Month: May 2021

English-speaking political theorists identify John Rawls as among the most important political philosophers of the 20th century. Rawls developed a rational theory of justice in liberal democracy using a thought experiment inspired by social contract theory. He imagines organizing a state where none of the organizers know their position in the society they create. Assuming the organizers are rationally self-interested, Rawls claims that they would establish two principles of justice. The Equality Principle states that rights and freedoms should be as extensive as possible while being distributed to all citizens equally. The Difference Principles states that social and economic inequalities should be evaluated by their benefit to the least advantaged, and competition for prestige positions should be fair and open to all.

From the examples he employs, Rawls imagines that the United States political economy reflects the principles of justice. The Bill of Rights defines an equally distributed system of rights and freedoms, political positions are won in open and fair elections, and capitalism allows anyone to earn economic success on the free market. Rawls argues that the competition inherent in republicanism and capitalism ensures beneficial outcomes regulated by free choice of the citizens.

Like John Stuart Mill, Rawls overestimates the benefits of republican capitalism. Economic inequality is maintained by concentrating wealth, effectively transferring it from the working class to the wealthy. The worst-off individuals are both the most vulnerable and the most exploited. Their liberty is limited by their lack of wealth. Comparing American capitalism to the Nordic model or social market economies of Europe, the poorest benefit from increased regulation on the market and constraints on economic advantage influencing electoral politics.

Rawls published Theory of Justice in 1971. To frame the United States as conforming to the Difference Principle in the shadow of the civil rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr requires overlooking substantial injustices. Charitably, Rawls may have acknowledged the shortcomings in American political economy, but his emphasis on competition shows substantial sympathy with capitalist justifications of the market. The Difference Principle requires one to evaluate inequalities based on how the losers in the competition fare, so Rawlsian argments should be marshalled to support social justice and a welfare state.

Fortunately, Rawls’s positive assessment of capitalism can stand apart from the Difference Principle. The Difference Principle does not assert that there should be inequalities; it merely sets the conditions for inequalities to be just. While Rawls composed his theory of justice for liberal democracy, he succeeds in framing a notion sufficiently general that it applies to political organization generally. Recuperating the work of Rawls and Mill from their commitment to liberal democratic capitalism enables anarchist and socialist arguments to be framed in the language of academic political theory.

Pyramidal distributions of power guarantee social and economic injustice. To maintain sufficient support from the working class, the aristocrats will establish affinities between themselves and the working class. These affinities create the illusion of shared incentives, enabling the aristocrats to recruit for and justify the actions of the military and police that enforce state power. Identification with the aristocratic affinities divides the working class against itself, limiting its ability to act collectively. Horizontal distributions of power prevent the rise of aristocrats and therefore the motivation for stoking division.

The history of class exploitation, colonialism, and racial oppression demonstrates the theory. Medieval Christian lords pointed to shared religion as their source of authority, enabling exploitation of Jewish people and warfare against Muslim empires. British colonizers fomented rivalries in Africa to cultivate economic relationships and eliminate competition. With the unifying identity of “whiteness,” some Americans abuse people of color as a means of sharing in the superiority of the elite who exploit all of them.

When aristocrats promulgate affinities, they create a hierarchy of moral status. The preferred group, always significantly overlapping with the aristocracy, enjoys the full status of moral personhood. They have legally recognized rights and freedoms largely defended by the authority of the state. As one deviates from signifiers of the preferred group, one loses moral status. Legally recognized rights are not defended by the state and may be retracted, enabling any economic success to be plundered by the preferred affinity or the state itself. Public policy defines ways to control and contain marginalized groups, denying them agency. While the preferred affinity group, especially the aristocrats, may enjoy prosperity, the marginalized groups never enjoy the equivalent security.

Social and economic disparity raise significant obstacles to the cultivation of agency. Compounded traumas of poverty, incarceration, and illness impose significant economic, social, and personal costs. Some options may be significantly more costly for a member of a marginalized group, and some may be entirely unavailable. Anything they build remains vulnerable to the preferred affinity group’s plunder. While some individuals can overcome structural disadvantage, those who fail represent a failure of society to uphold the moral obligation toward them. By inhibiting and denouncing the agency of marginalized group members, the aristocrats who organize society become culpable for that immorality.

Since horizontal distributions of power remove any incentive to align affinity groups with social value, these specific harms to agency cannot arise. Self-governing communities could embrace promulgation of affinity groups to strengthen inter-community networks and facilitate research into history and migration. In that context affinity collapses into a curiosity or historical accident rather than a signifier of moral status. Without the horizon, aristocrats weaponize affinity to establish and maintain the hierarchy that benefits them at the expense of everyone else. As such, only horizontal distribution of power enables a moral forms of governance. All governance under a pyramid at best has immoral features.

The Pyramid and the Horizon illustrate the persistence of social injustice, but the argument takes for granted an obligation toward justice. A society should be just for the same reason that a person should be moral. The terms identify the ideals toward which a society or an individual should strive. However, such a simple account risks question-begging, so one also needs an account of justice that demonstrates its desirability.

Morality and justice originate in the need to live in harmony with others. Like all primates, humans live in groups. Our survival is tied to both our ability to fend for ourselves and our ability to help one another. Fundamental moral norms such as honesty, generosity, and harmlessness create a safe environment for individuals to cooperate. A norm of reciprocity ensures that individuals cultivate beneficial connections and sever harmful ones. While social units will define more specific norms, the root of morality is behavior that facilitates living in harmony with one another.

When social units mature into political entities, laws supplement morality by defining norms that political power will enforce. Since cooperation remains important to survival, laws should provide a basis for cooperation among citizens to distribute resources, solve problems, and resolve conflicts. A just society has laws that facilitate beneficial cooperation among citizens, just as a moral person behaves in ways that facilitate living in harmony with others.

If political power concentrates in a small group, the law will reflect the interests of that group primarily. If control over resource distribution enables a group to force bondage on the rest of the citizens, that group can cooperate within itself to exploit all other citizens. Such laws would be unjust insofar as systematic disadvantage poisons cooperation. If an individual is not protected by law, they must use extra-legal means to protect themselves. They must be suspicious of any cooperation because they would be unlikely to prevail in a legal dispute.

Injustice threatens the motive to cooperate, a motive inseparable from the urge to survive. Citizens should push their society toward justice because a just society benefits all citizens. We strive to be moral so that we can live in harmony with others, and we strive for a just society so that we can share the advantages of that harmony.

Advocacy for anarchism must address the difficulty of imagining a functioning society without any of the familiar institutions that currently maintain it. Anarchists face a disadvantage with such questions because anarchism describes a means of solving problems rather than specific solutions. Most systems of government can be summarized by identifying who wields political power and how they come to do so, but anarchism resists such a simple description.

In a republic, citizens vote for representatives who then govern the country. Most citizens never have to consider their social institutions beyond the elected officials who maintain them. However, an anarchist community operates its own social institutions directly, requiring the members of the community to decide how to distribute resources, solve problems, and resolve conflicts. Imagining such a responsibility without reliance on existing social institutions, one must then consider the needs of their community and how to address them.

The anarchist should not address specific questions such as “Who would prevent crime?” To do so, one must rely on a version of socialism, communism, syndicalism, or some other general political system. Defining social institutions in the abstract precludes communities determining their own social institutions as anarchism requires. An anarcho-socialist describing their ideal political economy quickly becomes a socialist in contention with capitalism, leaving anarchism and republicanism aside.

Anarchism is best communicated when the advocate recognizes that their audience needs help imagining an anarchist community. The responsibility to govern a community can feel daunting to someone conditioned to individualism under capitalism. Soothing those fears with a vision of cooperative responsibility builds an essential bridge between the audience and anarchism. Advocacy for socialism, syndicalism, or any other political economy should be directed to criticize capitalism rather than republicanism or other forms of government.