The Serpent's Wisdom

This weekend i spent a fair amount of time pondering what peace is and how it should be achieved.

Whenever we have a war, there's a bunch of shooting and bombing and fear and rape and famine and torture and maiming, and whole nations are deeply traumatized and face environmental and economic crises for years or decades.  And after the primary spasms of horrific violence end, there are "peace talks."  Or, often the "peace talks" happen when there's been some terrorism and skirmishing and threats.

This whole idea of "peace talks" though enshrines a number of unspoken presumptions and agendas that i want to unravel a bit. 

First, look at who gets to be party to the peace talks: the generals and warlords and state leaders and other people who masterminded the war in the first place.  Does anyone ever speak for, or listen to, the refugees, the broken families, the orphans and widows, the children who were prostituted or drugged and made into soldiers? 

Also absent are the war profiteers.  They would prefer to stay in the shadows, because they benefit most when no one pays any attention to their role in all this and everyone just assumes that they are passive merchants, not power brokers.  They want people to think that it wouldn't matter if they stopped selling arms or hiring out mercenaries because the demand exists independent of their supply, so if they got out of the war business someone else would just offer the same products anyway.

The people who do get to participate in peace talks do so in order to advance their agenda -- and i assert this to be the case for all parties no matter what ideology or doctrine they epouse: they want to duck any kind of accountability they might otherwise face for war crimes, and they want a seat in the cartel that has a monopoly on violence in the region.  Throughout the peace talks, it is in their interest to make it seem that they are willing to return to violence at the drop of a hat -- as if being violent is the easy option, and not being violent is a perpetual struggle.  Running and outfitting an army is not cheap, the resources for training, weapons, and provisions have to come from somewhere, and yet we are to believe that being nonviolent is the harder option?  At peace talks, the biggest asset one has is the appearance of having limitless capacity for violence, and how backward is that?

So the idea of "peace" promoted by the state is the absence of factional organized violence, enforced by a cartel who assert the unique authority to use sanctioned violence in that region.  Anyone else uses violence, they are criminals; the state uses violence, it is just and heroic.  This is "peace:" unrealized potential violence.  The state wants you to believe that peace comes at the point of a gun.

Which is where, like so many of the matters i consider, this comes down to one's view of human nature.  If people are fundamentally unruly animals, for whom it actually is more difficult to be nonviolent than brutal, then pacificism doesn't make sense, and neither does compassion.  Under the pessmistic view of human nature, we should be thankful if we live in an area with a strong state and a healthy culture of fear-respect for God, police and military.

However, i'm not inclined to think that way, for several reasons, not the least of which is that what we are witnessing is not the action of humans in our natural habitat but the action of humans under the severe stresses of crowding and being caged.  If our unruliness is fundamentally the reaction to this stress -- along with stress from various other stressors -- then adding the stress of perpetually-threatened state violence cannot be a lasting solution.  The better solution, it seems to me, is a more direct response to the stresses which cause our unruliness.

Is peace more than the absence of war?  I believe instead that it is the steps we take to foster greater understanding, less prejudice, and reduced stress.  If this is the case, then we all have a stake in promoting and developing peace.  And we, all of us, not just the ones with the guns and bombs, have a voice in saying what it looks like.

The idea of "socialist government" is an oxymoron.

Human freedom, as defined by Marx and Engels, is essentially the freedom to "contemplate oneself in a world one has created." In other words, people are free if they have real say in the direction or future of society.

This goes beyond the popular idea of freedom which we have in the United States today. Americans have the freedom to do what they want to do with their time and to pursue what interests they want. But we do not have real freedom to shape the future, to make our voices heard against the ubiquitous ethical bankruptcy of our institutions.

The American ideal, as it exists today (it was not always so) is government of the people, by the people, for the people -- not government that facilitates and provides a veneer of legitimacy or even respectability for the slow-motion cannibalism of the lower classes. The idea of government of, by, and for "the people" points to the "naive need" for society to have just and humane governance, governance which holds perpetrators accountable for injustices at all levels.

Suppose, on a naive level, that people come together to create an institution to facilitate the protection of some degree of fairness. People do so because they recognize that human nature is not at the point where people can be expected to just do the right thing. The problem with this scheme is that the authority of an institutional edifice depends upon its mission being respected by all people. Where the aristocratic class finds a way to undermine the mission of an edifice by appointing cronies as watchdogs -- and we can regard this outcome as inevitable -- suddenly people need to be protected against the edifice itself. It has become a proponent of the injustice which they intended it to prevent.

And so it goes with government of, by, and for the people. Any government established by and for "the people," including one founded on socialist principles, can be expected to be undermined by a cabal of cronies.

We cannot even achieve justice by rebelling against an unjust government, because rebellion is part of the imperialistic scheme. The faces at the top change, the words and ideologies change, but not the methods of imperialism.

The key may be changing human nature, but what do we do until that can be achieved?

The difficulty is in imagining something that will remain "naive" without becoming undermined by cronyism, but which is simultaneously protected against imperialism from outside.

One might contemplate mutual aid organizations that are designed to dissolve every so often, and this would be a decent scheme if it contained the means to protect itself simultaneously (1) against becoming a cronyist edifice, (2) against imperialism from without, and (3) against becoming a tool of injustice against minorities.

One might contemplate a sort of "perpetual radical movement" that replenishes every generation, but such movements have not been able to avoid the fate of being either (1) suppressed and forcibly silenced or (2) misappropriated and misdirected into tacit support for imperialism. (The aristocracy does not have to silence radicals if they can make our own words meaningless by drowning us out with a popularized "safe and sanitized" version of our own terminology.)

To succeed, a radical socialist movement would have to be global in its scope, would have to focus heavily on "values education," would have to minimize power centralization (while simultaneously maintaining a high degree of universal accountability), and would have to perpetually renew to avoid having its language misappropriated and diluted.

I saw An Inconvenient Truth this weekend. It was well-done and fairly informative, although i'm convinced that it is also a campaign film for Al Gore. An Inconvenient Al (thanks to _raven_ for the link) matches a lot of my reactions to the movie.

There's a scene where he shows the auto emissions standards of several countries, demonstrating how much lower they are in the US than anywhere else, even China. In fact, US-made cars cannot be exported to China because they don't meet the emissions standards there. Gore suggests this is one reason why US auto manufacturers are having trouble: instead of striving to compete against carmakers who are following international emissions standards, they are keeping them low here in the US.

Gore uses this observation to argue against the conservative position that lowering CO₂ emissions will be damaging to our economy. It bears adding that any entrepreneur with enough vision could turn emissions reduction into good business.

So why isn't that happening? I gained a lot of insight into human nature in that moment.

Under capitalism, as i learned about it in college, companies change their strategies to stay competitive, or they die. But this is assuming that losses will make a company actually shut down. If one mom-and-pop store can't compete against another mom-and-pop store down the street, the closing of one such store does not impact the economy or the nation. (Well, it does, but few of us will notice.) The prospect of an airline or auto manufacturer going out of business is a different story; the state and federal governments will come up with all sorts of programs and deals to prevent an economic bomb like this from dropping.

Add to this that consumers really do not have the ability to impact the decisions a very large company makes via "voting with their shoes." This would work, again, if the business in question is a neighborhood mom-and-pop. Boycotts are ineffective; General Electric doesn't care if a small percentage of people stop buying their light bulbs.

The net result is that very large companies do not have to operate by the rules of capitalist competition and operate instead by the rules of privilege and entitlement. If a company gets large enough, its shareholders and directors will claim the ability to essentially operate in open defiance of reality, and no one can stop them. This, at its heart, is what characterizes imperialism (and usually causes empires to be short-lived).

I am a socialist, but i recognize that the problem would not be solved by nationalizing corporations. The fundamental problem remains the same: institutions that grow beyond a certain size operate under a completely different set of rules.

The great problem of the 21st Century is gearing up to be: how do we design institutions that are responsive to the actual needs of real people?

A cartel is a group of legally independent producers whose goal it is to fix prices, to limit supply and to limit competition.

In Economics 101, you're taught that the cornerstone of capitalism is the free market. The theory goes, if you don't like what is being offered by one seller, you can go to another.

The problem with this theory is that the market is not as free as walking across the aisle to another stall. Exercising your consumer freedom involves an expenditure of time, energy, and perhaps money (if you have to pay to go to the next vendor). You have to spend time researching different products and vendors in order to get the best deal, and you have to have access to good information. These "free market costs" add up to leverage that can be used to the vendor's advantage -- but this kind of leverage is small compared to the leverage the vendor has if you are dependent on the product they are selling.

This leverage makes it possible for cartels to form. In a truly free market, a cartel would not be viable because a single vendor could undermine it by lowering his prices or increasing his supply. But the leverage which vendors possess makes it possible for vendors to band together and undercut the mechanism of competition by setting their own prices. Once a cartel forms, the consumer has nowhere to go to get this product without submitting to the cartel's terms -- and if the consumer is dependent on the product, the consumer cannot simply opt out of buying it.

Theoretically, when cartels are identified, the government forcibly breaks them up in the name of "preserving market competition." Another reason to break up cartels is that they often involve coersion and can lead to violence from efforts to keep the vendors or consumers in line.

The leverage which haves have over have-nots is the root of the "iron law of oligarchy," which states that "all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop oligarchic tendencies."

The fact that we have authorties charged with trust-busting means that those cartels which are allowed to continue existing are given tacit legitimacy.

Is it still a cartel if it spans the entire economy? The difference between an oligarchy and a cartel is like the difference between a religion and a cult: the only real difference is size and social acceptance, the veneer of "legitimacy." If the cartel's influence is lingering and ubiquitous, we arrive at a state where we cannot imagine life without it; it becomes standard reality, common sense.

So if i were to suggest that our labor market is ruled by an enduring and powerful employment cartel, i might be dismissed as a loon, but think about it for a moment. Your employer has a strong degree of power over you. The "free market cost" of seeking another employment vendor is often high -- and is probably kept that way -- thus putting pressure on people to keep or seek jobs, no matter how cruddy or humiliating or dehumanizing they are. Dependency is high; people without their own property do not have the freedom to visualize themselves in a world of their own design, and they are kept that way because oligarchy is more profitable for the landed class than democracy.

Economists have described the "natural unemployment rate" as an inevitable aspect of a capitalist economy. But those without jobs are held up as an example for those who have jobs, to keep our enthusiasm high for whatever drudgery that we do to pay our rent. The "natural unemployment rate" is a mechanism of coersion.

Since i can't sleep, i thought i'd reply to a locked conversation that took place with a friend regarding my free market post. This friend is a free-market supporter, but was not one of the true targets of my sentiment, since i do not question hir compassion and commitment to genuine human freedom.

In a subtle way it was a Hurricane Katrina entry, because i am still fighting anger and disgust towards those who have sought to argue that the plight of the poor in the hurricane's aftermath was basically their own fault; or, alternatively, that it was the fault of the welfare state for putting people in a state of "learned helplessness." I am still angry and indignant towards victim-blamers who can't stand to see direct evidence of class oppression and exploitation in our society.

If ever there was proof of it, there it is.

I feel strongly that no free market exists, and furthermore that the free market cannot possibly exist (except possibly in a post-scarcity world). In my opinion the dehumanizing effects of commodification, the coersion exerted by creature needs for necessities, and involuntary participation in the labor market by anyone not independently wealthy, are fatal flaws.

That said... i am short on proposals to the contrary. I have leaned of late towards anarcho-socialism. Criticisms of government along the lines of those offered by the mutualists have stuck with me; also the thoughts of the Austrian school regarding cronyism and corruption as a human failing preventing implementation of just free markets; and i have written about the tendency for problem-solving edifices to become problems in their own right for future generations. I am aware of the failures of attempts to institute a socialist government that protects human liberty or civil rights. So i am under no illusions that socialism is necessarily the best antidote for market injustice.

I am also concerned about the potential for intellectual dishonesty that is brewing in my thoughts. To say that the failure of a free market to exist is due to an inherent flaw in the idea of the free market itself, while the failure of socialist democracy to exist is not due to a similar inherent flaw but rather of incidental problems, does not rest easily with me.

I feel i know where i stand, but just yet i feel uncomfortable walking in any one direction.

The idea has been lurking in the back of my mind that a culture which genuinely values life and accepts and celebrates diversity would find ways to alleviate the effects of inequality among its people regardless of the political or economic system it used. So perhaps our foremost goal should be the nurturing of such a culture. I fear, though, that commodification and starvation present insurmountable obstacles in the development of such a culture. (Perhaps i should be less willing to say never with regards to socio-political theories.)

Where does it begin? Where does it end?

I am becoming anti-capitalist, but I don't know yet what would better replace it. Here's the process by which my thought is evolving.

1. What seems to me the most reasonable system is a free market, regulated to the extent that this is necessary to ensure competition and level access to all buyers and sellers. A democratic government would provide public goods like infrastructure, civil defence, and public order.

2. The problem is that any public solution that is put in place by honest people becomes a system that is, within a couple of generations, entirely corrupted. Industry convinces politicians to put its yes-men on regulatory boards, so that over time the wolves are watching the hen-house. This leaves us with the illusion of a regulatory system that claims it watches out for the public interest while increasing the opportunity for exploitation. See, for example, how the FDA and big pharma collude to mass-market poisons to the public as "medicine." Merck has, with one substance, killed over 38,000 people and hid the evidence for years while continuing to profit madly from Vioxx. There has been no public outcry whatsoever, because people trust the FDA to protect them. But also, I think there's a sense of fatalism; a sense that if we can't trust the FDA, what can we do instead that won't be similarly corrupted by cronyism?

2a. The only hope for counter-cronyism seems to be the fact that for many industries, there is a complementary industry whose profit depends on keeping the others honest. For example, the insurance industry stepped in and started doing its own auto crash testing when it became clear that the government wasn't setting safety standards high enough. The problem, though, is that while this does help keep the auto industry somewhat more honest, it doesn't always benefit the consumers, because the insurance industry makes its money by doing what it can to avoid making payouts, and there is no real market balance to help, because in an important sense there is no competition: once an accident has occurred, you can't shop around to find the insurance company that will pay you the most. Sure, if your insurance company doesn't pay out when you have an accident you can switch insurance companies, but that does you're current situation no good. Officially there is recourse to the attorney general, but if this is an elected official, chances are his biggest campaign contributions came from insurance companies -- see point 2, "cronyism," above.

3. The profit motive itself seems a unversal corruptor. Far from encouraging "rational market behavior," it inspires people to look for ways to flout the rules in order to increase those profits. The more competitors there are in the marketplace, the more scarcity there is, and the more greed is favored. Game theory demonstrates that people will cheat when they can expect to get away with it. There is no economic arena where in general this has been false. So long as people are able to convince themselves that real people "out there" are not affected adversely by their market decisions, they need feel no remorse at the likelihood that their gain comes at someone else's loss. In theory, the open-information, profit-driven free market helps everyone; in practice, there is no way around the effect of greed.

4. Greed and cronyism find considerable opportunity in the vulnerabilities of those who come to the market at a social disadvantage. Members of all disparaged groups -- whether they are categorized by gender, race, religion, class, size, disability, neurodiversity, sexual orientation, or gender identity, find themselves coming up short in the labor market. To begin with they do not have equal access, which creates opportunity for exploitation for those not thusly disadvantaged. It is not an accident that in the U.S. the captains of industry, the heads of the bureaucracies, and the elected officials are disproportionately white, male, Protestant, upper-class, slender, "sane," straight, and cis-gendered. Exceptions are rare enough that they are newsworthy. Even to the extent that there is a meritocratic system, access to education and valuation of one's merit is biased in favor of those who have social advantages -- those who can "dress for success" and speak "WASPishly" enough. What with people taking any advantage they can find, and the privileged operating the level-making frameworks (such as judges or arbiters who preside over discrimination or labor-fairness lawsuits) with cronies, the slant is so strongly in favor of those with privilege that even initiatives like affirmative action and collective bargaining have done little, across society, to counter it.

4a. This combination of factors has already given us patterns like "the war on (some) drugs," in which common behavior has been criminalized in the name of "public protection." There is quite a bit of violent crime involved with the drug trade, but not driven so much by the use of it, as by the self-interested behavior that occurs in a completely unregulated system. Competing vendors feel entitled to whatever means will ensure them greater market access; and addicts, scrambling for survival in a politcal and economic system that ostrasizes them, become increasingly desperate (whether they are junkies who live in squats or tweakers who live in Manhattan penthouses). This pattern has seen the growth of a "prison-industrial complex" that actually has incentive to incarcerate people, especially for drug offenses where current federal rules allow police to confiscate and sell all kinds of personal possessions, and companies who now can have products made cheaply by effective slaves thanks to entities like UNICOR. (At least such products are "Made in America" -- which by the way has the most highly incarcerated population in the world.)

5. Advertisement has become a system whereby the consumer's brain is colonized with a consumerist mentality that puts "blinders" on us, and causes us to treat our consumer obligations as if they were integral aspects of our survival. How else would people go along with the drudgery of factory or menial office work, if they were not convinced that they needed "money" in order to survive (and by survive, I mean buy clothing in the latest fashions, the cool new CDs and DVDs and the cool new gadgets to play them on, etc.)? People facing the inability to pay their debts panic as if they were facing a predator -- people talk about their credit rating in anxious tones as if a dip would create a life-threatening emergency. Cigarette companies don't just sell cancer-sticks, they sell "masculinity in a box," wearing a poncho and riding a horse across the plains. The diet industry doesn't just sell starchy low-fat food, it sells a promise of salvation.

Since these seem to be problems that are rooted in human nature, I don't think that lasting solutions can be developed in the framework of a capitalist republic. I'm not sure, though, what to advocate as a solution. Should we fight the present battles within the current system against greed, cronyism, and class exploitation, knowing that our solutions will eventually become our children's problems? Would stronger ethical instruction during childhood produce a generation that is more compassionate and generous?

Or is the solution a truly radical overhaul that tears down not just institutional edifice, but what I've come to call "the tyranny of the written word," the use of contract and law as tools of dehumanization and exploitation? I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though; between honest people, a contract can be an instrument of mutual benefit.

Is the current system the best we can do? Without it, how could we see to things like environmental protection, defense of equal opportunity, and caretaking of the ill and disabled, which are best handled as public issues?

Today I am basically issuing a "convert me" challenge to libertarians and anarchists on my friends list.

Can you show me how privatization and de-regulation usually results in better services at better prices, despite the many instances about which I have read where these lead to higher prices or declines in service quality?

Can you show me that government regulation makes people worse off than they would be without it? That any benefits to the public over the last 100 years in the areas of food, product, and occupational safety would have been even better without government involvement?

Can you show me that 41 million uninsured Americans are better off -- financially and health-wise -- without insurance than they would be under federal single-payer healthcare?

Can you show me that people with disabilties were better off before the Americans with Disabilities Act, or would be better off without it now? Are they better off with public assistance, or are they better off relying on family wealth and charity?

Can you challenge the "Economics 102" assertion that the free market cannot provide as efficiently as public or publically-monopolized enterprise for public goods such as roads, education, and national defense? Edit: can you also show me that the environment would be better off without pollution controls?

Take note that you do not have to convince me that capitalism is the best economic system; I already believe that. I believe that it is better at creating wealth than any other system. However, I do believe in checks and balances and I am not convinced that the free market has them inherently. I am concerned that without some sort of oversight, that the free market will inherently find its way into a state of oligarchical collectivism -- via the way that immense capital can distort the market (analogous to mass distorting space and time) to shape market actions into a pattern of greed, exploitation, and ultimately oppression.