Capitalists And Other Parasites: Controversial Implications for the Role of the Market in Post-Capitalist Society
Introduction: “Where the hell have you been?”
For the past few years, I have been laying low in the arena of radical politics. After the failure of the radical momentum during the Bush years to materialize into any lasting systemic change, and with Obama's “hope-inspiring” presidency assimilating a lot of the remaining activist energy into superficial liberal do-gooder-ism and easily-assimilated renovations of capitalism, I felt in some vague way that it was time to step back from radical politics for a while.
In the meantime, I have been exploring other tools (such as psychedelics) and the prospects for using these tools to facilitate radical social and ideological change. I have also been musing on the reasons for the failure of the radical momentum of the Bush years. I think it is pointless to keep on trying to do the same things when it is apparent that their outcomes are not living up to your expectations. In such a case, your model of social reality is badly malfunctioning, and it calls for a fresh look at your philosophy and your programme from the ground-up.
So this is what I will be doing—first by re-establishing from first principles a primary motivation for being against capitalism and for pursuing a radical political programme (rectifying capitalist parasitism), and then by critiquing some cherished dogma about that political programme itself (by arguing that the Market will actually remain an indispensable institution in any post-capitalist society, for precisely the same reason that the transcendence of capitalism was needed in the first place—the need to overcome social parasitism).
Motivations for Radical Politics
I have been to many political events at which speakers have shouted passionately through their microphones that capitalism is an “injustice.” Oh, how I loathe the obfuscation that this word creates! As a word, it is the perfect tool for organizers to rally groups together that really, philosophically, have no business attending the same rally. Everyone can oppose “injustice” (regardless of the fact that the word will have wildly varying connotations and implications for liberals and radicals). As we see, the word “injustice” is actually the worst word for actually explaining anything coherently, so I will not be complaining that capitalism is “unjust.”
For me, capitalism is flawed mainly for two specific reasons: having to put up with social parasites (capitalists), and having to go through life not having any real power politically or economically (which is odious for both material and existential reasons). I also object to it vaguely in a third way for the type of culture and bourgeois values that capitalism seems to cultivate. Nevertheless, I will only be focusing on the first motivation in this article.
Capitalism As Parasitic
It is a very simple thing to demonstrate that capitalists, insofar as their role as “owners of capital” is concerned, are parasites. (By “capitalists, insofar as their role as 'owners of capital,'” I mean, disregarding any accidental aspects of the capitalists such as whether they happen to also contribute effort and ingenuity while managing their capital, and paying attention only to the essential feature of being a capitalist. If a capitalist also wants to work as a manager, then a wage (not profit) remuneration comparable to the pay for another wage worker would be justified for that capitalist-as-manager. But let us consider the capitalist-as-capitalist). To demonstrate this, I will come up with a capitalist who functions only as a capitalist.
Consider a capitalist who has hired out the working of his machinery to workers, the managing of these workers to managers, and the financial and legal representation of his estate to lawyers. Let's say this capitalist gets in a car wreck and is made into a virtually brain-dead vegetable. Even so, while he lies in his hospital bed in a vegetative state, money will continue accruing to his name from the operation of his business. He need not even have his wits about him in order to make sure his funds do not get embezzled—if the law is functioning properly, it will monitor that for him. Years later, when he magically awakes from a coma, his estate will be waiting for him, larger than ever before.
Clearly his money that he originally saved up has been “working” for him, or rather, the resources, machinery, and human labor purchasable with that money has been working for him. Perhaps he is only remaining even from his purchase of labor, and it is his machinery and resources that are making money for him. Let's see if that's true.
Let's imagine that, without using his machinery, a man can farm 5 bushels of wheat a day. With his machinery, a man can farm 20 bushels of wheat a day. It would appear that the machine is responsible for farming 15 of the wheat bushels, since the change in the input was the machine, and the change in the output was the 15 bushels.
Consider it from the man's perspective, though: the machine, standing alone by itself, farms 0 bushels of wheat per day. With the man's help, the machine farms 20 bushels of wheat a day. From the man's perspective, by the same calculus, he is entirely responsible for the 20 bushels of wheat farmed.
How then, is one to divide up the produce of 20 bushels between man and machine (or owner of the machine who is dedicated to the notion of not having himself work, but rather living as a pure capitalist)? Obviously, the man should get somewhere between 5 and 20 bushels, and the machine should get somewhere between 0 and 15 bushels.
The problem is, however, that there are an infinite number of ratios that fulfill this system of equations. Mathematically, this situation could be represented by:
5 < X < 20
0 < Y < 15
X + Y = 20
Where X is what the man earns, Y is what the machine earns, and X + Y is what they produce together. If we rearrange the last equation so that the Y is by itself, we get Y = 20 – X. If we graphed these equations, it would look something like this:
http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e326/Zeiter/economic-situation1.png
Choose any point along the red line between the blue f(x)=15 line and f(x)=0 (the x axis), and you will fulfill the systems of equations. We could, for example, split it up 10 and 10. We could split it up as 12 for the man and 8 for the machine (meaning, the owner of the machine). Interestingly, if we took the midpoint, we'd end up with 12.5 for the man and 7.5 for the machine, which seems to maintain the difference between the pre-combination productivity of each input by itself, while distributing the increased productivity from the combination evenly among the two, from the standpoint of the human (he was producing 5, now the output is 20, there's 15 surplus production to assign, so he gets what he was already producing, plus 7.5, while the machine gets what it was already producing, plus 7.5).
Furthermore, whichever point on the red line between f(x)=15 and f(x)=0 that we choose, it will be in the interest of each party to agree to. Even if we choose a point like 5.0000001 for the man and 14.9999999 for the machine, it it is still technically better for the man than the alternative of refusing the deal and continuing to work on his own, producing 5.0000000 bushels. Likewise, if we choose a point like 19.999 for the man, and 0.001 for the machine, it is still technically better for the machine (or, the capitalist owning the machine) to agree to this deal, than to get nothing at all.
Given that there are these infinite possibilities, where does the deal actually get made in real life? This is where “supply and demand” comes in, which essentially, when it concerns how one earns one's livelihood, boils down to “which party is less desperate for the deal and thus has more leverage?” If the capitalist is starving, absolutely must make some money, and is absolutely dead set against doing any work himself, then he must basically accept whatever he can get, even if it is something like 0.5 bushels for him and 19.5 bushels for the worker. Obviously, this scenario is not common. Much more common would be the opposite scenario, where the worker is starving and must do anything to increase his earnings, even if it means taking a deal like 5.5 for him and 14.5 for the machine (capitalist). In general, the deal will tend towards one of these extremes depending on who is most desperate. Only if the desperation on each side happens to be perfectly balanced would you get a deal like 12.5 for the man and 7.5 for the machine (the midpoint, as mentioned above).
The situation above is more reflective of the haggling that might go on between a medieval freeman peasant and lord rather than between a wage worker and a capitalist because the “worker” in the above example always has the option of working alone for 5 bushels/day and subsisting. The situation of a wage worker is far more disastrous because he has no land to fall back on to produce a subsistence of 5 bushels/day. His alternatives are, don't combine with the capitalist's machine (and land, etc.) and produce 0 bushels, or combine with the capitalist and produce 20 bushels. This is the situation that Marx was describing when he said that a precondition for capitalism was that labor had to become a commodity, meaning, something that had no use-value in-and-of itself to the worker that possessed it, but rather, something that only obtained value when sold (to a capitalist), something that only had “exchange value,” in Marx's words.
For the capitalist, the situation is the same as before: his machinery (and land, etc.) will produce 0 bushels without the worker, or 20 bushels with the worker. So the system of equations we are dealing with in this case is:
0 < X < 20
0 < Y < 20
X + Y = 20
Where X is what the man earns, Y is what the machine earns, and X + Y is what they produce together. If we rearrange the last equation so that the Y is by itself, we get Y = 20 – X. If we graphed these equations, it would look something like this:
http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e326/Zeiter/economic-situation2.png
This graph looks similar to the one before it, except for the subtle difference that the endpoints are different. The extreme cases are:
The man earns 0.000001 bushels, and the capitalist earns 19.999999 bushels.
The man earns 19.99999 bushels, and the capitalist earns 0.0000001 bushels.
The midpoint in this case would be each party earning 10 bushels.
Once again, there are an infinite number of points on this line between these endpoints for which it would be in the “interest” of both parties to agree to the deal, compared to what each party could obtain without the deal. So, how does a ratio actually get chosen? By supply and demand, or as it should perhaps it should be called in instances where it holds the livelihoods of people in the balance, “the law of desperation.”
In most cases, the worker is going to be more desperate than the capitalist for a number of obvious reasons that I don't need to go into right now (less reserve capital stock for hard times, capitalist has option of having himself work his machinery (land, capital, etc.) rather than employ a worker, etc.) So the deal is going to tend towards 0.000001 bushels for the man, and 19.99999 bushels for the capitalist.
However, there is a factor that prevents the deal from ever sliding all the way to this extreme: the worker, being a factor of production for the capitalist, needs to be able to maintain himself (physically, mentally, emotionally, etc.) in order to be able to work the next day for the capitalist, for the capitalist's sake. It would be a shortsighted capitalist who abused and prematurely ruined his tools. Therefore, in practice the earnings of the worker will settle towards a minimum of how much it takes for him to reproduce his own labor. This also, includes, by the way, the cost of raising the next generation to continue on his labor when his own body inevitably wears out.
What we have arrived at is the realization that any talk of “the worker gets paid exactly what his labor is worth” is hogwash. The worker gets paid what it requires for him to maintain himself as a working tool of the capitalist. The reality is, there's no objective way to determine “what his labor is worth” in this situation. It is anywhere on the red line, from 0 bushels to 20 bushels.
The closest thing you might point to as an “objective worth” of the worker's labor would be the midpoint: 10 bushels, splitting the earnings (not the profits, but the earnings!) right down the middle in this case with the capitalist. In fact, it does not take long to realize that, according to this analysis, splitting the earnings right down the middle will always be the midpoint where the worker's labor by itself can produce 0 bushels (because he lacks any means of production to work on, even land), and where the capitalist's machinery/resources will produce 0 bushels on their own without any human input (as they always will).
I am skeptical of how “objective” even this midpoint is, though, because it takes no account of how complex, expensive, or efficient the capitalist's machinery is. It could be a simple plow, or it could be a supercomputer, and in each case both the capitalist and worker by themselves will start out producing 0 bushels alone, and then together the full product (whether it is 20 bushels with the plow, or 2 million bushels with the help of the supercomputer), and the midpoint will be either 10 bushels, in the first case, or 1 million bushels in the second case, but in either case the midpoint will still mean 50% for the worker. This intuitively just doesn't make sense to me.
What I think this thought exercise demonstrates more than anything, I think, is that the law of “supply and demand” (or the “law of desperation,” as it might be named in these instances), warps any agreements to the extremes of what is minimally acceptable to one of the parties, in comparison to some much worse prospect that really should not even be an option in a humane society in the first place (starvation). In any conceivable situation, this will be to the supreme disadvantage of the wage worker. The agreement will be so warped to the extreme against him that he will effectively be paid however much the capitalist can afford to squeeze out of him (the only impediments being the need to maintain the worker in working condition, and the threat of working-class rebellion). If we cannot consider this parasitic, then what can we?
In a broader sense, should we not object to using other human beings' situations of desperation against them out of simple emotional revulsion to it? It would be like seeing someone drowning in a flood and offering them a rope for an infinite amount of money—all the money that the person will ever make in life subsequently, minus the amount needed for his/her own maintenance. Sure, the person still has an “interest” in accepting the deal because the only alternative is certain death, which is worse, and you can still say that you are doing the person a “favor” because, even if accepting the deal, that debt-burdened person will still be better off than had you never shown up...but such a deal is at one of the very extremes on one of our lines, and it just feels wrong from the standpoint of our emotions as social animals needing to cooperate in good faith with others in our species, historically and today, in order to survive. And yet we allow the operation of this “law of desperation” in millions of instances in our society every day.
If I sound like I'm objecting to this on moral grounds, and not grounds of objective material class interest, as any good Marxist should, it's because I am. Now, I'm not saying that this is immoral because of what some God or holy text says. I'm saying it is immoral because I viscerally feel that it is immoral, probably because of certain genetics that most humans share that give us an instinctual sense of some social situations being “moral” or “immoral.” I don't care if I never convince the capitalists of the immorality of this, as long as I can convince enough workers of it.
(Note, also, that I am criticizing the law of supply and demand only insofar as it is used in absolutely essential transactions that inherently have an element of desperation in them. I am not objecting to someone in a village market somewhere selling a pair of shoes to someone else according to the laws of supply and demand...unless that person is going to die without that pair of shoes and is so desperate that he must agree to the deal, no matter what the cost. As I will explain later, I actually consider the market in many situations to be indispensable).
Since there is no “objective” way to divide up the worth of labor and machinery when they are joined together, then I propose that we make sure that we never have to! There is no question of this division when a worker is working his/her own means of production. It is when a means of production is operated by someone other than the person who owns that means of production that we run into this insoluble problem of finding an objective division of productivity and have to resort to a barbaric law of desperation to cut through the infinite mathematical indeterminacy.
What, then, if we stipulate in our society: no absentee-operation of any means of production? That is to say, no operation of a means of production by someone who does not own it. As a corollary, of course, it would follow: anyone who is allowed to use a means of production becomes an owner of it. Cooperative ownership would be a precondition for cooperative labor. Therefore, if you don't want others jointly owning something that you currently own by yourself (such as a handsaw, a small machine shop, or a large factory), then don't agree to have others work with those means of production with you! (In reality, there would be no means of production capable of employing more than several people in solitary hands because these would be the obvious targets for workers to take over outright during a revolution).*
Note that, if the workers were feeling really unjustifiably generous, then they could even take over these multi-employee enterprises with compensation to their former owners. The compensation to the former owners, however, would be in the form of property that could never be employed as a profit-earning means of production ever again. It could always be sold, but what was bought in exchange or it could also not be used as a means of production for earning absentee profit.
In my mind, this “absentee profiting,” of off means of production by people who are not working them, the lack of equal profit by the people who are working those means of production—this parasitism, this is the essential feature and problem of capitalism, and what I've outlined here is, I think, an easily-imaginable and feasible way of running our society otherwise.
*By the way, if you are worried that loaning your toothbrush to your friend will make him “part owner” of your toothbrush, then all I have to say is, it will be the domain of law, legislation, public opinion, and common sense to stipulate what sort of things would be covered by this principle, and what sort of things would not be.
The Indispensability of the Market
I've already gone over how capitalism is parasitic, and how that parasitism can be removed. Now, I'd like to attack a sacred taboo of the radical left and explain why the “Market” might actually be essential to preventing other sorts of parasitism. (Note the distinction between capitalism, which I defined very specifically as abstentee ownership of means of production by non-users, and the Market, which has the same common sense definition as it probably does for you).
Humans seem to have a natural aversion to parasites, whether biological or social. We sense that leeches, intestinal worms, ticks, etc. are bad for our body. Regardless of whatever diseases or annoyances they bring with them, at the very least they deprive our body of its resources and make us expend more effort in order to manufacture those lost resources. This is the essential feature of a parasite as far as this discussion is concerned.
Humans also seem to be averse to social parasites. We have many social institutions designed to disincentivize social parasitism. Some, like “the Market,” are quite visible in our contemporary world. Throughout human societies that have traded in markets, the agreement has been that neither side wants to give away something for nothing, and so in order to get something, you must give something that the other person finds valuable in return. The logic of the Market is, if you don't produce some good or service that others in your society find useful, you starve and die.
The Market seems emotionally callous, and it is indeed emotionally callous, but throughout history it has been supplemented (and, for probably all of prehistory, overshadowed) by another mechanism designed to disincentivize social parasitism, one that I might call “economic morality.” This mechanism, far from being emotionally callous, is very emotionally rich—but really, just as brutal. The logic of this system says, “If you don't produce something for us, we will still feed you so that you don't starve, but meanwhile we will also throw dirty looks at you and make you feel like an outcast until you produce again.”
When radicals in modern capitalist countries look at hunter-&-gatherer societies, radicals often construe a peaceful tribe in which everyone magically gets along without the use of a market. “Everybody shares.” Primitive communism. One idea is that, if primitive communism worked, then industrialized communism could work too.
I don't necessary disagree. Industrialized communism could work—except that it will come with the same price that primitive communism comes with, which is a communal life that must reprimand you morally with social scorn and ostracism when you don't “share” equally. It is a social life in which the accounting is done in emotional rather than numerical terms. How much someone owes you is determined by the magnitude of your vague sense of disgust and annoyance at their laziness (or by your vague sense of admiration at their help they've given in the past, as the case may be).
Do you think that any primitive tribe allows any and all members to do nothing socially-useful? No, the question would hardly ever come up because it would be something that “just wasn't done.” You would have been taught from childhood in various implicit ways that everyone had to have a role in the tribe. Some, such as the shamans, might not even produce food or other physical necessities, but would rather attend to the medical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of the tribe. But everyone would have to have a role, and not necessarily just any role, but specifically, something that contributed to community life. Needless to say, this role need not take up all of one's time (or perhaps any more than 4 hours a day, if some studies of the work-habits of primitive tribes are to be believed). But nevertheless, there are mechanisms other than the Market in place to disincentivize social parasitism.
I suspect that many small radical cliques get the impression that industrialized communism could work, and that everyone would indeed “pitch-in” and take out the garbage when needed, etc., because it works well within their own small clique. And indeed it can work well in situations where strong emotional ties bind people together and make them emotionally accountable to each other. In such cases, the garbage does, in fact, get taken out.
However, even in these harmonious cliques I do think that there does emerge after a while an awareness that a (different) sort of calculus is actually going on—that they have simply replaced money with social approval. Petty hostilities flare up from time to time, bearing witness to the unseen, but felt, emotional calculations going on underneath, of the likes of “He's really annoying me. It seems like he takes out the garbage consistently a little less often than me. I'm starting to resent that.” Except, unfortunately, I don't think activists in radical cliques are so conscious that these are where some of their “problems” are coming from because they don't want to acknowledge that a sort of calculus is still going on. It reeks too much of “the Market,” but unfortunately having demands placed upon oneself in exchange for either money or social approval is a hard fact of human social existence.
There are, granted, a few situations in any human society where these calculations don't come into play, where we unconditionally bestow love and care and resources and attention on people with no expectation of recompense and with no thought of it constituting social parasitism—we do this with children, the elderly, and with various types of individuals who are deemed to be unable to help themselves (although if there is any suspicion that these people could indeed be helping themselves, then the care is given only alongside subtle or not-so-subtle hints of social disapproval, so these are not true examples, as the emotional “economic morality” calculus is still very much in play—such as when the Salvation Army feeds the homeless only on condition that they listen to a bunch of Jesus talk).
Note that some people (including myself in the past) have tried to make the argument that the decision to help children is actually done as a sort of social contract with the unspoken expectation that those children will help their parents in old age. I don't doubt that this comes into play, especially as the child gets older. However, I suspect that we mainly help young children and the elderly because of emotional attachments and pre-rational instinct (not that these activities are necessarily bad just because they are pre-rational! Or rather, these activities might be pre-rational from the standpoint of maximizing one's resources, but entirely rational from the standpoint of tapping into the ways in which we are hardwired as humans to find joy in life.)
It is an important fact that the two major exceptions to the human aversion to parasitism, children and the elderly, take place within the family. Pre-rational emotional bonds of a strength that can only be forged by a lifetime of intimate contact are what enable these otherwise parasitic relationships to be rewarding for other, incalculable reasons. Even the most cult-like and insular of radical cliques will have difficulty establishing this sort of intimacy.
In any case, radical cliques have the calculus of “economic morality” to fall back on in order to disincentivize parasitism, but that only can work within the radical clique, where individuals are emotionally accountable to one another. When it comes to interacting with strangers in mass society, strangers cannot be relied upon to not be parasitic because there is no emotional accountability. One doesn't have any way to shame these strangers or make them feel dejected and outcast for being parasites. Therefore, if one has ruled out the market as a check on social parasitism, you potentially allow social parasitism to run rampant. The Soviet Union gets unfairly beat up on, I think, for how it supposedly fostered laziness. I think most people overstate the case and ignore the subtle social pressures to work (as well as overt political pressures) that, I'm sure, continued to operate, quite apart from any economic pressures. Nevertheless, in a purely communist society (which the Soviet Union was far from being), I do foresee laziness as possibly being a problem.
One rather far-out solution that I could envision, aside from the Market, would be if it was mandatory for every citizen to take a dose of LSD or some other psychedelic once a week. What this might effectively accomplish would be to reproduce the intimacy and emotional accountability of the family on a society-wide level, such that “economic morality” could disincentivize social parasitism not just among a small emotionally-intimate group like the family, but between you and any stranger you meet on the street as you both stare into each others' souls, loaded on LSD. You wouldn't be able to say to yourself, “So what if that random stranger thinks I'm a social parasite. I don't care.” because that person's seemingly-telepathic voice of disapproval of you would be intruding into your mind, and you would not be able to avoid the emotion of guilt that would arise. Not that it would often come to this, though. You might end up identifying with some far larger altruistic interest, from the pharmacological influence of the LSD, in the first place, so as to prevent any impulse towards social parasitism from even arising. Anyways, compared to this, I'm sure relying on the Market to dissuade against social parasitism would be far less controversial (lol).
Now, I think the Market should disincentivize social parasitism in the same way that the family does. The Market should never cause one to die because of being a social parasite (i.e. turning the “law of supply and demand” into “the law of desperation,” as I mentioned earlier); it should only make you a little uncomfortable. The only reason it allows you to die from being a social parasite currently is because it makes workers more desperate to agree to deals more advantageous to capitalists. But the emotional logic of this is completely foreign to us (my probable readers in the industrialized West) when we consider that there is probably no family in the industrialized world that would allow one of its members to die just because it was being parasitic. (People make much of the legend of the Inuit ceremony of shipping a dieing elder out on a chunk of ice to die of exposure precisely because it seems so crazy to most others. Likewise, in the same way, the Chinese practice of aborting female fetuses just because the families anticipate the girls being economically parasitic strikes most people in the industrialized West as barbaric). Families do, however, have other, slightly more gentle ways of making social parasitism uncomfortable and of incentivizing one to not be a social parasite. This is what the Market should do as well.
Finally, as further evidence that the Market is indispensable, I would point to how it always spontaneously reconstitutes itself after any revolution, even revolutions explicitly with the object of getting rid of the Market. Sometimes revolutionaries will say that they are “getting rid of money,” only to institute “labor-time vouchers” or other sorts of ostensibly fairer currency. But the function being fulfilled is still the same, whatever the name of the currency. In much the same way that I consider workers' councils to be the obvious primary institution of proletarian democracy because of their spontaneous emergence in pretty much every proletarian revolutionary attempt, I consider it a point in favor of the indispensability of the Market, the fact that people continually see a need to resurrect it, or something like it with a different name, every time it is disrupted.
Conlusion: Where this fits in the broader picture of my vision for post-capitalist society
My ideal radical programme would include the following:
*Workers' democratic control of the means of production.
***Democratic determination of workers' relative profit remuneration at each enterprise by the workers themselves. (Technical experts and ingenious managers can be paid more, if the other workers deem it fitting. And vice-versa).
*The Market for distribution.
*A legislative government of recallable delegates whose permanent job is to draft legislation that they think will be relevant to the voters who will then vote on the legislation directly with weekly ballots put up to a direct vote.
*A recallable, impeachable executive with extremely limited powers and many Constitutional restrictions placed on it.
*A recallable judiciary (because if I cannot count on the eventual sagacity of the masses, then this project is dead in the water in the first place).
*A revolutionary or Constitutional transition, with or without partial compensation to the owners of capital, I don't really care either way. Whatever looks most feasible. (Mind you, any compensation would be in property that could not be, henceforth, employed as capital to make a further profit).
In many ways, this is where I began my journey as a proponent of radical politics in junior year of high school, before I had ever heard of anarchism, back when I naively thought that these had to be entirely original ideas (because I had never heard them from anyone else before). In time, I would learn that these ideas had somewhat of an historical precedent, particularly in the form of the individualist anarchism of Benjamin Tucker, and the anarcho-syndicalism of the Spanish CNT.
It always seems more legitimate to have some sort of historical precedent behind your ideas, so that it doesn't just sound like you are a lone lunatic shouting in the wind. That, perhaps, partly explains why I soon abandoned some of the more nuanced and compromising touches of my radicalism and accepted, partly on faith, that the anarcho-communism of Kropotkin could work. And indeed, when you read his “The Conquest of Bread,” or “Fields, Factories, and Workshops,” he does put forward a rather compelling case for a thoroughly communist society. Marx, then, of course puts forward a very compelling case for why the change will never happen through constitutional means. I am familiar with all of these arguments. And yet, as I've thought about things, I wonder.
I consider it an open question whether the change that I envision could be brought about legally. Certainly it would never be without the active military resistance of capitalists and their militaries, but might we still be able to give some legal legitimacy to the transition as well? Certainly, I've always been convinced that this sort of fundamental change could never come about unless it were popular, unless it had at least a majority of support among the population. So my primary goal has always been to change minds first, or rather, to encourage class consciousness in general, and I have always been critical of reform-oriented radicalism that considered this sort of reflection and talk the mere idle banter of ideas. Well, as Marx once said, “thought becomes a material force the moment it influences the masses.” Or something like that. I can't bother to look it up.
In any case, thanks to this reflection, I've come to the startling conclusion, against my own will, really, that the Market will actually remain indispensable, even in a post-revolutionary non-capitalist society. I say “against my own will” because it would be a much tidier intellectual package, and a much more popular one among the Left, to remain with the notion that communist distribution could work, but I've come to the conclusion that this notion retains its vigor only in large part because radical cliques can rely on “economic morality” to give a semblance of the feasibility of altruistic harmony within their own ranks—a harmony that they mistakenly assume will flawlessly extend to encompass the entire society, given the correct initial conditions. Even if economic morality could extend to the rest of society, would we want it to? It might feel a lot like living in a Massachusetts Puritan village, complete with occasional witch hunts to root out the unpopular social parasites by less formal means that the Market can accomplish.
