Tag: politics

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.

Utilitarian ethics evaluates morality by the ratio of pleasure to pain. John Stuart Mill, who framed the most philosophically robust version of Utilitarianism, applied his ethical theories to his writings on poliical economy. Like many of his contemporaries, Mill promoted “liberal democracy,” a political philosophy with a system of individual rights and freedoms that allows citizens to influence the action of government. Free market capitalism was seen by many political economists, Mill included, to be an essential ingredient of a free society. Unfortunately, capitalism accomplishes the opposite as wealthy people have opportunities never available to the poor. Understanding why Mill does not anticipate this dynamic and reject capitalism shows why Utiltarianism should instead reject capitalism, not merely reform it.

 

As a Utilitarian, Mill argued that moral good is achieved when there is generally more happiness than there is pain. Undergoing pain voluntarily into order to achieve a worthy end, like an athlete training for a competition, is good when the happiness gained outweighs the pain suffered. While an individual can decide to trade some current pain for future pleasure, Mill does not think that a society can ask one person to suffer for the sake of another person’s happiness. In such a situation, Mill argues that no one could be happy because any pleasure they enjoy could be taken away at any time if someone else would benefit.

 

When applied to political economy, Mill’s Utilitarian framework evaluates policies by their potential for enabling happiness and avoiding pain. Since Mill acknowledges that happiness depends on the individual’s preference, he prefers a societal system that enables individuals to pursue whatever happiness they choose as long as they don’t hurt anyone else. Mill also recognizes that concentrated wealth affords a small group more choice, and therefore more possibilities for happiness, than the majority of people enjoy. Instituting a tax on inheritance would ensure that wealth would be gradually redistributed, as Mill argues in his Principles of Political Economy.

 

However, Mill proposes only a gradual redistribution by reducing inheritance rather than an aggressive redistribution by taxing wealth directly. However, the advantages that accompany wealth tend to enable further concentration of wealth. Wealth purchases influence through political donations, lobbying, and propaganda. Political influence allows wealthy people to obstruct redistributive efforts, further exacerbating wealth inequality. Through philanthropy, wealthy individuals influence the education, science, and the economy, shaping it according to their needs and their beliefs. The working class generally enjoy fewer choices, and even their available choices must serve someone else’s happiness even if it luckily also serves their own.

 

A charitable interpretation of Mill’s views would assume that Mill believed the harms done by concentrated wealth are not too severe, that concentrated wealth would not influence public policy to prevent redistribution, and that Mill would revise his proposal if his beliefs changed. Mill argues against socialism by claiming that capitalism provides more freedom than socialism, that inequality provides more motivation to strive, and that monopoly abuses are unlikely to manifest. While Mill did not see wages declining during his day, the decline of real wages from the 20th to 21st century has now been well-documented. Compounding advantages of wealth enable monopolistic collusion to prevent wage increases. Reduced wages motivate workers, requiring them to spend more of their waking hours working in order to provide for their needs. The working class then have very little freedom as long as they remain chained to wage-earning activity.

From a contemporary perspective, none of Mill’s objections hold. While the wealthy may enjoy a high degree of freedom, the corresponding suffering of the working class cannot be justified. As such one might assume that, if he were exposed to the right data, Mill would agree that capitalism fails to enable freedom, and that more direct redisribution of wealth may be needed.

A community may organize so that power concentrates in a few decision-makers who organize and direct the efforts the everyone else. The small number of decision-makers relative to the rest of the population constraints the number of opportunities to lead or wield social or political power. A small number of people will hold power over the rest, and very few people will be able to attain those power positions. Power in such a society can be represented by a pyramid with the few “at the top” ruling the many “below” them.

A community may also organize to limit the scope of any social or political power. In such a society leaders or decision makers oversee a small or narrowly defined domain to organize or direct only a few people, or only within a specific circumstance or activity. Opportunities to wield social or political power may be numerous even if the scope of that power remains relatively small. Many people, potentially every person, may find an opportunity to lead in some capacity. Power in such a society can be represented by a horizon with many “leaders” who must cooperate with one another to achieve large scale shared goals.

The Pyramid and the Horizon represent an abstraction of power distribution in a society as one might find it. Political states throughout the world tend toward the Pyramid, ruled by an elite few who organize and direct the many. The Horizon appears in less formal associations or small communities.

When set against the the history of politics and political states, the Pyramid serves as the preferred tool for conquerors and rulers who rely on coercive power. The rising political class forms or allies with a martial class to compel obedience from the working class that forms the majority of the population. The monarchies that arose in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire exhibit this pattern, as do monarchies in India, China, and Japan. Governance aligns with the interests of the political class generally, the martial class where needed to maintain loyalty to the political class, and the working class only to ensure continued support for the political and martial class. Since the political class needs to prevent unified resistance from the working class, they need only to serve the interests of a defined subset at the expense of the rest. Much of the political class’s influence over the working class can be accomplished by propaganda rather than serving material interests, convincing the privileged subset that their interests align with the political class and against the rest of the working class.

The Horizon pattern emerges organically in small communities or in response to systematic oppression by the political class of an established Pyramid. Anarchists and collectivists, generally committed to cooperative power, tend toward the Horizon when organizing for reform or revolution. Distribution of power prevents the formation of a well-defined political class since any person may exercise power in some domain but will be subject to power in other domains.

As such, the political class and its supporters perceive the Horizon as a threat. Establishing a Horizon existentially threatens an established Pyramid and will diminish the power and associated wealth or control over resources that the political class enjoys. The political class will work against any reform that distributes power more broadly, preferring to maintain systems of oppression rather than sacrifice their privilege and power. Pyramid propaganda will frame the Pyramid as the only viable model and argue that the Horizons generally collapse into instability. However, no political entity can survive under constant attack, and a move toward the Horizon attracts sustained attack from any Pyramid. Historically, evidence for Pyramid reactions to such threats can be seen in the wars against France instigated by aristocrats who feared their privilege at risk in the wake of the French Revolution, the framing of anarchist collectives as bent on destruction, and the assassinations of civil rights leaders carried out by the FBI under COINTELPRO.

Nevertheless, the Pyramid instantiates injustice throughout its system of governance. The political class leverages their influence to concentrate wealth and resources, utilizing the martial class to suppress active resistance. Continued extraction of wealth from the working class reinforces established power as it enables the political class to purchase support from the martial class and often a select privileged subset of the working class established to divides the working class.

Since the Pyramid cannot sustain itself without that pattern of exploitation, support for hierarchies of power entails support for continued oppression and abuse of the majority of people for the benefit of a minority aristocratic class. Accepting the status quo of the Pyramid means accepting the rampant death and destruction leveled against a divided working class and whatever foreign states the Pyramid can exploit through the threat of military force. Concentration of power will always produce such abuses because the political class needs to enact abuse to maintain its position. Reform of the Pyramid is impossible. To achieve justice a community must move toward the Horizon.