The Free Market Ain't Free

So, Marxists are self-deluded utopians, right?   Any Objectivist uber-capitalist will tell you that they are the ones who see the world with clear eyes.

Or do they?  It seems that Objectivism relies on utopian self-delusion (or is that faith?) more than anyone is admitting.

Case in point: an open and freely competitive market will always result in the best products.

Oh really?

Three words: VHS versus Beta.

Three more words: Mac versus PC.

The only possible way you can judge VHS video systems or PC computer systems as superior products is if you consider advertising, market leverage, and distribution as part of product quality - in that sense, these products did prove superior.  A capitalist accounting always takes into consideration the excess detritus that makes up the whole of the thing as it appears in the market (the thing + its production + its marketing + its initial position in the market as determined by the market strength of the entity that owns it), not simply the thing itself.

Since capitalism deals only with the quantitative, not the qualitative, the products cited are judged superior, since they are the ones that took over the market.  This is the destructive reductive central aspect of capitalism: because it does not deal with the qualitative, it can not judge "good" in any meaningful way.

Sometimes the best product takes over the market.  Sometimes it doesn't.  That's a long way from the "cream always rising".  It's a long way from the understanding that the Objectivist publicly projects about the market.

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And what exactly is a "free market" anyway?  Is it a market which is naturally allowed to evolve on its own without interference, or is it a competitive market?

"Unencumbered" markets (markets which are allowed to evolve naturally) tend toward monopolies.  Strong corporations become stronger and more dominant in the market as markets become more complex and difficult to master.  There are, of course, some markets which don't readily lend themselves to monopolies, but wherever monopolies are possible and desirable, they will occur unless there is interference from the outside.

Monopolies per se are not the problem; rather, it is the tyranny of the bottom line that is given primary importance by the capitalist system that causes the problem. Monopolies allow corporations the ability to focus solely on their own bottom lines without having to answer to competitive challenges . . . again, the primacy of the quantitative wins out, and in the case of a monopoly, the qualitative is wholly subservient to the quantitative. Monopolies are built to control markets; the production of goods is secondary.

American professional sports leagues are shining examples of the efficacy of regulated markets.  The fact that amateur drafts are always ordered to place the worst teams first (except for the NBA, which has a [somewhat flawed] formula that theoretically orders the worst teams first without allowing teams to manipulate the system) shows how sports leagues value the outcomes of their systems over the mechanisms.

It can be argued that the competitive limitations leagues put on their teams actually hurts the quality of the product: what if the richest team, the "monopoly" team, were able to bid openly for talent instead of waiting in line for the draft, or dealing with some variation of a salary cap that allows less rich teams to bid for the best players? Theoretically they could buy the very best players at each position, and then stock their benches with the second and third tier players simply to keep them away from other teams.  This team would, by any definition, be the best team available, and it most likely would dominate its league.  In this case, the "monopoly" team would be the best not just in a quantitative sense, but in a qualitative sense.

This is an important point.  Monopolies are not necessarily bad . . . they are as good as their goals.  If your goal is to build a space program that will get you to the moon in a few short years, then a monopoly is not a bad idea.  If your goal is to pool risk to lower the costs of medical coverage for an entire population, then a monopoly is not a bad idea. If your goal is to put together the most insanely talented football team ever, then a monopoly (no draft, no salary cap, just a wide open market) would be good . . . and not just good in a quantitative sense, but in a qualitative sense as well.

But what is the ultimate goal of "quality" in professional sports?  It's not to have the best team, it is to have the best contest . . . and, to that end, the sports leagues have decided to heavily regulate their markets.  It ranges from baseball, who will theoretically let you pay as much for your roster as you wish (but try to make the balance more competitive by taxing the living hell out of you if you spend too much, thereby making it prohibitive to spend above a certain amount), to NASCAR, who essentially makes everyone drive identical cars, who will change rules as soon as one team displays even the most minute of technical advantages, and even aren't afraid of changing rules on a race to race basis*.  In this sense, the market regulations that the leagues have imposed have been successful, since they make the leagues competitive and interesting . . . and, importantly, despite the ebbs and flows of their incomes, wildly successful in the quantitative as well as the qualitative sense.

The simple fact that discussions occur on the qualitative level, whatever the final outcome may be, makes sports markets superior to financial and commercial markets. It also puts in sharp relief the question: what is a free market - the market which is most free in its mechanics, or the market which is most free in its access?

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And, free or not, who went and made the market the final arbiter of all that is great? Oh, right.  Ayn Rand did.

Please, next time you want to include Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche in the same sentence, remember the following quote:

Far from the market place and from fame happens all that is great: far from the market place and from fame the inventors of new values have always dwelt.    -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: First Part, "On the Flies of the Marketplace"

So you can just go to hell, John Galt.
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*  Does anyone else find it ironic that the sport most closely tied to the Tea Party is the most socialist of sports?

The Duty of Civil Disobedience Part 2: Governance in the Larger Sense

Thoreau wrote "Civil Disobedience" in 1848 and 1849.  One of the main roots of Thoreau's discontent, America's invasion of Mexico, ran from 1846 to 1848.  The spoils of that war were most of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

John Jacob Astor, the first American multi-millionaire, died March 29, 1848.  The first American transcontinental railroad was started in 1863, and finished in 1869.

Apropos Thoreau's other prime example of American governmental immorality, John Brown helped jump start the American Civil War with the Pottawatomie Massacre in 1856 and the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859.  In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President, and on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces attacked a US military installation at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.  Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865.  Lincoln was assassinated five days later.

Thoreau himself died of tuberculosis in 1862.

Ireland's Great Famine, known here as the Irish Potato Famine, ran from 1845 to 1852.  This famine was probably the source of the biggest voluntary migration to the United States, though one hesitates to call escaping starvation and death completely voluntary.

In January 1848, the very same month Thoreau began delivering a series of lectures that would become the basis of "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience", Karl Marx finished the Communist Manifesto.

I don't have a blackboard, but there are some connections here.

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Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist.  Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers.  As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants.  Not only are they the slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overseer, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.  -- Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party

With Marx and Thoreau, we have historic attacks on what can be called, at their most base and simplistic level (the level on which all public political discourse takes place in this country), both the public and the private sectors.  Following the logic of current political thought, these theories are diametrically opposed, but they do have one thing in common: both are interested in attacking the structures that control and subjugate populaces.

How Marx and Thoreau came up with these ostensibly opposing positions is clear.  Thoreau was living in a brand new country with seemingly limitless land, spaces, resources, and opportunities.  America at the time was certainly capitalist, but since virtually nothing was scarce in the country, the conditions that would later foment Communist revolution worldwide were not yet obvious.  There had been various recessions and depressions, but with the exception of the 1819 depression, most economic problems had been localized and diffuse.  And while there were certainly rich (relatively speaking) men around, there was yet no super rich class (folks along the lines of the Astors), no robber baron class, no obvious gulf between the rich and poor (since most everyone still participated directly in the production of goods).  No, the gods of capital had yet to wrest control of America; rather, it was the government that stood everyone in line and set the stone tablets of moral imperative for the country.  Thoreau, finding that morality lacking, had a clear target.  That target we call today, in our pre-digested and overly simplified way, the public sector.

Marx's target was older and more evolved, but just as clear.  The morality he opposed was indeed dictated by governments, but these governments themselves are controlled by money.  Monarchical and feudal privilege had by this time mostly disappeared and evolved into the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.  Marx's Europe was fighting with all kinds of shortages, and in the production processes of the capitalist machine he located the dehumanization of its subjects.  Marx certainly had a beef with governments, but the source of the problem was not there, but in the people who pulled the government's strings . . . and those people were very private.  Or, as we say, the private sector.

And yet, does this public/private dichotomy even make sense?  The forces of control are all public to the degree that they delimit our public sphere; and private to the degree that they are constituted at a level different than the one they occupy (here in America, by the ballot if you are an optimist, and by the checkbook if you are a realist).  Think of governance in a larger sense: who runs your life?

In the end, the whole public/private debate is a red herring: we should think of governance as the monolithic structure that runs our lives.  This structure has its public and its private aspects, and these aspects do not necessarily code out the way we normally think they do.  There is, in this country, an absolute continuum between what we normally consider public and private*, and the struggle is between various ideas of morality, not between ways of executing this morality, which is all that "public" and "private" boil down to.  It is time to dispense, once and for all, the idea that "public" sector and "private" sector oppose each other.

It is not my job here to reconcile Marx and Thoreau; rather, I think that an understanding of each can inform us on governance in the larger sense.  Both Marx and Thoreau are concerned, at their very core, with dehumanization.  And, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how we fight against the dehumanizing forces we face: it just matters that we fight.

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Sometimes, like I said, civil disobedience is a simple thing, if not an easy thing.  It is simple for Libyans, Egyptians, Tunisians.  Simple, but certainly not easy.  On the other hand, it is easy for Americans, but extraordinarily complex.   Is there a store that you can buy from which does not, in some way, diminish the rights of citizens somewhere?  Is there a vote for a man or woman who is truly and always just?  Can I breathe, eat, and live without diminishing the earth?  Indeed, to paraphrase Thoreau, how can I make a living without standing on another man's shoulders?

The short answer: you can't.  Failure is the end result of any action we take.  And yet, (once again) from Beckett by way of Zizek, we can fail better.  We can improve.  We can always improve.

And that is the duty of civil disobedience.

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*  Two parts of that continuum are capital (money) and the masses (people, or the efforts of the people).

Sorry, Wrong Question

Seriously, the atheists are on my nerves as much as the fundamentalists are these days.  Below is some crap that I've hashed out before, but it's a scab I can't help but pick.

In Anti-Oedipus, their infamous evisceration of Freud, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari run across the problem of atheism, and connect it to theories of the unconscious shared by Jung and Freud even after their split:

If the unconscious is thought to express itself adequately in myths and religions (taking into account, of course, the work of transformation), there are two ways of reading this adequation, but they have in common the postulate that measures the unconscious against myth, and that from the start substitutes mere expressive forms for the productive formations.  The basic question is never asked, but cast aside: Why return to myth?  Why take it as the model?  [. . .]  What we mean is that, starting from the same postulate, Jung is led to restore the most diffuse and spiritualized religiosity, whereas Freud is confirmed in his most rigorous atheism.  Freud needs to deny the existence of God as much as Jung needs to affirm the essence of the divine, in order to interpret the commonly postulated adequation.  But to render religion unconscious, or the unconscious religious, still amounts to injecting something religious into the unconscious. (Delueze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 57-58)

Freud is casting the unconscious at the level of the "edifying forces of myths and religions", so the function (D & G's "productive force") of the unconscious is essentially the same either way.  D & G continue

Let us recall Marx's great declaration: he who denies God only does a "secondary thing", for he denies God in order to posit the existence of man, to put man in God's place (the transformation taken into account).  But the person who knows the place of man is entirely elsewhere does not even allow the possibility of a question to subsist concerning "an alien being, a being placed above man and nature": he no longer needs the mediation of myth, he no longer needs to go by way of this mediation - the negation of the existence of God - since he has attained those regions of the autoproduction of the unconscious where the unconscious is no less atheist than orphan - immediately atheist, immediately orphan. (Anti-Oedipus, p. 58)

Removing the human from the framework of myth "orphans" it, cuts it loose . . . and, when myth is re-inserted, it is no longer "natural", but must explain itself.  And again, it is this explanation that is important: the objective fact of God's existence is essentially irrelevant.

"Do you believe in God?"  Sorry, wrong question.  How about "Why do believe/not believe in God?"  That answer is going to get much more to the point.