed state was for Lenin. Likewise, I understand why Lenin was so insistent on wanting the revolution to happen immediately: if all the technology was in place in Germany for the socialist revolution to happen, if all that the proletariat of the world needed to seize the means of production was an example that it could be done, and if Russia was a place in which that revolution could happen, then by God, it better happen quickly! I genuinely believe that Lenin thought that he was on the threshold of a brand new era of new human possibilities and he did everything he could to make sure that he had a hand in crossing that threshold. Similarly, I understand why it was so important for him that once the revolution happened that the rest of Europe also have their own revolution, and I can only imagine how absolutely disappointing it must have been once that failed to happen and just how much creative energy and thought had to go into figuring out what to do next.
Sadly, I also see shades of how the gamble on the world-wide revolution and its subsequent failure lead to some of the excesses of the following decades. I don’t think there’s a direct line from Leninism to Stalinism, but I do think that there’s a reasonable line to be drawn from the failure of Lenin’s predictions to the excesses of Stalinism. That’s not to say that had Lenin lived longer his ideas would have necessarily lead to Stalin. But it is to say that I do see how a failed world-revolution and, crucially, a misunderstanding of the nature of bureaucracy can lead to someone taking absolute power through the bureaucracy which is, in turn, justified through the uncertain nature of how the revolution would proceed.
All that is not to say that Leninism leads to Stalinism, but that I can see the justification of the latter in the understandable human mistakes of the former. This should be seen as no more of an indictment of Lenin than Nazism is of Nietzsche or Al-Qaeda is of Islam. In short, shit’s complicated.
This is the final chapter of TSaR, and, sadly, it makes for a rather anti-climactic one since it ends up being just more internal fighting between different revolutionaries (Lenin never finished the pamphlet since the Russian Revolution broke out while he was writing the final chapter). Aside from that, the other thing of note is that some of the stuff that Lenin says here seems to challenge my earlier understanding of a ‘smashed’ state, so either my understanding is off, or Lenin is being inconsistent. I’ll point to that as it comes up. In any case, for the sake of completion, let’s finish chapter 6!
After this post, I’ll do one extra one summarizing what I take to be the big takeaways from this pamphlet (a kind of reader’s digest version of this first series) and then turn to either reading Mao or Engels’ “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State”.
Chapter VI: The Vulgarization of Marxism by the Opportunists
Plekhanov’s Controversy with the Anarchists
Georgi Plekhanov (or the human personification of ‘harumph!’)
Summary
Ostensibly, this chapter is supposed to be a discussion of how the most prominent theoreticians of Marxism have distorted his teachings. In reality, it ends up being mostly a tirade against Kautsky with Plekhanov getting only this first tiny section covering barely a page.
Lenin’s frustration with Plekhanov is, simply put, that he wrote a pamphlet on ‘anarchism and Socialism’ without bringing up the question of revolution and the role of the state even once. This by itself “is a victory for opportunism” (pg. 125)
Analysis
I have virtually nothing to say on this and it strikes me as pretty damn petty. Maybe more knowledge of Plekhanov’s work would change my mind, but as it stands, the very brief commentary and one-line argument against Plekhanov is pretty lame.
2. Kautsky’s Controversy with the Opportunists
Ol’ Double K
Summary
The bigger target of Lenin’s vitriol is Kautsky, whom Lenin repeatedly accuses of opportunism on the question of the state. Lenin provides several examples of this opportunism. The first is Kautsky’s work against Bernstein’s Premises of Socialism. There, Bernstein seizes on Marx’s claim from The Communist Manifesto that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” to claim that this was a warning from Marx against revolutionary zeal and promoting incrementalism (i.e. “you can’t just seize things, you’ve got to work within the system!”). Lenin has already argued why this is decisively not what Marx meant and that this is a distortion. Kautsky, too, took issue with Bernstein’s interpretation, but Lenin’s problem is that Kautsky’s criticism of Bernstein misses the point. In short, Kautsky’s claim is that Marx meant that one can’t simply lay hold of the state machine, but that this isn’t enough. For Lenin, the fact that Kautsky doesn’t point out the fact that Bernstein is arguing for the very opposite of Marx’s point is tantamount to a fundamental concession to Bernstein, and, hence, a massive distortion of doctrine.
A second example of Kautsky’s opportunism can be found in his pamphlet, The Social Revolution. Here, again, Lenin says Kautsky avoids the question of the state. The problem here is, once again, the fact that Kautsky doesn’t make explicit what the proletariat needs to do in the revolution. “By avoiding this question, Kautsky in practice makes a concession to opportunism on this most essential point, although in words he declares stern war against it and emphasizes the importance of the ‘idea of revolution’ (how much is this ‘idea’ worth when one is afraid to teach the workers the concrete lessons of revolution?), or says ‘revolutionary idealism before everything else’, or announces that the English workers are now ‘hardly more than petty bourgeois.'” (pg. 130). In essence, Lenin’s claim is that Kautsky’s arguments amount to opportunism by omission.
More concretely, Lenin also takes issue with Kautsky’s remarks on the nature of bureaucracy. In short, Kautsky thinks that it’s impossible to do without bureaucracy in certain contexts, that, consequently, bureaucracy is inevitable, so that part of the tasks of the proletariat is to take over that bureaucratic machinery.
This, as we know, is not Lenin’s view. It is not the case that the proletariat simply takes over the bourgeois bureaucracy and makes sure that it works in the interest of the workers. Rather, it smashes and rebuilds the machinery such that it preserves a semblance of management while at the same time eliminating bureaucracy by making sure that, in essence, everyone performs the function of a bureaucrat (“all shall become ‘bureaucrats’ for a time and that, therefore, nobody may be able to become a ‘bureaucrat’.” pg. 131). In essence, what will be removed is bureaucracy as a kind of class apart from society while preserving the bureaucratic functions that make operation of enterprises possible.
The mistake that Kautsky makes, claims Lenin, is not understanding the difference between bourgeois parliamentarism and proletarian democracy; the former “combines democracy (not for the people) with bureaucracy (against the people)” while the latter “will take immediately steps to cut bureaucracy down to the roots, and which will be able to carry out these measures to the end, to the complete abolition of bureaucracy, to the introduction of complete democracy for the people.” (pg. 132) In essence, this amounts to “the same old ‘superstitious reverence’ for the state, and ‘superstitious belief’ in bureaucracy.” (pg. 132)
Finally, Lenin discusses Kautsky’s pamphlet, The Road to Power, which, while an improvement in comparison to the previous pamphlets insofar as it takes seriously the arrival of a new era of revolutions, still displeases Lenin. More specifically, what angers him is still the perpetual fact that although Kautsky makes a big deal about talking about revolution, he never actually picks up the question of the state as it relates to this forthcoming revolution. Thus, Lenin summarizes his frustration with Kautsky as follows:
German Social-Democracy, in the person of Kautsky, seems to have declared: I adhere to revolutionary views (1899), I recognize, in particular the inevitability of the social revolution of the proletariat (1902), I recognize the advent of a new era of revolutions (1909). Still, I am going back on what Marx said as early as 1852 now that the question of the tasks of the proletarian revolution in relation to the state is being raised (1912).
Lenin, The State and Revolution pg. 133
Analysis
There’s more in this section than in the previous section on Plekhanov, but here, again, I’m afraid more knowledge of Kautsky’s work would be needed to understand the validity of Lenin’s arguments.
Two things are worth pointing out though. In the first place, granting that I don’t have the full context, I find Lenin’s argument of opportunism by omission unconvincing. Just because a particular line of argument isn’t pursued in a discussion does not mean that the person who omits this line of argument doesn’t believe it or disavows it. One tends to tailor one’s arguments to the audience that one is addressing and to the topics that are most relevant to the discussion at hand. Since that’s the case, I think relatively little can be gathered from the fact that Kautsky doesn’t bring up exactly the points that Lenin thinks are important in criticizing Bernstein. The most that can be read from this, I think, is that Kautsky didn’t think Lenin’s argument was the most relevant or important thing to consider, but that’s about it. Lenin is making the asshole mistake of assuming that if his opponent doesn’t explicitly make the same point that he does, then the opponent can’t possibly understand or agree with that point.
Now, of course, Lenin’s claim would likely be that Marx’s lesson is so simple and so clear that anyone who claims to be a Marxist can’t fail to grasp what Lenin has grasped without being disingenuous or misinformed. But that strikes me as uh…implausible. There’s very little in Marx that’s just that obvious.
The second thing to note is that this section poses a challenge to my understanding of what it means to ‘smash’ the state. I’ve been arguing that Lenin has been using the term so far in a technical sense: to smash x is to deprive x of its primary function. This interpretation let me make sense of some of the claims that Lenin was making earlier in the pamphlet. Yet, here, we have Lenin making claims like the following:
The workers, having conquered political power, will smash the old bureaucratic apparatus, they will shatter it to its very foundations, they will destroy it to the very roots; at they will replace it by a new one, consisting of the very same workers and office employees, against whose transformation into bureaucrats the measures will at once be taken which were specified in detail by Marx and Engels
Lenin, The State and Revolution, 133
Notably, Lenin here isn’t talking about the deprivation of the function of the old state machinery, but explicitly about its complete destruction and its replacement by a new machinery. And that’s in complete odds with my standing hypothesis. I suppose that there is a sense in which my reading is still compatible with this quote insofar as one might think that to remove the function of the state just is to “shatter it to its very foundations” and insofar as the building up of the new machine just is running a machine that has a different function. But I’m skeptical. It’s also possible that Lenin is just inconsistent in how we talks about the destruction of the state, but this, too, would be surprising (or embarrassing) given how central of a theme this is in the pamphlet.
In short, I’ll have to revisit why I was so convinced of my initial take before I make a final judgment on this.
3. Kautsky’s Controversy with Pannekoek
A google Image search for “Pannekoek” gives a bunch of pictures of pancakes
Summary
Finally, Lenin picks up a left challenge to Kautsky from Pannekoek (a left communist who ran with Luxemburg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonie_Pannekoek) who argued that the task of the proletariat is not simply to take the instruments of state power but to completely destroy the existing state.
In response, Kautsky claims that “up to now the difference between the Social-Democrats and the anarchists has been that the former wished to conquer state power while the latter wished to destroy it. Pannekoek wants to do both.” (pg. 135; Lenin quoting Kautsky). This is doubly frustrating for Lenin because, as we’ve seen, this is not what he takes to be the difference between anarchists and socialists, and, furthermore, because this kind of response amounts to opportunism on behalf of Kautsky.
Lenin once again reminds us of the difference between Marxists and anarchists. In the first place, both aim at completely abolishing the state but the former know that this can’t be done without some transition period, while the latter simply aim to get rid of the state overnight. In the second place, Marxists understand the need to substitute a new state machinery while destroying the old machinery while the anarchists offer no guidance as to what to put in its place or how to wield revolutionary power once they have it. And in the third place, Marxists “demand that the proletariat be prepared for revolution by utilizing the present state” while anarchists do not.
In essence, by mincing words and equating ‘conquest’ of the existing state power with the wielding of a simple majority within the state rather than with a complete destruction of the state, Kautsky abandons Marx and retreats to what’s most advantageous at the moment; i.e. advocating for a kind of simple seizure of state power within the existing system.
Kautsky’s reply is in essence a return to the previous claim regarding the necessity of the bureaucracy and of officials. If even the SD party needs officials, then it’s simply ridiculous to claim that, given the current state of affairs, the opposition from the party should be one that demands their removal or the destruction of bureaucracy. To argue otherwise (I take it given his earlier comments re: anarchy) is to advocate an anarchist position and not a Marxist one.
To Lenin this is simply a trick. The question is one of revolution and its relation to the state and in Kautsky’s responses there is simply no mention of revolution at all.
The point is not at all whether the “ministries” will remain, or whether “committees of specialists” or some other institutions will be set up; that is quite unimportant. The point is whether the old state machine (bound by thousands of threads to the bourgeoisie and permeated through and through with routine and inertia) shall remain, or be destroyed and replaced by a new one.Revolution consists not in the new class commanding, governing with the aid of the old state machine, but in this class smashing this machine and commanding, governing with the aid of a new machine.
Lenin, The State and Revolution, pg. 137-138
It’s true, claims Lenin, that we don’t get along without officials even in the party, but this is because the conditions of capitalism make it such. Once the revolution is complete we will be able to do without such a class, precisely if we take the steps that Marx and Engels say were shown in the actions of the Commune. If it seems as though bureaucracy is necessary it’s only because capitalism has created this illusion–once socialism is on the scene this illusion will disappear since (to repeat the perennial refrain of the pamphlet) anyone and everyone will be capable of governing and anyone and everyone will become used to living with no one governing.
Both the opportunist and the anarchist misunderstand this point. The opportunists shy away from the task of revolution and come up with excuses for why revolution must be curtailed and held back; the anarchist embraces the revolution and the destruction of the state but doesn’t care at all about any of the concrete problems that must be solved in order to do that or what is to replace the destroyed state. The true Marxist, of course, navigates the path between both of these by not only embracing the revolution, but also understanding the minutia and details needed to make it happen.
Thus, Lenin ends by noting that there must be a decisive break with both opportunists and anarchists and an embrace of the only true and correct path towards socialism.
[There are some closing remarks about other challenges from the right, but they neither seem important, nor fully fleshed out to warrant discussion]
Analysis
What’s been said in the last two sections can be repeated here. In the first place, I would need to know more about the particular disagreement between Kautsky and Pannekoek to weigh in on whether Kautsky is being an opportunist or whether Lenin is just being wildly uncharitable. I should say that the evidence Lenin musters here is slightly more convincing since he actually brings in some positive claims from Kautsky against which he argues rather than inferring opportunism through omission. However, perhaps because I have very strong reservations about Lenin’s own views on the nature of bureaucracy (ones I’ve brought up over and over again), I’m leaning more in favor of Kautsky here. In short, I’m just not convinced that some kind of hierarchical organizational structure isn’t necessary regardless of the conditions under which the organization exists. Lenin’s claim appears to be that the very nature of how people operate in groups changes in the socialist society such that it doesn’t require any mediation. That may very well be the case, but, as I see it, the evidence for that claim is nothing short of a firm commitment to a kind of utopian future. But maybe I’m just being an opportunist :p
Chapter V: The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State
Lenin working hard at his West Wing fan fiction
Presentation of the Question by Marx
Summary
Lenin begins my noting that Marx sometime speaks of the “future nature of the state of communist society” which has made some people think that, unlike Engels, he believes that there will be a future communist state. According to Lenin this isn’t the case and Marx and Engels have precisely the same view on how the state will wither away after the revolution. The only difference between the two authors is that Engels was interested in directly showing Bebel that he shouldn’t be concerned with the state at all and thus addressed the question regarding the state directly. Marx, on the other hand, was more interested in the question about how the future communist society would develop, and, as a result, only makes passing remarks on the withering away of the state.
Thus, Lenin turns to how Marx attempts to answer that question. There, we learn two things. First, we learn that the answer will be one that’s rooted in scientific facts and reasoning (and hence it will not be utopian). Since that’s the case, and since we can’t study future subjects scientifically, we can only make inferences on the basis of what we can study scientifically in the moment. More specifically, we know that it’s capitalism that gives birth to Communism, so we can infer some claims about what the future will be on the basis of what we know through our study of the present.
In turn, what we know currently is that what all modern-day capitalist states have in common is that they’re all based on modern bourgeois society. Since the future of communism depends on what things will be like once that society is dead, the question becomes one of “what transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence that are analogous to present function of the state?” (Lenin quoting Marx, 102).
Crucially, for Lenin this signifies that Marx is committed to the necessity of a period of transition from capitalism (the bourgeois society) to communism (the post-bourgeois society). The importance of this claim is not specified here.
Analysis
If I haven’t made it clear before, I find Lenin to be a pretty irritating writer. This is one of the times in which I find it very difficult to work out what he’s trying to get at and how he thinks that what he’s written is making the point he wants to make.
Given how the section opens, Lenin’s overarching goal must be to demonstrate that Engels and Marx were in lock-step regarding the role of the state and that both of them believed in a the “withering” hypothesis. That much is clear. It’s also clear that Lenin thinks that Marx’s commitment to this hypothesis has to be read between the lines of what he says regarding the transition period between capitalism and communism. The answer will be an indirect one that will be provided on an examination of this question.
However, what we see is, as noted, a section about how this answer must be given scientifically (which is all well and good, but granting that doesn’t add to anything like an argument), and that the existence of a Communist future entails an end to the current bourgeois state. And neither one of these things is sufficient to show the overarching goal that Lenin sets up before.
The most reasonable suggestion seems to be that a recognition of the fact that Communism comes after the death of bourgeois society is tantamount to a recognition of a transition period. Why recognizing a transition period is improtant isn’t clera yet, but the point is at least sensible (though, it seems to me that it shouldn’t be overstated). If a caterpillar has transformed into a butterfly, then there must have been some transition period between caterpillarhood and butterflydom; i.e. the chrysalis stage. More generally, it seems true that for any x that becomes a y, there is some time during which x is becoming y that can count as its transition period. This holds even when we’re talking about crossing the border between two countries (the transition period there is just the time it takes for you to cross the particular checkpoint or imaginary border that separates the two countries) as well as transformations of society. If society x is to become society y, then there has to be some time z that counts as the transition period between x and y.
Perhaps in light of this Marx’s remarks are to be read as follows: don’t ask me about the future of Communism–I can’t tell you about that. The only thing that I can tell you is that between the present and that time there will be some transition time and given that this is the case, I can tell you some things about what that transition time will be like because I can at least work that out on what I know scientifically about the present state of affairs from which this transition period is to be born. And I answer that question scientifically by looking at what state functions are currently in place, and which ones will come to be unnecessary.
This, too, is fine, but, again, it remains puzzling why Lenin sees it as showing that Marx and Engels were in agreement about the withering away of the state.
Arguably, Lenin’s argument would be complete if he can show that Marx thought that transition period just would be what Engels describes as the withering away of the state. However, this hasn’t been shown yet! In other words, Lenin seems to have only set up the question by establishing that Marx makes room for a transition state. But noting that as a matter of conceptual necessity there will be some transition period tells us nothing about what that transition period will be like. Consequently, we can’t possibly think that Marx and Engels are in agreement just yet.
So, perhaps that piece of the argument is forthcoming…hopefully.
Apart from that, there’s something odd about the way Lenin describes Marx’s reasoning. Namely, it’s not at all clear to me that the way to figure out what the transition period will be like for a transition from x to y is a matter of figuring out what functions of x remain in existence. Consider the following (I hope) analogous example to the quote from Marx: it is clear that there is a difference between my being alive and my being dead and that, consequently, there must be some period between the two in which I go from being alive to being dead. Let’s call that period ‘dying’. Should we then say “The question then arises: what transformation will the body undergo in death? In other words, what bodily functions will remain in existence that there are analogous to present functions of the living body?” Is this how we learn about dying? Maybe, but it seems like a bizarre way of looking at the matter. The same can be applied for the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly–one doesn’t look at what functions of the caterpillar are preserved in the cocoon to understand the chrysalis!
I can make some sense of this by noting that one might reasonably make some inferences about what must be going on with the chrysalis if one knew what features the caterpillar has, what features the butterfly has, and then by inferring what it must take for that transformation to happen (thus, one might reason that the transition period is one in which wings are grown). So maybe this is what’s going on: we know that currently we have states based on bourgeois society and we know that in the future there will be no bourgeois society. Thus, we infer about what it would take for bourgeois society to be removed. But it’s still not at all clear to me that we learn about this by looking at what functions of the present state are retained and which ones are removed. Rather, what that approach does at best is give us some constraints about what kind of speculations we’ll allow (though these constraints will be loose! Perhaps the state becomes superpowered and then votes its way out of existence! Perhaps all people who know about the state are zoomed away by aliens! Perhaps there’s a withering away… and so on). In any case, I don’t feel I have a good grasp of things here and Lenin isn’t making it easier for me.
He really does look quite a lot like Leonardo di Caprio here
2. The Transition from Capitalism to Communism
Summary
The second begins with an important quote from Marx regarding this transition period:
Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Lenin quoting Marx, The State and Revolution, 102
[Note: this quote is from Marx’s critique of the Gotha Program]
Lenin claims this remark is the conclusion of a scientific analysis based on observations applying to current society and that the claim itself is an acknowledgement that there must necessarily be a political transition period without which the achievement of Communism would be impossible. The purpose of the state during that period can only be that of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
The question, then, becomes what the relation of the proletariat in this dictatorship role is to democracy. The answer is laid out in the Communist Manifesto: “to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class…to win the battle of democracy.” (103) In practice, this means a decisive rejection of the kind of democracy-in-name-only that exists in capitalism. In order to win the battle of democracy, capitalist democracy must be rejected.
Crucially, for Lenin this doesn’t mean a kind of simple lifting of restrictions so that we get “greater and greater democracy”. Rather, it means precisely instituting the dictatorship of the proletariat. Why? Because–and here I quote in full:
the resistance of the capitalist exploiters cannot be brokenby anyone else or in any other way. And the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the moneybags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that where there is suppression, where there is violence, there is no freedom and no democracy.
Lenin, The State and Revolution, 105
In short, there can be no straightforward expansion of democracy because if the revolution is to be successful, there must be active restriction of democracy for some (the bourgeoisie) and an active expansion for others (the proletariat). And if there’s not a kind of uniform expansion then we really are talking about a kind of dictatorship in which some people gain some rights and others have theirs taken away.
This is what happens to democracy in the transition period. The ‘bad’ democracy of the few under capitalism will be smashed and a ‘new’ democracy of the people will be introduced.
When this transition period is complete and full Communism has arrived we get the wonderful picture of true, unrestrained democracy without exception. At that point the state will wither “owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse…without force, without compulsion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for compulsion which is called the state.” (106)
Before that can happen–indeed, so that that can happen–oppression of some groups (viz. the bourgeoisie) is still necessary. And hence, a state as a machine of oppression is necessary as well. But once the transition period in which this necessity remains is over–once all class differences have been destroyed–that necessity no longer holds, and the state disappears.
Interestingly, this machine, when taken in the hands of the majority will not be a complex one. Much complexity is needed to keep the majority suppressed by a minority, but very little is needed to keep a minority suppressed by the majority. In fact, it’s so simple that nothing more than a mass arming of the organized proletariat.
Lenin ends this section by noting that he’s not a utopian and he knows that the arrival of communism does not mean that there won’t be individual excesses or violations of social norms. In short, Communism won’t solve every conflict. But Lenin does think that the problems that remain will not be such as to require the complex specialization of a state.
Analysis
Lenin is moving too quickly at the beginning. He is using the quote from Marx to argue that achieving communism is impossible without a dictatorship of the proletariat, but nothing so strong as a necessity claim can be immediately read from that quote. How does he get to there? The answer seems to be that the necessity claim must rest in the correspondence between the social and political revolutions. Simply put, if the social revolution necessarily requires some transition period, and if that social transition period necessarily comes with an accompanying corresponding political transition period, then there’s a necessary political transition period as well.
I suspect that Lenin is also trading on the assumption that the corresponding transition periods must occur concurrently. That is, the correspondence that he’s speaking of isn’t one of correlation but of simultaneity (or something close to simultaneity): the social revolution occurs and its completion requires an accompanying political revolution with its own transition period.
But it’s not clear why this is the case. One could imagine a social transition period that comes about with a corresponding political transition period which follows it (or precedes it) rather than occurring concurrently with it. In such a scenario, the social revolution occurs first, and then the political one happens. But if such a temporal split can happen, then it seems possible for capitalist society to transition to a Communist society with a bourgeois state, and then institute a dictatorship of the proletariat with regards to the state during that transition period. This possibility is consistent with Marx’s quote (though I’m skeptical it’s what Marx meant), but it is clearly inconsistent with what Lenin is pushing at. For Lenin’s purposes, it seems that the two transition periods must occur at the same time such that the social revolution demands the institution of a political revolution of a certain kind.
The argument for this, as we see, has to do with the claims we’ve seen made earlier (and later in the section) about the function of the state. In short, if the function of the bourgeois state is to wage class warfare on the side of the bourgeoisie and if the social revolution cannot succeed so long as the state has this function, then the success of the social revolution itself requires a political revolution–i.e. a smashing of the state.
I also want to make note of Lenin’s remark at the end of the long quote above. Crucially, part of why there can’t just be an unqualified expansion of democracy is because there are a certain group of people (the capitalists) who must be suppressed in this transition period. And if there’s a suppression of that group, then there is no democracy for that group. But it is precisely that group that was holding the reigns of the existing democratic process. In other words,there can’t be a pure expansion of democracy because it’s necessary that we actually restrict the democracy of those who were in charge; we’re not merely granting the privileges that they had to others, but are actively stripping those privileges from some and giving them to the poor. That, of course, is a dictatorship and that is precisely the change that democracy undergoes in the transition period.
I made a big deal of stressing both of these points here because they both lead us back to the familiar fact that so much of Lenin’s arguments ultimately boil down to certain commitments about the nature of the state. Why is a dictatorship of the proletariat necessary? Because without it the state remains a tool of oppression. Why must the dictatorship of the proletariat occur concurrently with (rather than following) the social revolution? Because without it the state as a tool of oppression will roll back on the social revolution. Seemingly every road points back to a fundamental commitment to the state as a monolithic entity with a singular purpose: to oppress the working classes for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. This is something tantamount to conceptual bedrock for Lenin and most of his arguments succeed or fail depending on whether or not the claim is true.
Third, the end of the section gives us yet another insight into Lenin’s view of psychology, sociology, and history. Unsurprisingly, his remarks seem to suggest that he thinks the complexities of modernity are primarily due to class antagonisms. The picture he paints is of people who naturally know how to get along and who can live together simply on the basis of simple, clearly observable and clearly learn-able standards. Conflicts arise even under these conditions, but there’s a kind of simplicity to life in those settings that renders those conflicts easy to handle. It is only with the introduction of classes, oppression, and the specialized systems and tools necessary to oppress that social life becomes so difficult. Lenin seems to be completely convinced that should these complicating factors be removed, the simplicity of life will return. And here we might be skeptical…(aside: Nietzsche thought that the introduction of Christian introspection made life both more interesting and also ruined a lot of really good stuff, but he was under no illusion that getting rid of Christianity would get rid of our new skill of introspection. That bell can’t be un-rung. As a result, he thought we needed a radical, bold, creative new value system and not a return to the Greeks. There’s no retreat to the past here–not so, it appears, for Lenin…)
Finally, it’s worth noting that there’s still a hole left in the argument. Recall, we were anticipating that the transition period that Marx is concerned with will be precisely the transition period that Engels refers to with respect to the withering of the state. However, we now find out that the withering of the state only occurs after the transition period of the dictatorship of the proletariat. So, it’s still not clear that Marx and Engels are precisely in agreement. That being said, this might seem to be a minor point if we grant that they both eventually come to think that there’s going to be some period in time during which the withering of the state occurs. I’m not sure where I land on that primarily because Lenin is really sparing with quotes from Marx about the state withering away (he returns to Engels at this point) and the quote he starts the section with only talks about the necessity of a dictatorship of the proletariat–that dictatorship may be necessary even if the state doesn’t wither away!
“What am I even doing here? I could be at home playing Call of Duty…”
3. The First Phase of Communist Society
Summary
Because the initial Communist society will be one that has grown out of capitalism it will initially be marked in its first stage by the characteristics of the society that produced it. It will, as Marx puts it, bear the birthmarks of capitalism. This is the first, lower stage of communism.
During this stage the means of production will not be in the hands of individuals as private property but will instead be owned collectively by society. The remuneration for each worker will be allotted by a kind of public certificate of work that specifies how much socially-necessary labor an individual has performed. In turn, these certificates can be exchanged for an appropriate quantity of goods from a public store of goods with some amount of labor subtracted for the maintenance of social services and the means of production.
(What Lenin is describing here is virtually like the kind of paper money we use every day with the exception that its value is fixed by labor value rather than by demand of treasury notes, foreign exchange reserves, or exchange rates. I leave it to the economists to figure out if this is at all possible)
Such a society might look like an equitable one (after all, everyone will be given an amount of ‘money’ equal to the amount of labor they put in), but Lenin and Marx disagree for the simple reason that an equal share of a good for people in unequal circumstances doesn’t make for equity. Different people have different needs and different abilities–if I have kids and put in as much work as you who don’t have kids and we both get the same share for the same amount of work, then you in fact get more than I.
This first stage of Communism will still preserve the unjust differences in wealth and, in that respect, will still carry with it the marks of injustice it inherits from its capitalist parent. However, what will be different is that exploitation by individuals will be impossible “because it will be impossible to seize the means of production, the factories, machines, land, etc. as private property.” (111). Full justice will not yet be in place, but the injustice of exploitation will have been eliminated even at this early stage.
Thus, Marx is under no impression that the mere fact that the means of production are in the hands of the proletariat will somehow change all the ways in which people are unequal. Even more importantly, it will notremove “the defects of distribution and the inequality of ‘bourgeois right’ which continues to prevail as long as products are divided ‘according to the amount of labor performed.'” (112)
In other words, the most important thing that happens during this stage is that the products of social labor are not allotted to private individuals (as is the rule under capitalism) but to society as a whole. That part of the ‘bourgeois right’ disappears. However, “it continues to exist in the capacity of regulator (determining factor) in the distribution of products and the allotment of labor among the members of society.” (112)
Notably, for Marx and Lenin this is a defect–things should not be like this–but it’s entirely utopian to think that people can go from having a standard of allotment to absolutely no such standard overnight. Living in this latter way must be learned and the means to do so must be created by the people who have already overthrown the capitalist system. Until that happens, the only standard remains that of the bourgeois.
Crucially, during this stage there is still a partial need for a state. Its role here is to both safeguard the public ownership of the means of production (i.e. make sure that no capitalist sneaks back in!) and to make sure that there’s the kind of equality in labor and distribution talked about here (the imperfect kind). However, insofar as there are no classes in this society, the state will no longer have the function of suppressing any classes, and, consequently, that function will no longer be in play.
Analysis
I rather like this section quite a bit precisely because it refuses to be utopian. Lenin makes it explicit that the expropriation of the means of production is not a panacea for all of society’s ills and that nobody should expect that. Indeed, Lenin’s claims might strike the reader as too modest since the only thing that the seizing of the means of production does is to eliminate the injustice of the exploitation of labor while still preserving some of the other injustices in place.
Of course, in the Marxian framework, it’s just not true that this is modest since it’s precisely class differences and exploitation that cause the intractable social problems throughout history. So, the elimination of the exploitation of labor would do quite a lot!
However, one might still wonder if it would be enough. Consider, for example, that according to Lenin one of the reasons the Communards instituted equal remuneration for all state functionaries was to curb the prestige of such jobs and the ability to leverage that prestige into special privileges that divide society. Now, as long as all such privileges are indeed garnered through one’s salary, then making everyone’s wages equal will, indeed, curb them. However, as Lenin himself says, this isn’t the case and individual differences between different people can have significant downstream effects. If the equal salary that I get for the same amount of work that you get goes only towards supporting me while yours goes towards supporting you and your children, then my salary has more purchasing power since my expenses are less than yours. Consequently, given our initial assumption about how privilege is obtained, the problematic social divisions will continue.
Now, as stated, Lenin acknowledges that this will exist in general, so he’s not ignorant of the phenomenon. This is just part of how the revolution plays out. Nevertheless, he faces a problem insofar as that phenomenon can also appear within the (smashed) state. If it appears there–if the social privileges are either preserved or begin to accumulate within the state, then we’re in trouble. And, as I’ve brought this up before, this is precisely how Stalin worked his way into power by granting special powers and privileges to the bureaucracy.
The problem becomes even bigger if this initial transition period is an indefinite one (as Lenin indeed acknowledges it must be–see the next section). What we have in that situation is…well, an indefinite dictatorship of state functionaries…
Sometimes history makes me sad.
SPOILERS!
4. The Higher Phase of Communist Society
Summary
The higher phase of Communism is marked in the first place by the disappearance of the distinction between mental and physical labor. When that distinction disappears so does the accompanying source of social inequality that treats intellectual labor as more prestigious than physical labor. This distinction, notes Lenin, cannot be removed by mere expropriation of the means of production.
Rather, that expropriation will allow the productive forces to be fully unleashed. Under capitalism these forces are constrained since, presumably, they are not put forward to producing those goods that are socially necessary, but are put forward to producing those goods that are profitable. If this constraint is not in place, then the productive forces of humanity will come to open up all sorts of new possibilities. Crucially, however, the details of just how everything is to come into place are not something that we can know a priori.
But how rapidly this development will proceed, how soon it will reach the point of breaking away from the division of labor, of doing away with the antithesis between mental and physical labor, of transforming labor into “the prime necessity of life”–we do not and cannot know.
Lenin, The State and Revolution, pg. 114
The only thing we know is that the state will fully wither away only when people can truly live according to the old maxim “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” and only when “their labor becomes so productive that they will voluntarily work according to their ability.” (115) At that point it won’t be necessary to keep close accounting track of just how much someone has worked more than someone else since everyone will be able to receive everything that they need.
The bourgeois have called this view of the future utopian and have argued that because one can’t give an explanation of how this latter stage will be put into practice, there should be no move away from capitalism into the first stage of Communism. But this is, according to Lenin, is just ignorance since no socialist has ever “promised” that this latter stage of Communism would arrive with them. And those who have spoken of it were not basing their foresight on the basis of the current conditions and on the current population but simply laying out the black-boxed future conditions that will develop under the first stage of Communism. Thus the charge that the Bolsheviks political plan is useless because they can’t introduce the fully developed communist future into the present is thus not a fair one–it’s simply not the kind of thing that can be introduced at all given the current material conditions!
Thus, we can (scientifically) distinguish between socialism on the one hand–that first stage of communism–from Communism proper (the later stage). On the basis of this distinction we can also say that under socialism there will still be a need for a kind of state since during this stage, as discussed, the ‘bourgeois right’ of the distribution of goods on the basis of labor still remains and the state is still needed to enforce and administer those goods. This, again, is because Socialism grows out of and is marked by the capitalist womb from which it emerges.
The question then becomes what happens to the state during this first stage. Democracy remains and so does a smashed state machinery, now transformed and made more democratic in the hands of the armed masses of the workers. In that stage every person engages in the management and administration of the state and every person can do this (as we have seen before) because capitalism itself has made administration of all bureaucratic functions incredibly easy.
What was said in section three is restated: the goal of this still-functioning armed worker’s state is control of the distribution of goods and the accounting of labor that makes that control equal. Here, Lenin gives us a more detailed picture of what that would look like:
Accounting and control–that is the main thing required for “arranging” the smooth working, the correct functioning of the first phase of communist society. All citizens are transformed here into hired employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers. All citizens become employees and workers of a single nationwide state “syndicate.” All that is required is that they should work equally, do their proper share of work, and get equally paid. The accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the extreme and reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations — which any literate person can perform — of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts.
Lenin, The State and Revolution, 120-121
The practical goal here is to see that “the whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labor and equality of pay.” (121) Once this has been achieved and there’s been sufficient control to make sure that the gentry and the capitalists can’t sneak back in and ruin things, the need for government will disappear. And once that happens, once everyone has internalized the management of the state and has gotten used to living a certain way, the door will be open to the higher stage of communism.
Analysis
Most of what Lenin says here is repetition of what has been said before. Lenin doesn’t really talk about the higher stage of communism as much as he does about the first stage (i.e. Socialism) and we’ve already gotten a taste of what that’s supposed to be like from the third section. Likewise, we’ve already been tracking the fact that Lenin has some interesting presuppositions about epistemology and human psychology with respect to how the socialist future is supposed to come about. I won’t talk about them here again.
What I do want to note, however, are two other things that struck me as interesting. In the first place is an interesting parallel between the way Lenin sees the development of communism and what David Hume says about justice. Paraphrasing Hume, there would be no need for any convention of justice in a world in which there is no scarcity for necessary material goods or in which there’s an unlimited benevolence from individuals. In either a world of plenty or a world of infinite benevolence, we have no need for justice since its conventions are appealed to only to settle questions of private property and the fruits thereof. If there were enough of everything to go around for everyone, then it wouldn’t matter if you got this particular bushel of corn, or that coat instead of me–I would just get some different corn and a different coat from the pile of plenty. Likewise, even if there were scarcity, but every individual were infinitely benevolent and wasn’t thinking about how to maintain one’s welfare for the future, then we could figure out how to ration the scarce goods among us so that nobody starves or goes without clothing.
Many casual (vulgar even!) critics of communism accuse it of being too idealistic because they assume it needs something like the latter view of infinite benevolence. That is, they assume that communism requires that people be more concerned about the welfare of others than their own–that, in short, they become much, much more benevolent than they really are. But it’s clear from what is said here that, if anything, Lenin is much more committed to the former proposition and that, in fact, he thinks that (if not in the present, then in the near future) the productive technological advances employed by capitalism will indeed provide us with a world in which there is no scarcity. This is the world under high communism in which everyone can give and take whatever they need to the extent that they’re capable and this is the final version that Communists are striving for.
I suspect most people are inclined to think that this, too, is a kind of utopian fantasy, but it seems to me that there’s something to be said in its favor when we start to consider that modern farming practices are advanced enough to feed the whole world. One also can’t help but wonder how many resources are spent on different kinds of fighter planes and military adventures that could have been put forward towards other social needs. I don’t know where I stand on this. It’s incredibly easy to find examples of capitalist excesses, but it’s not like central planning was proven to be the most efficient system of distributing goods…
The second interesting thing has to do with Lenin’s reluctance to commit to any specifics about the distant future of communism. On the one hand, I think this is a good thing. One of the things that I find to be of most value in Lenin’s thought is the stress that there are, indeed, very large unknowns looming in the future, that these unknowns cannot be established a priori, and that, at best, settling them is nothing more than pure speculation. On the other hand, I find it somewhat frustrating since the theory of history that Lenin is constantly pushing is one that seems to claim very strongly that the future can be read by understanding how history unfolds. So much of the pamphlet is focused on stressing the importance of a proper “scientific” analysis of history that when we get to this point the fact that nothing can really substantive can be said past a general view of what Socialism will be like seems a bit ad hoc.
I think regardless of where we settle on this, there’s still something interesting in the offing. Suppose for a moment that Lenin is right and that we can’t know anything about what the future of Communism is like and that the best we can do is give a sketch of the first stage of Socialism. What follows from that? The important thing here to note, I think, is that in that case we would still have to make a judgment about how we should live: should we remain in a system that we know but which we recognize as exploitative and which feeds on the misery of the workers and the blood of imperial subjects? Or should we fight for a different system that we have to build ourselves?
This, I think, is what Lenin is frustrated with when he says that “the mercenary defense of capitalism by the bourgeois ideologists (and their hangers-on, like Messrs. the Tseretelis, Chernovs, and Co.) consists precisely in that they substitute controversies and discussion about the distant future for the vital and burning question of present-day politics, viz., the expropriation of the capitalists…” (116). In short, he’s frustrated that the unknown nature of the future of Communism is used as grounds to preserve the current order. The “bourgeois ideologists” imply that if the opposition can’t produce a clear, controversy-free vision of the ultimate goal, then the current order should be preserved. Which is tantamount to endorsing a conservative line. And of those who say they don’t want to preserve the current order–if they do indeed believe in Marxism and the tenets of Marxism–then the specifics of what the Communist future holds should have no bearing on whether or not action is needed now.
It’s important to note that this argument does not generalize. Given certain situations it’s absolutely vital that you know what the end result is like and how you plan to get there before you sign on to a particular course of action. It’s not enough for me to say “listen, if you give me all your life savings now I’ll make sure good things happen for you–I can’t explain how cause a lot of it’s gonna depend on what I come to figure out once I get your money, but you should trust me on this.” If I’m going to convince you to get on board I better have something more to say.
The cases for which the argument does work is precisely those cases in which you’re already in a terrible situation with a clear cause and for which the alternative proposed involves some risk. If you’re trapped in a burning building you shouldn’t refuse to leave because the firefighter who’s come to rescue you can’t explain how you’re going to recoup your loses after the fire. Nor should you try to work with the fire to preserve your most cherished possessions. Rather, you should just leave the damn house and figure out the other stuff as it comes up! Arguably, this is precisely the kind of situation that Lenin believed the Socialists of his time were in: they knew the house was set on fire by the bourgeois state, yet, here is comrade such and such who’s trying to talk with the arsonists and work with them to save the house.
The problem, of course, is that it’s not equally obvious to everyone that the house really is on fire. Political and social dangers are never that universally and unambiguously obvious. We might see them as they apply to others, but we rarely see their connection to us. As long as we fail to do that it’ll only be rational to think that things aren’t as bad as they could be, that there’s still more time and fix them and to work within what’s already known rather than venture out into the uncertain.
In order to recognize such dangers one has to learn (or re-learn) how to interpret one’s situation; you have to learn to recognize what’s killing you as something that’s killing you. And that’s not an easy thing to do when, let’s face it, life goes on quite comfortably from day to day. Of course, ideology plays a big role here since, to a large extent, it forms the interpretive framework through which we make sense of such events as dangerous or not. How could an economic system be causing climate change? Sure, California’s on fire, the Caribbean is constantly hit by the biggest storms we’ve ever seen, and every month is the hottest month on record, but what’s that got to do with me and what’s that got to do with capitalism? Maybe California’s house is on fire, but mine isn’t! I’m happy to help out and make some reforms to help out (I’m not a monster, after all), but let’s not go overboard here…
Of course, all of that is ideology–you live in the same house. The clear answer to this challenge is the fostering and raising of class consciousness, but that’s a topic for another post.
All this is to say that I think that there’s something of value in the urgency with which Lenin addresses the issue that faced him and that on his assumptions, the radical stance he takes is a perfectly rational choice (perhaps the only rational choice). Whether he was right then (as well as now) will depend, once again, on whether those assumptions are true. And that, in turn, will depend on whether class antagonism is indeed the driving force of history, whether the primary function of the state is suppression of classes, whether capitalism can produce enough goods to provide for everyone’s needs, and so on and so on…
Chapter IV: Continuation. Supplementary Explanations by Engels
As the title states, this chapter is about the elucidation of Marx’s thoughts by Engels.
The Housing Question
How Bulgaria solved its housing question–chaboi grew up in that bricked up second floor apartment on the left
Summary
Engels’ suggestion of how people are to be housed after the revolution is fairly straightforward. First, he stresses that there is no real “shortage” of housing and that there is, in fact, plenty of housing available for anyone who needs it if only the space is used rationally. That is, if some people didn’t own more housing than they needed and if that housing was made available to those who need it there would be no housing problem. The means by which this rational allocation is to take place are the same as before the revolution: expropriation and billeting. In other words, just as the state can now expropriate private property from certain owners and use it to quarter people (soldiers) therein, so the proletarian state, too, will expropriate living space from owners and billet the homeless and the workers who need a place to live. This cannot be done by the existing state, but must be taken upon by the entire working people.
Crucially, this method of expropriation differ from the Proudhonist/anarchist kind “redemption” insofar as in the latter case the individual who is given some property “becomes the owner of the dwelling, the peasant farm, the instruments of labor” (Lenin quoting Engels pg. 69). By contrast, under Marxist expropriation the collective proletariat who takes control of housing, land, or the means of production retains proprietorship of what it has taken control. Thus, a family might live in an expropriated apartment, but it does not own the apartment by virtue of occupying it–the apartment remains, ultimately, as a property of the people. In other words, the occupants of state provided housing act as renters of a space and the state (i.e. the proletariat mass that has taken control) acts as landlord.
Interestingly, Engels acknowledges this:
Under [Marxist expropriation] the ‘working people’ remain the collective owners of the houses, factories and instruments of labour, and will hardly permit their use, at least during a transitional period, by individuals or associations without compensation for the cost. Just as the abolition of property in land is not the abolition of ground rent by its transfer, although in a modified form, to society. The actual seizure of all the instruments of labour by the working people, therefore, does not at all exclude the retention of the rent relation.
Lenin quoting Engels, The State and Revolution pg. 69
Lenin doesn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that this plan is tantamount to the state becoming a landlord to the dispossessed and requiring rent from them. However, he does use it to highlight the fact that in order to provide housing to individuals there must be some standard of allotment and that “all this calls for a certain form of state, but it does not at all call for a special military and bureaucratic apparatus, with officials occupying especially privileged positions. The transition to a state of affairs when it will be possible to supply dwelling rent-free is connected with the complete ‘withering away’ of the state.” (pg. 69-70)
Furthermore, one of the main lessons that Lenin draws here is that, once again, neither Marx nor Lenin were anarchists. They do not advocate for the immediate abolition of the state overnight, but, as we’ve seen before, for a preservation of a smashed state under the dictatorship of the proletariat which then withers away.
Analysis
Lenin’s point here is to show that Marx and Engels were always stressing a particular vision of what was to happen to the state with relation to the revolution. This, we have seen, is that the state will be smashed, its function taken over by the people for their purposes and society re-organized along communal lines, until such a time that all its functions can be taken over and performed by ordinary workers (i.e. until the state withers away).
Crucially, he’s more at odds to show that this is not an anarchist proposal than the specifics being proposed by Engels at this point are practical or feasible.
To that end, his argument here is, at the very least, one that I’m able to make sense of given the previous three chapters. Whether he has the correct reading of Marx and Engels, is, perpetually, a question on which I just have to punt.
Still, I do find it strange that Lenin (and to the extent that he’s right, Marx and Engels, too) thinks the reproduction of the renter/landlord relation at the state level–however temporarily!–as a virtue. One would have thought that if a person were homeless it’s partially by virtue of the fact that they can’t afford to pay for rent. To whom they pay that rent is, I imagine, irrelevant. So, I find it difficult to see why the fact that an apartment is now owned by the worker state rather than the landlord will solve the housing problem as long as both the state and the landlord demand rent that the homeless cannot afford. Rather than solving the problem, it merely relocates it somewhere else.
I suppose the obvious answer is that under worker control the rent will not be driven by supply and demand of housing, but will be fixed by the state such that those who need housing will always be able to afford it (until, of course, all housing becomes free after the state withers away). In that respect, perhaps what’s being proposed is something like a temporary sliding scale of rent: everyone gets housing, but those who can’t afford to pay rent (or those who can only afford to pay a little) don’t have to, while others who can will continue paying rent until the state withers away. This seems like a plausible interpretation and seems go along fairly well with the whole “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” motto.
I suspect the full answer to this question is to be found in Engels’ own writing rather than its summary by Lenin, but, as I stated in the first entry to this series, I’m only staying within the particular text.
2. Controversy with the Anarchists
Proudhon
Summary
Here, Lenin brings up a series of articles published by Marx and Engels against the Proudhonists. The controversy in question is precisely about the the Marxist position regarding the abolition of the state as set against the anarchist position.
Simply put, both Marx and Engels stress that they, like all socialists of the time (which included the anarchists), believed that the state would eventually disappear once classes disappeared. What they disagreed with the anarchists on, claims Lenin, is about the use of the state by the proletariat until that time, and, hence, the use of violence by the proletariat. “[Marx] opposed the proposition that the workers should renounce the use of arms, of organized violence, that is, the state, which is to serve to ‘crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie.'” (Lenin, pg. 71).
This, then, is a question of means to a shared end. The anarchists and the Marxists both agree on the end, but whereas the former, claims Lenin, want to overthrow the state and then lay down their arms, the latter want to maintain the violent means of the state to repress their opponents until the state can, eventually wither away.
The same point is expounded on by Engels. He does this in the first place by ridiculing the notion that a society can do away with authority or structure all together in all domains of life.
Take a factory, a railway, a ship on the high seas, said Engels–is it not clear that not one of these complex technical establishments, based on the employment of machinery and the planned cooperation of many people, could function without a certain amount of subordination and, consequently, without a certain amount of authority or power?
Lenin, The State and Revolution, 72-73
In short, the doing away of all authority and all subordination is a pipe dream according to Engels and Lenin. The real question, then, is how the use of authority is going to be used with regards to the state. Here we get a fairly interesting quote from Engels:
The anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority.
Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough? Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they are talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.
Lenin quoting Engels, The State and Revolution, pg 73-74
In short, Engels claims that there can be no revolution without the use of force and authority by those who have won the revolution, and that to argue that such authority and force should be given up immediately after the successful revolt is tantamount to leaving the revolution open to its enemies.
As Lenin puts it in light of this, the anarchists’ argument is decisively non-revolutionary. It’s not that, as the Social Democrats say, this is a matter of one side recognizing the state and the other not. Rather, it’s a matter of real, practical questions of how the revolution is to be done and what the revolutionaries should do with the state. Furthermore, in answering that question, Engels looks back to the last proletarian revolution–that of the Paris Commune–and not to some utopian ideal of how revolutions are played out in order to make his argument that state authority is the order of the day. In other words, what’s learned form the Commune is the mistake of not using enough violence, and that a repudiation of authority at that stage of social development (though not permanently!) can only lead to ruin.
Analysis
On the whole, I find this section quite interesting, though not much new information is to be gleaned from it that we haven’t gleaned form previous sections. Nevertheless, the quote from Engels is pretty interesting when it comes to offering a very succinct explanation about the different positions taken by anarchists and Marxists: they have a shared end, but differ significantly on the means by which they achieve it. They also differ greatly on the source of the problem with respect to which they adopt the same end–roughly, the Marxists see class society as the problem and the anarchists see authority as the problem (and before one is tempted to think that the shared similarities are enough to make the two positions ultimately the same, take a look at this previous post).
That quote from Engels also puts some pressure on some of Lenin’s earlier commitments, or, at the very least, on what I ascribed to him as a commitment. Namely, it might seem that Engels believes that the complex nature of certain modern work necessarily requires a subordination to authority in order to be done. If a ship or a factory is to run at all, then some people must be subordinated to others. This, in turn, might seem to suggest that there are some jobs that are just too complex to be done by just anyone and that they must be done by certain people to whom others are subordinated. If so, then we might suspect that some of the bureaucratic tasks of the state are complex in just that way, requiring the subordination of certain masses to that of a ruling minority. Certainly, the running of the state is at least as complex as the running of a factory and the worry is that the prestige that accumulates as a result of belonging to a ruling group will be enough to create a split in the population and reproduce something like a class structure.
Here, it’s important to note that there’s a through line through this tension (whether that’s successful is a different question). Specifically, it’s important to note that what Engels seems to be concerned with is not a division of labor based on a difference in knowledge or skill needed of a job. It is perfectly possible that anyone can do any job on a ship or in a factory, but that nothing can get done unless there’s some kind of subordination by some people to others. Thus, Engels seems to be primarily concerned with the need for authority to resolve certain collective action problems which will arise regardless of how competent the people involved in the enterprise are. What Engels is objecting to in speaking against the anarchists, then, is that they think they seem to be committed to a world in which there are no collective action problems. To the extent that they are committed to such a world (unlikely), the criticism is a valid one.
Still, one might still press the line I was pressing and ask why the necessity of authority as a way of resolving these problems within the state won’t simply reproduce the same problematic conditions. Recall, further, that for Lenin, the dissolution of the state is primarily the result of the fact that the functions of the state will be able to be done by anyone. Does he in fact also think that there will be no collective action problems as a result?
Honestly, it’s not clear. However, there’s a different line of reasoning that might work. Namely, it’s important to remember that what matters for Lenin is less the existence of certain authoritative structure and more of whose interests the authoritative structures serve. One of the problems with the existing state structure is that the interests it serves are the capitalist minority. They come to do this because those who own the means of production buy them and influence them to serve their interests. This is not a problem, presumably, if the authoritarian structure comes to serve the interests of the people. As long as that’s the case, its authoritative status is not a problem. Indeed, this is part and parcel with what he believes the state must come to be during and following the revolution.
So, the real question is not about whether or not there will be the use of authority of the proletarian state–we already know that there will be. Rather, it’s a question of how it can be maintained that the authority of the state will always be used in the interest of the people. And that, we’ve been told, is done precisely by the creation of a cheap government in which everyone is paid the same and everyone can do everyone else’s work. In other words, the idea seems to be that anyone who comes to wield more power than they should will never be able to turn on the people because he or she will be always replaceable. Crucially, this goes even for the people who must wield authority for the purposes of resolving collective action problems. If Josef D. is getting too big for his bureaucratic britches, then it’s just a matter of replacing him with Leon T. who can do the job just as well (and so on and so on).
I don’t know if that’s what Lenin was going for, and a number of other practical questions arise as a result (who has the power to replace?) but I can at least make sense of what’s being said here.
3. Letter to Bebel
the rather handsome August Bebel
Summary
In March of 1875 Engels writes a letter to Ferdinand August
Bebel (one of the founders of the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party) in
which he criticizes the Gotha Program and, in particular, the role of the state
taken up in that program. Lenin draws specific attention to the fact that
Engels insists that the term “state” should be replaced with the term
“community” in the program.
Engels’ argument is as follows: Once the state stops
oppressing the majority in favor of the minority, it ceases to be a state. Talk of a ‘free people’s
state’ or a ‘people’s state’ just doesn’t make sense since when it is in the
hands of the proletariat it is no longer a state but simply a tool to be used
to “hold down its adversaries.” Once this has been done—once the people are
free—then there just is no state. What’s left behind is something else; viz. a community.
Lenin restates this argument, then, in typical
fashion uses it to rail against Kautsky, and to assure the reader that the
Bolsheviks are completely on board with the proper orthodox Marxist line.
Analysis
I have very little to say about this section since nothing terribly new is being brought in. This does seem to be more grist for Lenin’s mill in claiming the mantle of the most-Marxist Marxist around, but that’s about it.
4. Criticism of the Draft of the Erfurt Program
Summary
In this section Lenin brings in Engels’ criticisms of the Erfurt Program proposed by the Social Democrats as further support for his understanding of the role of the state.
Lenin focuses on three points that Engels brings up with respect to the state’s role in the program. The first and biggest one has to do with the fact that there’s no call for a republic within the draft. Engels thinks that the current German constitution is simply a “fig leaf” over the reactionary absolutism of 1850 which only legalizes and formalizes an unjust order. Furthermore, he criticizes the SD in claiming that the only reason they’re not calling for a republic is because of fear of a reactionary backlash and the re-institution of anti-socialist laws. This, claims Engels, is an opportunist move and only serves to support the absolutists and reactionaries–they forego the pursuit of a principled end for the achievement of short term Pyrrhic victories. In Engels’ eyes, the democratic republic is the nearest approach to the dictatorship of the proletariat and there is no future for the proletariat that doesn’t go through a republic but only seeks to make peace with the status quo.
As Lenin puts it:
For such a republic–without in the least abolishing the rule of capital, and, therefore, the oppression of the masses and the class struggle–inevitably leads to such an extension, development, unfolding and intensification of this struggle that as soon as there arises the possibility of satisfying the fundamental interests of the oppressed masses, this possibility is realized inevitably and solely through the dictatorship of the proletariat, through the leadership of the masses by the proletariat.
Lenin, The State and Revolution pg. 84
In short, the move towards a republic makes it possible for the proletarian revolution to kick off once the contradictions of capitalism have come to a head.
This is the first practical suggestion Engels makes in criticizing the program: include a call for a republic. The second suggestion–in the same vein–is concerned with the model of the republic that is called for. Specifically, Engels holds that the SDs should be primarily fighting for a unitary republic and not a federal republic (although he grants that the latter may still be a step forward in some cases; viz. those in which multiple nations span the same geographic locale). In a unitary republic the provinces or individual states within the republic are all held by a common central aim or commitment to the republic. By contrast, a federal republic is one that is divided by the state in separate units. The difference, then, can be thought of as the difference between a top-down approach in which unity is forced by and the state and then partitioned by it, and a bottom-up approach in which unity is achieved through the cooperation of different autonomous parts who unite in a single state.
This is made all the more apparent when Engels speaks about the local governance of these individual units and claims that there should be “complete self-government for the provinces, districts and communities through officials elected by universal suffrage. The abolition of all local and provincial authorities appointed by the state.” (pg. 87) This, once again, reinforces the building of a bottom-up unity (we elect our officials locally and then participate nationally) rather than a top-down imposed federalism (we elect someone to the state who then appoints local officials).
All of these remarks are, of course, intended to show that Lenin has the right reading of Marx and Engels and that a proper orthodox Marxist is in favor of a democratic centralism and not whatever it is that the anarchists are calling form.
Analysis
I might be misreading either Engels’ remarks of Lenin’s analysis of them, but this section seemed to me to be less in support of Lenin than he takes them to be. Perhaps part of this is the fact that I don’t quite understand the different models of federalism that Lenin and Engels seem to have in mind in drawing their distinctions. I don’t, for example, know what the Swiss federal model is and why that kind of model is much worse than a different kind of federalism.
It also strikes me as odd, perhaps because of some unfair historical foresight on my part, that the models for self-governance advocated by Engels and Lenin is the republicanism of America and the former British colonies. Part of the reason why I think it’s odd is that the model that we know ends up being used in the USSR is precisely not the one that Lenin and Engels are pushing here. Rather, it seems to be precisely the ‘bad’ kind of federalist republicanism which operates from the center to the periphery. Within the Soviet Union, Russia was always the central player who dictated to the other members, and within the individual states within Russia (to the best of my knowledge) rule always flowed from the central party to the provinces, and not the other way around (but I could be mistaken).
In any case, I suppose it warrants saying, once again, that Lenin is writing this having had zero experience in state power (the perennial irony of all this is, of course, the fact that Marxism is supposed to be uniquely positioned to prevent precisely this kind of armchair speculation by drawing attention to the particular material conditions on the ground…though, of course, Lenin was also convinced that he knew those conditions). The second thing to keep in mind is that although Lenin is still bringing in some of this stuff to buttress his position against the anarchists (“see, Engels was about democratic centralism too!”), the group that he seems to be primarily addressing here is that group that is one that’s on his right–namely, those democratic socialists who might want incremental change within a system.
Still, it seems to me that these very same passages from Engels could be seen as going against Lenin’s theory of revolution. Recall, Lenin doesn’t want a bourgeois revolution before the socialist revolution. Rather, he wants to go directly to the latter without the former–it’s to that end that the violent smashing of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat is to be used. Yet, here, we have seemingly clear arguments from Engels about why a republic needs to be established first so that when certain conditions come to hold, then we can have the proletarian revolution. Why this isn’t a place where Lenin is being heterodox is unclear to me.
5. The 1891 Preface to Marx’s The Civil War in France
“H.A.G.S.” – Engels
Summary
In this preface Engels is summarizing the lessons learned from the Commune with the benefit of a 20 year hindsight. The first lesson, Lenin notes, is that the central question regarding the success of a worker’s revolution is that of who is armed. Hence, Engels’ claim that “the disarming of the workers was the first commandment for the bourgeois who were at the helm of the state. Hence, after every revolution won by the workers, a new struggle, ending with the defeat of the workers.” (89) For Lenin this is, of course, yet another reason to support a violent and armed revolution, but it is also an opportunity to throw some jabs at some of his old opponents, and in particular Tsereteli (see note below explaining what he’s getting at).
Following this is a minor note about the role of religion that seems to pertain only to the stance taken by the German SDs. Citing Engels’s statement that “in relation to the state religion is a purely private matter,” the SDs had taken the position that religion was a private matter tout court. Lenin corrects this by saying that this is a misinterpretation of Engels and that Engels’ remarks by no means meant that religion was a private matter in relation to the party. This remark seems to go nowhere other than to air out Lenin’s grievances against people whom he thinks don’t understand Marxism as well as he does.
Returning to the main point, Lenin tells us what the two main lessons learned from the Commune were with respect to the state. They’re familiar ones:
First, it’s that the state remains the state even in a democratic republic. It remains a tool of class oppression even if democracy is on the scene. The Commune had realized this and knew that as long as the state officials remained in their old capacities and still served as “masters of society” the working class couldn’t survive. To do so, it would need to do away with all previous state machinery and smash it.
Second, in order to smash the state machinery, the Commune had to transform the state officials and their roles from masters of society to servants of society. The Commune did this precisely by electing officials anew, making all of them recallable, giving them all working wages so as to stop opportunism and career hunting, and by imposing strict term limits.
Lenin then repeats that curious claim that the abolition of the state requires that the functions of the state be “converted into the simple operations of control and accounting that are within the capacity and ability of the vast majority of the population, and, subsequently, of every single individual.” (92). This, again, to stress, is what is needed in order for the state to be smashed–its machinery must be converted into this so that careerism and prestige become impossible. Once that is the done, the state loses its function as a tool of class oppression, the jobs it provides gain the status as ordinary jobs, and it slowly begins to wither away.
So much should already be familiar. Following this recap, we get a curious little passage about a mistake Engels doesn’t make. Namely, “Engels did not make the mistake some Marxists make in dealing, for example, with the question of the right of nations to self-determination, when they argue that this impossible under capitalism and will be superfluous under Socialism.” (93). What’s normally conflated is unclear (I’ll take a whack at it below), but it is followed by a less familiar claim by Lenin which I quote it here in full:
To develop democracy to the utmost, to seek out the forms for this development, to test them by practice, and so forth–all this is one of the constituent tasks of the struggle for the social revolution. Taken separately, no kind of democracy will bring Socialism. But in actual life democracy will never be “taken separately”; it will be “taken together” with other things, it will exert its influence on economic life, will stimulate its transformation; and in its turn it will be influenced by economic development, and so on. Such are the dialectics of living history.
Lenin, The State and Revolution, 93
This remark isn’t elaborated on at all. Rather, Lenin moves on to really stress that Engels’ warnings were perennially about knowing the true nature of the state:
In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible until such a time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap heap.
Lenin quoting Engels, The State and Revolution, 94
Engels gives this reminder especially to comrades in Germany, but the message is clear: don’t romanticize the state simply because it has taken a different form–it’s still the old enemy in new clothes. Lenin’s advice to his contemporaries is equally clear: this is why we shouldn’t work through the state without first smashing it; if anyone works with the state they should only do so reluctantly and never eagerly.
Finally, Lenin ends by remarking that although he agrees with Engels that the state remains a state even when democracy has entered the scene, this doesn’t mean that either of them think that the state has the same form in both monarchy and democracy. Far from it, a more open and freer class struggle is possible in the latter and not the former, and hence, we should be in favor of the latter (but for that reason and not because some kind of magic happens once democratic processes are in place!).
Analysis
I promised a bit of historical information regarding the Tsereteli remark so let me begin by addressing that. Lenin here is referring to a speech Tsereteli gave on the occasion of banning a planned Bolshevik demonstration on June 10th. The demonstration was, according to the Bolsheviks, supposed to be a peaceful one, but the grounds on which it was banned by a block of Mensheviks and SRs (Tsereteli himself was a Menshevik) was essentially that the radical nature of the Bolsheviks would be used as a justification by the Provisional Government to disarm the workers. I couldn’t find the original Tsereteli speech, but his argument appears to be “your radical revolutionary tactics are likely to sink the whole revolution; once the workers are disarmed, the whole thing’s over. So, we’re banning you from doing what you were planning for the sake of the revolution.” Lenin’s response in return seems to be that this very muzzling of revolutionary tactics is itself counter-revolutionary (a kind of “oh, so what are you doing in de-facto disarming us and not allowing us to demonstrate? Are you not playing the game on bourgeois terms?”). Hence, his claim that this was really the breaking point when the SRs and Mensheviks broke apart from the true revolutionary purpose.
Apart from this explicit reason, the SRs and the Mensheviks were, in all likelihood also trying to swing their weight around a bit and send a message to the Bolsheviks that despite their name, they still represented the minority in their coalition and that they should step in line. They score a small victory on that front in the so-called ‘July Days’ when mass street violence is blamed on the Bolsheviks, the party leaders are arrested or scattered, and Lenin is forced to go into exile. Ultimately, however, we know that the Bolsheviks have the last laugh.
Setting that aside, what should we make of the rest of the section. I don’t have much more to say about the elements that are repeated here regarding the smashing of the state, other that to say that I’m more and more convinced that I was correct earlier in my interpretation of a ‘smash’ being used as a technical term and in my claim that a lot hangs on this empirical assumption Lenin makes about what smashing requires (i.e. the transformation of all state functions into simple processes that can be done by anyone). That’s not to pat myself on the back since it only means that I can still read, but sometimes you gotta take pleasure in the small things.
Rather, I want to focus on the latter half of the section and in particular on that strange passage that I quoted in full above. I have a very hard time understanding what Lenin is trying to say there. It’s clear that he’s drawing a distinction between democracy as it can be understood when ‘taken separately’ democracy as understood when ‘taken together’, but this distinction is still opaque. My best guess is that this is a distinction between looking at any particular form of democracy and looking at what a full democracy requires. To think of democracy in the former sense is just to be concerned with what institutional features one’s political system has (i.e. is it representative, is it direct, etc.); to look at it in the latter sense is to be concerned with what genuine self-rule by the people actually needs (i.e. ???).
From that perspective Lenin’s point seems to be that there is no single kind of democracy such that when it is established, Socialism simply follows. It’s not as though instituting universal suffrage will suddenly transform the existing system into a utopia. Quite to the contrary, achievement of absolute democracy is a wholistic and dynamic thing that requires constant adjustments, experimentation, and sensitivity to the totality of how people live. In that sense, the work towards achieving a more perfect democracy is always in progress–even if you achieve it for a certain time period, conditions on the ground might change and require new ways of adapting.
If correct, then Lenin’s direct point to his contemporaries was that they shouldn’t be merely striving to achieve a democratic system. That by itself isn’t going to do anythingand it certainly won’t automatically bring about the socialist revolution. As both Lenin and Engels stress, the introduction of a certain political structure is useful for the waging of a more unconstrained class struggle. This is a proximate goal towards an ultimate one and Lenin is really reminding us not to forget that.
[This reading also makes sense given the surrounding quotes by Engels, and especially the one used to chastise the Germans about their state fetishism. That makes me feel pretty confident about my interpretation, but I could be mistaken.]
One thing that I especially like about this passage (if my reading is correct) is that it highlights a certain flexibility of tactics of Lenin’s and provides us with a little window of what he envisioned the socialist future to look like. One of the unfortunate results of Stalinism (though by far not the worst) is that it turned socialism and socialist thought into something rigid and ossified (though, to be fair, shades of this are present in Lenin, too, with his obsession with the correct reading of Marxism). But it’s clear here that this was never what it was supposed to be and that it was envisioned to be something incredibly flexible and agile in response to the workers’ needs.
This view is also in stark contrast to the general ways in which so many people think about the current political and economic system. Here I have in mind the popular moderate view that capitalism has solved all fundamental economic problems, that Locke solved all fundamental political problems, and that all other problems are just a matter of implementing different wonkish tweaks to those two systems. This, too, is a rigid and ossified “end-of-history” way of thinking about things that I find particularly frustrating and it’s interesting to see the outlines of an alternative way of at least thinking about these questions (even if the lessons of history suggest that at least part of this approach is mistaken).
6. Engels on the Overcoming of Democracy
That’s right, Engels had a neckbeard when he was young. I’m disappointed too.
Summary
The general question this section aims to address is why Engels believes that the removal of the state will be complete with the arrival of a new generation. The answer comes after a rather weird digression into the proper party name. Here, Lenin quotes Engels on why he and Marx preferred the label ‘communist’ to the label ‘social-democrat’–in short, they felt that ‘Communism’ described precisely the aims towards which the proletariat should be striving, while ‘social-democracy’ gave the impression that one of the aims that the party should be striving for is the preservation of democracy. The term ‘social-democrat’ can ‘pass muster’ for Engels so long as this mistake isn’t made and the party doesn’t take the label literally but instead remains true to the more basic principles.
After proposing that the Bolsheviks take this cue to change their name to the Communists (with ‘Bolsheviks’ in brackets) to better reflect their principles, Lenin gets to the heart of the matter. Engels’ point is that overcoming the state means overcoming democracy–when the state withers away, so does democracy. Lenin admits that this might sound bizarre and incomprehensible and grants that “indeed, someone may even begin to fear that we are expecting the advent of an order of society in which the principle of the subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed–for democracy means the recognition of just this principle.” (97)
However this is not the case because, as the alert reader may have already intuited, ‘democracy’ in this sense has a technical meaning. Lenin explains:
Democracy is not identical with the subordination of the minority to the majority. Democracy is a state which recognizes the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e., an organization for the systematic use of violence by one class against the other, by one section of the population against another.
Lenin, The State and Revolution, 97
To overcome democracy is to overcome the state is to overcome the very use of violence for the purposes of subordination. This is the Communist aim which Lenin reiterates:
In striving for Socialism we are convinced that it will develop into Communism and, hence, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section to another, will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination.(97-98)
Lenin, The State and Revolution, 97-98
And this overcoming itself requires the arrival of a new generation that can be subject to this kind of habituation. By growing up in such an environment and internalizing it fully from birth, this new generation is finally able to dispense with the state once and for all.
Analysis
Despite the fact that this is one of the shortest sections in this chapter, I find it to be one of the most interesting and illuminating ones. I myself raised the question several chapters ago about why the destruction of the state would mean an end to the process of deliberation by democratic means. The answer that we get here is that that process isn’t eliminated. What’s eliminated is the concept of the democratic state which is the means enforcing the will of the majority by violence on the minority. This is part of what Lenin means when he says that democracy in his sense is not identical with the principle that operates in the process of democratic decision. It’s not identical because the former includes more that the latter insofar as it incorporates the element of coercion and violence against the minority to enforce the will of the majority. That kind of democracy is the kind that Engels and Lenin think is overcome when the state has withered away.
What remains in its place? Well, presumably, the principle itself minus the violence. But what does that mean? It means that the majority dictates and the minority submits willingly. Furthermore, we see that this is supposed to happen because, by growing up a certain way, people have become accustomed to a world in which this is the case.
A couple of really interesting things are worth pointing out here. The first is Lenin’s picture of psychology. Specifically, it seems to be entirely modeled on a kind of conditioning or habit based picture. In short, it seems to assume that changing the environment in which one becomes habituated makes a massive difference to behavior. In the useless debate about nature versus nurture, Lenin is strictly in the nurture camp. This, as some of Lenin’s other assumptions about the nature of bureaucracy and epistemology, is, to a certain extent an empirical matter but one that is taken for granted for Lenin.
In saying this I don’t mean to suggest that I think the opposite is true–i.e. that really, human nature is in some respects immutable and that Lenin just didn’t see that. People rarely notice how bad of a track record that argument has had when particular examples have been brought up historically; there are so many things that supposedly were part of human nature that we could never curb but which we’ve learned to do fairly well without (pick your favorite piece of racist or sexist philosophy from history if you want examples). As far as I’m concerned, human nature is much more malleable than people give it credit for.
What I do want to say, however, is that Lenin’s picture of human psychology is much too simplistic. And here, the reactionary might have a point. Perhaps human nature is very malleable but is not malleable with respect to one or two very specific things. Perhaps, pace Nietzsche or Hobbes, it is not malleable with respect to its desire for asserting its will or its selfish drive. And if what is necessary to willingly submit to the will of the majority is that one fundamentally change that aspect of humanity, then we might be in trouble.
[For what it’s worth, I think such arguments are also overstated. More conservative folks will tend to treat the Nietzschian or Hobbesian claims as a kind of established empirical dogma. It’s not–it just seems more plausible to them that people are naturally selfish or that they want to assert their will and the support needed for that claim is black-boxed.]
Alternatively, it may also be the case that the environmental conditions that would produce the desired results require more than the elimination of class. This is the second interesting point. One of the fundamental assumptions that has been brought up before and that appears again here seems to be that the source of all macro-scale social antagonisms is due to class and that the removal of class leads to the removal of all such antagonisms as well. Everything in Lenin’s political theory ultimately points to and aims at class struggle and overcoming class struggle. This, in turn puts a lot of weight on both the concept of class and that of class struggle, and one might have serious reservations that they can handle all that weight. After all, one might think that questions of race, sex, religion, gender, etc. also make a difference to macro-scale social conflicts and those questions will continue to exist even if class disappears.
This isn’t a new concern, of course, and the standard solution has been to adopt some kind of class reductionism to explain why each of these other issues really amount to issues of class as well. I’m not unsympathetic to this kind of reductionism (in fact, I think it’s more reasonable than people suppose it is), but it, too, needs to be defended separately and cannot be assumed automatically.
Finally, it’s worth also thinking about the principle that Lenin identifies with the ‘good’ kind of democracy–namely, the principle of the subordination of the minority by the majority. In one respect, I think he’s right; when democracy works well, this is precisely what happens. Furthermore, when looking at it through the lens that assigns capitalists as the minority and the rest of the world as the majority, then, it’s clear that capitalism presents a perversion of democracy of the highest order. However, it seems obvious that a full adherence to that principle also allows for a tyranny of the majority in certain other contexts. This is all the more obvious if we consider that issues of race, gender, etc. can still persists even in a system in which there are no classes. In those cases this principle becomes fully tyrannical and oppressive.
This, of course, brings us back to the first two points. If all macro-scale conflicts really are the result of class, and if class is removed, then whatever is left over won’t be one of the cases in which submission to the majority constitutes tyranny. After all, the city council isn’t tyrannical when it builds a school in that place where five people wanted to put a bar. If all cases of submission to the majority after the end of class struggle are such, then there’s not much to worry about. Likewise, but in a much more cynical frame of mind, if there are still some such cases that aren’t eliminated by the end of class struggle, but if such conflict can be avoided by conditioning people to think differently about their submission, then the worry, if not fully abated, is at least shifted.
I take it this latter option is actually highly unattractive to most people (myself included) since it seems tantamount to the development of a kind of mass adaptive preference towards the good of the majority and away from the individual’s good. This is especially worrisome if it is supposed to be applied to questions that aren’t merely incidental, but are constitutive of what is really required for people to thrive. If, for example, the majority required the suppression of a minority’s sexuality and if sexual expression is constitutive of the good life, then the option just suggested is pretty much that of brainwashing and depriving individuals of something really valuable.
This, I should stress, is not a Marxist view. The core of Marxism as I see it is very much concerned with the flourishing of human beings and with providing the means by which that can be done. Clearly, this picture of flourishing doesn’t include “privately owning the means of production for the advancement of capital” as a way to flourish so it will exclude some means (and anyone who thinks this is a way of human flourishing is so deep in ideology that I’m genuinely surprised they’ve made it through FOUR of these impossibly long blog posts about LENIN). But it does (or should) include a plurality of others. Human flourishing is not a democratically determined thing, though it is, at the same time, not something that is independent of what people think it is either! The point here is that I’m skeptical of any treatment of Marx that allows for or counts on such unprincipled tyrannical excesses and I see neither Marxism (nor Leninism for that matter just yet) as necessitating such moves.
All this is to say that perhaps the full weight of the problem falls back on the question of whether all serious macro-scale social problems can be reduced to class problems such that those problems that remain in wake of the revolution aren’t worth taking seriously. If that can be shown, then most of my concerns would be abated.
The Crumb Dungeon 