What we accept when we accept individual freedom
Posted on Thursday 20 August, 2009
Filed Under Society
THERE is a natural tension between social conservatism and social liberalism, and not one that can be broken down on the usual left-right or Labour-Conservative axis.
Thus there are many socialists opposed to supercasinos, lap dancing clubs and 24 hour drinking, on the grounds that such activities are both detrimental to working class communities and carried on for private profit.
I happen think that attitude is wrong, and that the left should back the right of adults of all classes to engage in gambling, voyeurism and prodigious alcohol consumption if they elect so to do, irrespective of whether we approve personally.
At the same time, I acknowledge that the red puritan stance is a legitimate opinion with a traditional base in Britain’s ‘more Methodist than Marxist’ labour movement.
There is a similar cleavage on the political right. From the outside, it looks mostly an age thing. Thatcher’s children tend to be of the ‘let it rock’ school, extending the logic of the free market into the personal sphere. Yet at the same time, the Cameroons see no contradiction in harping on about ‘Broken Britain’.
Older commentators, and some rightwingers of religious motivation, still appeal to a morality that essentially disappeared in Britain decades ago. Some of them almost appear to be anti-fun on principle.
I have tried to explore such themes in a number of recent posts. I am well aware that my recent comparison between Tracey Connolly and Sir Fred Goodwin is not one of my better offerings, probably because the underlying thinking is slightly confused.
The thing is that we social liberals of both left and right demand social freedom, especially for ourselves, even though we can see the logical consequences of these freedoms when extended to society as a whole.
So we are agreed that it is bad when people are reduced to mugging or burglary to fund drug habits, especially when it is us they mug or burgle, but jolly agreeable when the middle classes break the charlie and the spliff out after a North London dinner party.
I have been in otherwise prosperous North American cities and seen block after block transformed into a wasteland as a result of the prevalance of crack cocaine. Yet still I am on balance in favour of the legalisation of Class A drugs.
Promiscuity among teenagers, especially those chav slags off the estates, sends the Daily Mail crazy. But student bedhopping at Oxbridge is only to be expected, and businessmen and politicians can get their leg over with the secretary and maybe a mistress or two, provided only they can afford the upkeep. Girls whose daddies buy them a loft apartment in Shoreditch are nice, girls who get knocked up to blag a council flat are nasty.
Tracey Connolly is slammed for watching porn, presumably of particularly low grade, on the interent all day. But there’s nothing wrong with arthouse flicks or young professionals popping into Anne Summers and picking up that Hoxton Honeys DVD by that supposedly tasteful young woman porno director.
Not working is disgraceful if one’s idleness is funded by benefits, but quite alright for trustafarians. Of course we want the ability to divorce, especially if it is our marriage that goes wrong, even while we recognise that the breakdown of the family has ineluctable social consequences.
The double standards are palpable, and the trouble is, neither side can have it both ways. If we buy into individual freedom – and I for one very much do – then we buy into what it entails.
So when we insist on our right to chainsmoke, get pissed and check out adult internet sites – because we can handle it, can’t we? – we logically insist on the right of Tracey Connolly to do just the same, even though she can’t.
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65 Responses to “What we accept when we accept individual freedom”
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I pretty much agree with you on personal freedoms, but there is the issue of the impact and harm to those around and how to square that.
For example gambling and when it becomes an addiction. In my family on my dads side, quite a few gambled, not perhaps to addicted levels, but enough to seriously impact on a pretty hard up working class household. Drinking as well, which resulted often in violence to female partners. In was ingrained through the generations. So my aunt, who has seen her violent drunk father beat up her mother, married a man who drank, though was less violent.
I think much of this had to do with lack of education and opportunities . There wasn’t any support or anywhere to turn and anyway I can’t imagine any of the men then going to support groups to address their drinking, violence or gambling.
I don’t think the answer is to stop people ‘for their own good, ‘it is important though to realise that some people can’t handle the drink or the gambling and although it is their choice it very soon stops being a real one and harms others. There needs to be support to help people stop. There also needs to be an awareness that in this current society its often those who have the least money and hope that turn to these activities in excess and that percentage wise it takes more from their incomes.
Sometimes a choice is borne out of having a crap life and wanting to escape, whether thats a dream of winning the lottery or blotted out by booze. So we need to work with that whilst saying people have freedoms. Freedom isn’t real if you have fuck all in life .
Even with my background , I am of a more libertarian slant, but there needs to be safety nets for those most affected and damaged by exercising their choices. They are often the ones who are not doing it at a nice dinner party either.
I do wonder why you stand up for “social liberty” but not “economic liberty”? You are quite happy to endorse your middle-class right to do charlie or get hammered or whatever, but balk at the idea of letting people keep the fruit of their labour.
Either you believe that people should be free or you don’t. But saying “people should have these freedoms but not those freedoms” marks you out as either a nutter or a hypocrite.
Obo
Because I don’t regard the free market as ‘the constitution of liberty’. Capitalist freedom necessarily means working class unfreedom. By having property in the means of production, you exclude me from having property in those means of production.
It’s an old debate.
Your question here is should any society have a say on other peoples behaviour or should people be free individuals allowed to do what they like, when they like and for what reasons they like?
I think to believe the latter is just another way of saying “there is no such thing as society” and seems the antithesis of socialism.
I also think that even if you allowed this anarchy some form of law would establish itself anyway, those affected by someone else’s bad behaviour would likely take revenge and soon groups of people would get together to form vigilante groups. This pure freedom argument is an illusion and asks the very important question you raise in the wrong way.
I’m all for legalised gambling, but you can hardly deny that the Supercasino project was an ugly and frankly rather bizarre spectacle. The image of a Labour government begging international gaming magnates to come to Britain, moving hell and high water to let them do so and claiming that this was the solution to urban decay in our cities is one I’d rather forget.
Hoxton Honey’s video? Thx for the tip old boy. Jumping on to pirate bay now to look for the d/load…
“a morality that essentially disappeared in Britain decades ago”
Goodness me, Mr Osler, you really need to open your eyes :
“When I got home I was overtaken by a desperate need, the likes of which I had never experienced, to cover my head. I put on my scarf and called my mum…the head scarf was once used to aid me in my quest to impress, vanity. Now it is worn in the true essence of what it stands for – modesty.”
“Not working is disgraceful if one’s idleness is funded by benefits, but quite alright for trustafarians.”
I think the point is that I’m taxed for the benefits, but not for the trustafarian (aka ‘idle rich’) – not unless said trustafarian is son/daughter of a banker anyway.
It’s interesting that your normal writing style is very clear and easy to understand, but that this explanation of why you exclude economic freedom is conspicuously less coherent than everything else. I struggle to understand what your argument is trying to be.
What you seem to be saying here is that by making ‘means of production’ something that costs money, it excludes the people who can’t afford it.
Which is true… but why is that a bad thing? “Whoever can and will pay” is the most liberating way to allocate resources – it treats everyone equally, and it delegates the decisions to individuals themselves.
What’s the alternative to deciding who gets what through the price mechanism? It’s the state deciding to treat people differently rather than equally, using the power it has to coerce some people into handing over money/property/businesses on demand (on pain of prison) to dispose of based on political priorities.
When it comes to “who gets what” the choice is, and always has been, money or force.
Money or force?
It’s all too easy to confuse liberty with money – to assume that they’re one and the same. If you point a gun at someone’s head and take their money from them and give it to someone else, you cannot possibly argue that the total liberty involved as remained the same just because there’s the still same amount of cash.
Personally, I found Dave’s original sentence quite coherent, and Charlotte’s reply totally incomprehensible.
‘Money or force?’
Randian!…..Give-A-Way
Randians have never understood there might just a connection between the two. Guns, Bullets, Batons and barbed wire ain’t free either. And those unions didn’t break themselves.
“Whoever can and will pay” is the most liberating way to allocate resources – it treats everyone equally
No it doesn’t. It privileges those with money.
What’s the alternative to deciding who gets what through the price mechanism? It’s the state deciding to treat people differently rather than equally
No it isn’t. The alternative is democratic community control of resources, and ultimately an abundance of production that ends the need for rationing.
This is what Marx called ‘the leap from necessity to freedom’.
The idea behind my above comment can be found in philosopher G A Cohen’s ‘The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom’, if you want the argument expressed impeccably with full rigour rather than on a blog.
The idea here is that your freedom to exclude me from your land results in the unfreedom of everyone else in the world.
Laban
My point is one of morality rather than economics.
Is it moral to be given housing without ‘earning’ it? If so, that point applies to both council housing and parental gifts.
Is it moral not to work? If it is, that goes for both ‘scroungers’ and rich kids.
Dave
Laban’s been hawking that quote about. I think it’s a quasi-feminist defence of theocracy or some such.
Charlotte
Firstly, the price mechanism doesn’t decide wealth and who gets what! This fundamental mistake perverts your entire outlook!
And your idiotic propaganda that capitalism doesn’t involve force may wash within your right wing circles but just exposes you as dishonest or stupid here.
Charlotte said: “Whoever can and will pay” is the most liberating way to allocate resources – it treats everyone equally, and it delegates the decisions to individuals themselves.”
This sentence may hold the record for most contradictions in a sentence ever!
Most liberating for the wealthy but the most despotic for those without! Treats everyone not equally but based on wealth and actually creates immense inequality! Delegates decisions only to those individuals who have wealth, to rule over those that don’t!
Capitalism has to divert huge amounts of resources just to deal with the fact that it naturally does create inequality, concentration of power and wealth and despotism.
We are socialists we want a society that produces for Human need, one that liberates the great majority of humanity and not just the wealthy, one that denies any individual the right to exert power over other individuals or allows any individual to live off the labour of other individuals.
And talk about lacking coherence, how about this for a paragraph,
“It’s all too easy to confuse liberty with money – to assume that they’re one and the same. If you point a gun at someone’s head and take their money from them and give it to someone else, you cannot possibly argue that the total liberty involved as remained the same just because there’s the still same amount of cash.”
You lefties all make me laugh except of course when you are in government.
You go on and on about freedom, but in fact you are opposed to freedom.
It is usually very hard to know what you are in favour of except that somehow society needs to tell people what do do (but only if thatcher’s not PM).
Wake up and realise that freedom means the liberty to do what you like when you like without having to defer to anyone provided that what you do doesn’t impinge on anyone else’s similar freedom.
The only person with a brain who has posted here aprt from me, is charlotte gore and you all pretend not to understand her well made point.
you are pathetic.
At least the previous libertariloon had the good manners to wrap her nonsense up in some pseudo-intellectual guff. This one just likes getting angry and shouting at the screen.
Poor quality trolling.
“Wake up and realise that freedom means the liberty to do what you like when you like without having to defer to anyone provided that what you do doesn’t impinge on anyone else’s similar freedom.”
As restricted a view of freedom as any socialist I know. And what does similare freedom mean?
And when will you right wing idiots realise that capitalism by its nature concentrates wealth and power?
When the west’s power begins to diminish you lot will be singing a very different tune.
I demand the total freedom to drive at 150 mph down the wrong lane of the M4 doing lines of coke whilst listening to late Coltrane and texting my broker. That is MY basic freedom (of fast movement) and an organic expression of personal liberty and human rights. YOURS is to get out of my way quickly. Or are you a “moralist” or worse? A MUSLIM moralist? Being at home in neo-liberaland means that morals are also commodities. It not a moral maze, its a buyers market.
Anyone who tries to stop me is obviously a reactionary fundemantalist/neo islamo-fascist and that evil (pre-post modern) attitude is what our wonderful boys (Gordon’s Heroes) are now stamping out in Lower Afghanistan and Wooton Bassett High Street.
Even my relatives are “relative”
I thought Dave’s article was pretty much spot on.
All the 19th century marxist, anti property, rich is evil and therefore you stole your money/property/means of production from the poor prolitariate such a load of old and outdated bollix. Any of you unreconstituted old lefties could do a very small modicum of research to find that the circumstances you describe do not hold true in the vast majority of cases in real life.
Please give me a real life example/evidence of
By having property in the means of production, you exclude me from having property in those means of production.
Libertarian
Simple enough, I would have thought. If you own a factory, I cannot own that same factory.
Uncontroversial, surely?
Eat, drink and be merry, I say – red hedonism
Quite a lot of messy thinking here that is typical of the Left.
“… it is bad when people are reduced to mugging or burglary to fund drug habits…, but jolly agreeable when the middle classes break the charlie and the spliff out after a North London dinner party.”
Surely both of these behaviours are bad? It’s just the former involves stealing as well as drug taking.
as is…
“Promiscuity among teenagers, especially those chav slags off the estates, sends the Daily Mail crazy. But student bedhopping at Oxbridge is only to be expected, and businessmen and politicians can get their leg over with the secretary and maybe a mistress or two, provided only they can afford the upkeep. Girls whose daddies buy them a loft apartment in Shoreditch are nice, girls who get knocked up to blag a council flat are nasty.”
… there is no difference: all these behaviours are wrong. If anything a politician conducting an extra-marital affair is probably worse than the (ahem) “chav slags” you speak of. Especially if he lies when suspected.
You are simply trying to make class an issue.
“the left should back the right of adults of all classes to engage in gambling, voyeurism and prodigious alcohol consumption”
Why should the left back it and not frown upon it? Give me one good logical reason why the misery of addiction, alcoholism, sexually transmitted diseases, etc should be encouraged.
However you are right when you say “not one that can be broken down on the usual left-right or Labour-Conservative axis.”
Regardless of political persuasion, some things are just bad for society.
@ Obnoxio the Clown
I do wonder why you stand up for “social liberty” but not “economic liberty”?
Why do libertarians stand up for “social democracy” but not “economic democracy”?
Or “no u” as the young people say.
balk at the idea of letting people keep the fruit of their labour.
It’s more the idea that you should be able to keep the fruit of other people’s labour I have an issue with.
A lot of the issue here is that most libertarians have never really understod the difference between personal and private property. Robert Anton Wilson puts this one well:
The error of most alleged libertarians — especially the followers (!) of the egregious Ayn Rand — is to assume that all property1 is property2. The distinction can be made by any IQ above 70 and is absurdly simple. The test is to ask, of any title of ownership you are asked to accept or which you ask others to accept, “Would this be honored in a free society of rationalists, or does it require the armed might of a Stateto force people to honor it?” If it be the former, it is property2 and represents liberty; if it be the latter, it is property1 and represents theft.
@ Dave
Yes simple, but totally wrong!
I own a factory. Or rather the business that I have a majority of the shares in owns a factory, all of my workforce colleagues own shares in the business so they also own the factory.
Ownership of the means of production was always a pretty stupid marxist concept even when it was more relevent in the 19th century. Now in the 21st century in the West where the vast majority of the wealth creating means of production is now in the brains, technical talent and skills of the individual worker it’s a busted flush.
I guess you could claim that Marx was right in that now that the workers DO own the means of production there is a fairer society, it just happened better under a capatalist system than socialist.
Who’d a thunk it eh!
why do marxists only drink herbal tea?
because proper tea is theft
@ Joker
That joke works better if you tell it about anarchists…
Libertarian – are you saying that you and your colleagues work in a cooperative-owned factory and you all own and control the business collectively?
Great. But that isn’t the predominant economic model under capitalism, is it?
If you own a majority of shares then you own the factory, therefore nobody else can own the factory.
@bemused
No it’s a straight forward limited liability privately held company like as you say most companies.
One of the problems with socialists is they have never bothered to understand how capitalism works or what a free market is and what the difference is. They just assume that because in the 18th and 19th century workers were exploited by mill and mine owners that ALL workers are STILL exploited when of course they aren’t not least of which I partially explained in my reposte to Dave about brains and talent.
However to ownership of a peice of land or some walls and a roof ( ie nothing whatever to do with the means of production any more just somewhere for us all to hang out together and do what we do)
A limited liability company has a number of shares in circulation lets for the sake of arguement say it’s 100. It is a legal vehicle and IT, not the individuals actually technically own it’s assets, one of which may be a factory.
Lets say me as a the founder of the business and the person that risked their savings on the start up own 51 shares and the workers between them own 49, then I have a controlling interest in voting rights in the company, but I do not own the factory, the business and all it’s shareholders own all the assets of the business.
I could vote to liquidate the company but then after all liabilities are settled what is left has to be divided up proportionally.
Now this is a private company. If you happen to be a Public Limited Company with your shares freely traded on the stock exchange then no one person owns a majority of the shares ( it’s not allowed, if an individual or another entity acquire more than a set amount of the equity they are required by law to make an offer acceptable to the remaining shareholders to buy them out)
So your local Whitbread Pub, or BP petrol station or Dunlop tyre factory is actually owned by 1000′s of people.
It seems to me that there are a number of things being confused here.
1) The ownership of property
2) The means of production
3) Workers exploitation
1)On the whole individual people do not own factories and commercial premises. For the simple reason that it is highly inefficient and tax unfriendly to do so. I would say that 90% of commercial property is owned by businesses. The only time this might not apply is an individual who owns the freehold of a shop and flat but still trades as a sole trader.
2) The means of production, is in about 75% of cases nothing to do with factories at all and in reality even factories aren’t a necessary thing to have use of in a manufacturing business. Now days the means of production is in the skills, labour, knowledge and creativity of individual workers.
3) Whilst some worker exploitation still happens, certainly in 3rd world sweat shops and in certain “dodgy” operations here, ie chinese cockle pickers etc, these operations are illegal in this country and therefore a criminal activity not a commercial one.
This is one explanation of how a factory can be owned and is owned by more than one person. If you add to that the fact that for instance I have a business in another town that uses a factory there that we lease from another business who owns the freehold. My business owns the leasehold, the freeholder can sell the freehold but I still get to use the factory for as long as my company owns the lease. So again 100′s if not 1000s of people “own” the factory.
Libertarian is taking the piss when he says that socialists don’t understand how capitalism works. His ignorance is total.
He utterly fails to understand how ownership works and how capitalism develops.
I will not get into a substantial argument with this guy as he is clearly dishonest or delusional but…..
Here are a few stats to mull over :
The wealthiest 1% owned approximately a fifth of the UK’s marketable wealth in 2007. In contrast, half the population shared only 7% of total wealth.
For me the thing about “individual liberty” is that it implies individual knowledge, the ability to make informed choices. Hell, it implies the “individual” being a meaningful entity in today’s world.
The indivdual is a social construct. The Japanese pre-Meiji era didn’t have a word for “individual” or “society”. In the American West, being an individual means owning a gun, watching NASCAR and hating gays, like all the other individuals. In Hoxton being an individual means variations of big hair and ironic t-shirts.
The mass media operates as a system for defining our individuality for the ends of capitalists. Supply and demand fails as a concept because demand – our wants, our tastes – is created, not simply satisfied. We don’t “demand” a 4×4 until we’re shown an advert of a man on a mountain driving one. Freedom of choice in a capitalist system is meaningless (or not quite meaningless, it’s better than the freedom’s of a fuedalist society, but worse than that offered by socialists) we get to choice if we buy strong or super-strong dish washing detergent but not whether or not to put money a neoliberal system that starves Africans. We can choice between any number of political men in sharp suits, but not whether we want the major political decisions in the world to be delegated to men in sharp suits.
This relates to social libertarianism. If people decide they want to box, if this a worthy desire springing from the soul, the informed intellect, the heart, that should be honoured? Or is it the result of an economic and social structure that makes men want to prove their manhood? Ditto strip clubs. Can Casinos be seen as anything other than capitalists exploiting people’s notions of ‘glamour’ and ‘risk’ to get people’s money for nothing?
This is not to completely deny individual agency. But it’s to say we live in a society where our capacity for individual agency is oppressed from many angles. In such a society, legislating against individual choice for greater social good (for example, able bodied people shouldn’t have the “choice”, or “right” to buy cars if they can live without them, because the environment is more important than their comfort) is perfectly moral.
I call myself a socialist because I put society above and before the individual.
@ Dear Steve Hodge
Really , well then genius give me one example from anything I said that shows a lack of understanding of capitalism.
Give me one piece of evidence that I’ve been dishonest or delusional.
You are a typical socialist when faced with facts you can’t answer you resort to name calling and screaming he’s a witch, he’s a witch, laughable.
OK the “facts” that you have given me to mull over aren’t facts at all they are just plain wrong, but it doesn’t matter that they are wrong because they are meaningless. By they way if 50% of the population shared 7% of the wealth that would give each of them £28000 per year and I think you’ll find that the average income across the board is actually £22000
The biggest amount of wealth in this country must be owned by the state or else where did they get the £175 billion they just spent on quantative easing? or the £1.5 trillion they have spent on public services?
Socialists always make the same mistake thinking that there is a fixed supply of wealth and if someone has a lot of it, it means that the rest of us get less. Wrong again. ( A socialist government in 1945 introduced the system of fiat money we have today)
Socialism is about subduing, manipulating and controlling the working class ( that’s why so many middle class tossers are socialists) Well some of us in the working class don’t fall for it.
What you lot think of as socialism is actually updated feudalism. Worse the left are great at telling us that we are all equal and we shouldn’t stereotype, then they go right out and grotesquely stereotype evil CAPITALISTS.
So bright boy who are the biggest single group of wealthiest shareholders in the UK ? Come on you can tell me, you must know you’ve got the answers and I’m delusional after all. No, well let me tell you. The biggest group of shareholds with the largest amount of money invested in the stock market, gilts, bonds, and commodities are…the 1.4 million workers in the NHS.
I have better things to do than counter your stupidity but here are a few more facts:
Firstly definition of wealth re previous stats: the estimates of the distribution of people’s marketable wealth relate to all adults in the United Kingdom. They are produced by combining Inland Revenue estimates derived from the estate multiplier method and ONS national accounts balance sheet estimates.
Now more stats :
The United Nations produced figures showing the top 2% of the world’s population –that’s people dick brain – owned more than half of all global personal wealth in 2007. Within that “the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2007, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total.”
Half the world’s population own only one percent.
The World Wealth Report has estimated the total wealth of rich individuals at $37.2 trillion. Of the wealth we are aware of , there are two main areas in which it is spent: financial investment and private consumption. This investment can be divided into four areas: real estate (commercial and residential property), cash deposits (in bank accounts we can see), equities (stocks and shares), and what is called ‘alternatives’ (things like hedge funds). In 2007, of the $37.2 trillion of private investment, 24% went on real estate, 14% was in cash deposits; equities were split between 21% in bonds giving a fixed income and 31% in shares; the remaining 10% went on alternatives.
The report also points to the huge amount of debt, particularly in the west and that many people in high-income countries have negative net worth.
bemused: “a cooperative-owned factory… isn’t the predominant economic model under capitalism, is it?”
Both capitalist and cooperative structures exist today, not “under capitalism” (that would be tautological and contradictory, respectively) but rather in a reasonably free economy. Capitalism is just a form of ownership, one with consequences certainly, but still that’s all it is. It isn’t an economic system.
Dave: “If you own a factory, I cannot own that same factory.”
Very true, but the case has to be made that it’s meaningful. Ultimately, things are going to reduce down to that in any system. If you eat a sausage, I can’t eat that same sausage. But you could eat a different sausage – one that I can’t eat – and you could own another factory. This isn’t zero-sum: you could build a new factory.
Of course, a sausage isn’t a “means of production”, This certainly is an old argument, and you might feel that the case has been made that the means of production are different to sausages.
Many of us find it hard to see the difference, though. Not because we’re malevolent, but because we just can’t. We can trade sausages for factories if we have enough of them. They’re all just property, and we choose which forms of property we own. Putting my property into a factory might create employment, rather than exploit it.
It’s an old argument, but not one in which you’ve proved your case to very many people.
Not the old sausages aren’t means of production argument!?
“We can trade sausages for factories if we have enough of them” – But how do you get enough sausages that can be traded equally with a factory?
Why would you put your property into a factory, what would be your motive? It would be exploitation, we argue for a different value system.
And you claim capitalism isn’t an economic system; I really have heard it all now!
Yes ownership is part of it but ownership and the economy are not mutually exclusive.
All economies are free in that other, better forms can come along and supersede them. In this way slavery was a free economic system. But these tautologies are really mind numbing, as was the rest of your dreary, meaningless contribution.
Never has such drivel been delivered in such a sermonic way.
ScurvyDom: “The indivdual is a social construct.”
For that to be true, society would have had to precede the notion of individuals. Is that the case? It is actually arguable, in the sense that some social groupings seem to have been present in very early human and even pre-human populations, even if just extended families and clans.
Does what was basically a family constitute a society? That isn’t really your use of the term, so far as I can tell. A lot of “there is no such thing as society” conservatives would place great weight on the family, and the more palaeolithic of them might say that individuals within families, wives and children, should bow to the will of the clan leader, the father.
If a Japanese culture had no words for either individual or society, we haven’t really got anywhere. The portrait of the American West you paint is just silly.
Hi Scott. A reasonably successful 40 years of employment would give me enough sausages – one of my clients bought a factory under exactly those circumstances, having inherited absolutely nothing whatsoever. It was a smallish, failing factory and cost less than his house was worth. About 40 employees. Bigger factories tend to be owned by lots of people pooling their sausages.
If you want to present a tautology (it’s exploitation because it’s exploitation) as an argument, I can’t really stop you. But safeguarding 40 jobs and adding another 20, all at rising wages, isn’t my idea of exploitation. If you feel that the whole value of each worker’s output is morally theirs and for the business owner to take any of it is exploitation, then you also have to explain why the whole output of the workers’ labour is not morally theirs, when it comes to the State deciding to redistribute some of it.
Capitalism is not an economic system, but arguing from incredulity is a logical fallacy.
Freedom does not mean a condition of non-freedom that can one day perhaps be replaced by something else. That isn’t a tautology, it’s a contradiction in terms.
But to continue to break the BCROC (blog comments rules of conduct), and remain reasonably civil, I take my hat off to you for that first line, Scott.
“Putting my property into a factory might create employment, rather than exploit it.”
Goodness, someone has never come across the labour theory of value (shock horror). It is possible to create employment and exploit it. Indeed, exploitation may well, and often does, go hand in hand with improved living conditions for that exploited labour. It is still, nevertheless, exploited labour. Of course some labour is more exploited than others and some forms of exploitation (or the working conditions that accompany them – ever seen ‘Blood, Sweat and Takeaways’ on BBC 3 about the workers who produce much of our food in places like Thailand?)are worse than others. But exploitation is not primarily a moral term (although obviously there are ethical implications built in to it) – it’s more of a technical term which simply expresses the idea that capitalist accumulation (crudely, profit)is reliant on the extraction of a surplus from the labour force.
You might not agree with that of course. But it’s only sensible and fair (and common courtesy in fact) that you should attempt, at least, to find out about the basics of the political-economic approach you’re attempting to lay into.
I’d actually just like to echo the comments of someone above who mentioned that socialism should be thought of in terms of the extension of democracy. Private property in the means of production necessarily sets limits to the scope of democracy and the sphere of the ‘political’. Socialists are from this perspective consistent liberals – they take the idea of democracy seriously and believe that people (not the state) should have a real say over the things that directly affect their lives including, most importantly, democratic control over their own work and democratic control over the wider production and distribution of resources. Right libertarians in fact favour the restriction of democracy. Their freedom is freedom for the rich and the powerful (which is actually no kind of freedom at all).
Ed: “Right libertarians in fact favour the restriction of democracy. Their freedom is freedom for the rich and the powerful (which is actually no kind of freedom at all).”
I couldn’t agree more. It gets worse: some of those involved in the UK lib party argue for an extension of the powers of the monarch as a counter to those of the democratically elected government.
I’m aware of the labour theory of value, I don’t agree with it. Perhaps I should have made that clear. I’d cheerfully discuss why if you like, but it’s drifting off topic in this thread.
I also think there are proper limits to the scope of the powers of democratic institutions over individuals, and that this is a reasonable definition of “liberal”. Liberalism began as the advocacy of individual rights (including in the franchise) over established powers: clerical, monarchic, and those based on wealth. And that’s what it should still be thought of as.
I’m exactly arguing that societies precede individuals, especially “the individual” in its essentially modern, political and cultural sense.
There were no “individuals” in feudal Britain, in that nobody imagined themselves in this way. People saw themselves as members of a group, farmers, merchants etc. On a political scale people were “subjects” long before they were “individuals”.
“The individual” as a unit capable of self-consciousness and political action is the product of specific historical forces in the history of ideas. It is a unit that differs between cultures, in America it holds a lot of ideological weight and legitimacy, in Japan it is very much subservient to the concept of society and social coherence.
As a word it has different meanings in different places – I stand by what I said about the American West because it is true that talk of “rugged individualism” is often a shorthand description or endorsement of a specific conservative NASCAR loving lifestyle, common to a particular society.
All the individual choices you could care to make are conditioned by your society. The very notion that you are an individual capable of choices is the product of The Enlightenment. Whether or not you choose to vote Tory or Labour, and the fact that you vote for a person called a Member of Parliament in what is known as a General Election is the product of the historical forces that created the Parliament and the party system. The words I choose to argue with you know have been shaped by complex linguistic, literary and political processes over the last thousand years or so.
I support “the individual”, and think it is one of capitalism’s successes that it helped bring the notion into existence and to the masses. I just think that the freedom and self-consciousness of such a being would be more perfect under socialism.
I don’t quite agree with Scott that ‘individuals are a social construct’ – although I see where he’s coming from. It’s totally obvious to everyone (apart from neo-classical economists) that individual behaviours, tastes, wants, desires, culture, sense of self and relation to others and their environment are socially conditioned. The methodological individualism of neo-classical economics is thouroughly absurd. Without learning a language (and language is by definition a social process) and the ability to communicate with other human beings we would not be who we are. The individual does not exist somehow prior to or outside of the social relations that he or she enters into from the day of his or her birth (or even before that, considering that a foetus is reliant on the mother).
I think it’s difficult to say that individuality is simply a social construct though. It’s more of a dialectical process – an intertwining of two things/processes which aren’t actually distinct from one another. It’s impossible (and probably meaningless) to make a sharp differentiation between the ‘individual’ and ‘society’ (or, better, the social relations that that individual encounters).
ScurvyDom: Do you not have to go back far before feudalism, by some tens of thousands of years, to determine which came first? And it might be worth considering that feudalism gets its name from an oath (feodalite or something like that) between individuals – this pre-dates the idea of the nation and was a society based on individual compacts.
I don’t know that we really have much idea how people thought of themselves at that time. Chaucer gives some insight, Mallory maybe, but both were very late in the period. I haven’t read any other medieval authors in any depth, apart from the historical sources. If people thought of themselves as part of a group, it was more vertical thahn horizontal, I think (with the possible exception of merchants). More based around the Manor. Even peasants were involved in individual contracts – I blogged about something that touches on this here:
http://freebornjohn.blogspot.com/2009/07/caristia-of-labourers.html
The thing is, I don’t know how we’d find out how early societies considered the respective importance of the individual and society.
Peter
Well, OK, we can do the civil agree to disagree thing. I respect classical liberalism – and find much of it very attractive – I just don’t fully agree with it in the sense that I don’t think that it goes far enough.
The point about the labour theory of value, though, was that your objections to Dave’s and others’ use of the term ‘exploitation’ just ignores the theoretical context in which that term, here, is being used. You are coming at this from an ideological/theoretical perspective which simply doesn’t map on to the one that’s taken for granted here. So it’s like you’re talking past each other. It’s not just about disagreement – it’s also about not talking about the same thing.
Ed: “It’s totally obvious to everyone (apart from neo-classical economists) that individual behaviours, tastes, wants, desires, culture, sense of self and relation to others and their environment are socially conditioned.”
Neo-classical economists are quite aware of this; they include them under the heading of “incentives” and say that incentives matter.
Ed: “… your objections to Dave’s and others’ use of the term ‘exploitation’ just ignores the theoretical context in which that term, here, is being used. You are coming at this from an ideological/theoretical perspective which simply doesn’t map on to the one that’s taken for granted here. So it’s like you’re talking past each other.”
I meant to suggest that this idea wasn’t a given, in the way it was presented. But talking past each other is a danger in these discussions and I accept I might have needed to be more explicit about this.
Thanks for your courtesy and conversation; I’m going to bed.
Sorry but I’m struggling to see how the inclusion of incentives in neo-classical theory indicates the full incorporation into that school of thought the observation that individuals are thoroughly enmeshed in, and largely constituted by, a complex network of social relations.
Ed, that’s more questioning whether neo-classical economists give enough weight to such issues (social relations), and that’s something they’d argue about with each other too. This weighting really is a difference between classical economics and Marxist economics, but it’s wrong to suggest that the classical folk aren’t aware of the issue.
I’ve a feeling this is the fundamental difference, because both accept a lot of common principles. Marxists seem (to my eyes as an outsider) to feel social conditioning can explain almost all, if not all, of human responses, whereas classicists feel there are some fundamentals. This carries through into other areas where relativism is a feature of the Marxist left in, say, critical theory, whereas the right, and Liberals, feel there are absolutes.
@Stephen Hodge
See you had to do it again and call me names you pathetic little wanker.
Quoting tractor stats isn’t an arguement. You ALWAYS ignore what is said and quote something completeley meaningless. What the f*ck has your peoples stats on who all the rich people are got to do with the point under discussion. Nothing. What rational arguements do you have to counter or produce an alternative to the points I raised, none.
You are the biggest tit I’ve come across so far on the blogosphere and that really is saying something.
Are you still at school?