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From: carnes@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Libertarianism as ideology (on industrial democracy)
Message-ID: <360@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 7-Mar-85 23:16:17 EST
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.360
Posted: Thu Mar  7 23:16:17 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 9-Mar-85 07:05:34 EST
Organization: U. Chicago - Computer Science
Lines: 234

[Sorry about the length of this article; just long enough to cover
the subject, however.]

Barry Fagin writes:
>Richard, if we're so interested in justifying the existing order of
>society, why do libertarians advocate (among other things):
>	The legalization of prostitution?
>	The legalization of narcotics consumption by adults?
>	The abolition of all government subsidies to industry?
>	The repeal of Social Security? [etc.]

By "the existing order of society," I don't mean every social
arrangement, but rather the existing structure of dominance.  What
bothers me about libertarians is this:  They proclaim the ideals of
individual freedom and justice -- great; I applaud.  So what do
libertarians propose to do about the greatest obstacle to that
freedom and justice in our society, the dominance of capital (the
power it gives an individual who has it to command a wide range of
other goods, simply because he possesses it) and its monopolistic
control by one segment of the population?  They propose to reinforce
it, for that is precisely the effect of their insistence on the
capitalist form of property "rights" as an absolute principle.
Libertarians also reinforce class dominance by opposing on principle
any government redistribution of income or wealth.  That is why I
called libertarianism a form of capitalist ideology, since "ideology"
means an unconscious justification of an existing social order of
domination.  Now perhaps I'm wrong, but that's the way I see it and
that's why I oppose libertarianism.  

>> The power of government to tax is
>>a threat to this social order, since it threatens its basis, the
>>"rights" (really privileges) of property.  
>
>Why is property a "privilege", but free speech and freedom of thought a
>right? 

I did not call property a privilege, but spoke of the "privileges of
property."  In capitalist society the ownership of the means of
production gives one the "right" to control the process of production
and gives one arbitrary power over the lives of others (the workers).

JoSH writes:
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that Socialists believed that
>the Government was a tool of the capitalists....Please note that by
>Carnes' definition of Socialist, namely a state that was once
>capitalist and is halfway to being communist, the US is socialist to
>a T.

Only stupid socialists think that the state is *just* a tool of the
capitalists.  And the US, although it has some socialist features, is
not socialist by the Marxist definition because the capitalist mode
of production is still the underlying structure of the society.  

Again from JoSH:
>Justice is a matter of people getting their just deserts -- it
>*does not* mean everyone getting the same thing.

Nor does any socialist I know of claim that it does.  Social justice
in my view is a very complex matter without a simple and elegant
specification.  But a good principle on which to base it is the
following (from Michael Walzer):

	No social good X should be distributed to men and women who
	possess some other good Y merely because they possess Y and
	without regard to the meaning of X.  

To quote Walzer:  "This is the effect of the rule:  different goods
to different companies of men and women for different reasons and in
accordance with different procedures.  And to get all this right, or
to get it roughly right, is to map out the entire social world."
Here's a story from Walzer, about the relation between property and
political power.  It's somewhat long, but well worth pondering.
________________

George Pullman was one of the most successful entrepreneurs of late
nineteenth century America....When he decided to build a new set of
factories and a town around [his company and fortune], he insisted
that this was only another business venture.  But he clearly had
larger hopes:  he dreamed of a community without political or
economic unrest -- happy workers and a strike-free plant....

[So he built Pullman, Illinois, just south of Chicago.] ...in short,
a model town, a planned community.  And every bit of it belonged to
him....There was no municipal government.  Asked by a visiting
journalist how he "governed" the people of Pullman, Pullman replied,
"We govern them in the same way a man governs his house, his store,
or his workshop...."  Government was, in his conception, a property
right; and despite the editorial "we," this was a right singly held
and singly exercised.  In his town, Pullman was an autocrat.  He had
a firm sense of how its inhabitants should live, and he never doubted
his right to give that sense practical force.  His concern, I should
stress, was with the appearance and the behavior of the people, not
with their beliefs....

I have stressed Pullman's autocracy; I could also stress his
benevolence....But the crucial point is that all decisions, benevolent
or not, rested with a man, governor as well as owner, who had not
been chosen by the people he governed....The men and women of Pullman
were entirely free to come and go.  They were also free to live
outside the town and commute to work in its factories....These
tenants are best regarded as the subjects of a capitalist enterprise
that has simply extended itself from manufacturing to real estate and
duplicated in the town the discipline of the shop.  What's wrong with
that?

I mean the question to be rhetorical, but it is perhaps worthwhile
spelling out the answer.  The inhabitants of Pullman were guest
workers, and that is not a status compatible with democratic
politics.  George Pullman hired himself a metic population in a
political community where self-respect was closely tied to citizen
ship and where decisions about destinations and risks, even (or
especially) local destinations and risks, were supposed to be shared.
He was, then, more like a dictator than a feudal lord; he ruled by
force....

But when [the townspeople] did strike [in 1894], it was as much
against his factory power as against his town power.  Indeed,
Pullman's foremen were even more tyrannical than his agents and
inspectors.  It seems odd to study the duplicated discipline of the
model town and condemn only one half of it.  Yet this was the
conventional understanding of the time....

It is true that the struggle for rights in the factory was a newer
struggle, if only because factories were newer institutions than
cities and towns.  I want to argue, however, that with regard to
political power democratic distributions can't stop at the factory
gates.  The deep principles are the same for both sorts of
institutions.  This identity is the moral basis of the labor
movement....It doesn't follow from these demands that factories can't
be owned; nor did opponents of feudalism say that land couldn't be
owned....The issue in all these cases is not the existence but the
entailments of property.  What democracy requires is that property
should have no political currency, that it shouldn't convert into
anything like sovereignty, authoritative command, sustained control
over men and women.  After 1894, at least, most observers seem to
have agreed that Pullman's ownership of the town was undemocratic.
But was his ownership of the company any different?  The unusual
juxtaposition of the two makes for a nice comparison.

They are not different because of the entrepreneurial vision, energy,
inventiveness, and so on that went into the making of Pullman
sleepers, diners, and parlor cars.  For these same qualities went
into the making of the town....

Nor are the two different because of the investment of private
capital in the company.  Pullman invested in the town, too, without
thereby acquiring the right to govern its inhabitants.  The case is
the same with men and women who buy municipal bonds:  they don't come
to own the municipality....

Finally, the factory and the town are not different because men and
women come willingly to work in the factory with full knowledge of
its rules and regulations.  They also come willingly to live in the
town, and in neither case do they have full knowledge of the rules
until they have some experience of them.  Anyway, residence does not
constitute an agreement to despotic rules even if the rules are known
in advance; nor is prompt departure the only way of expressing
opposition....

Is it enough if residents rule themselves while only workers are
submitted to the power of property, if the residents are citizens and
the workers metics?...[But the political community] is also a common
enterprise, a public place where we argue together over the public
interest, where we decide on goals and debate acceptable risks.  All
this was missing in Pullman's model town, until the American Railway
Union provided a forum for workers and residents alike.  

From this perspective, an economic enterprise seems very much like a
town, even though -- or, in part, because -- it is so unlike a
home....It is a place not of withdrawal but of decision.  If
landlords possessing political power are likely to be intrusive on
families, so owners possessing political power are likely to be
coercive of individuals....Intrusion and coercion are alike made
possible by a deeper reality -- the usurpation of a common
enterprise, the displacement of collective decision making, by the
power of property.  And for this, none of the standard justifications
seems adequate.  Pullman exposed their weaknesses by claiming to rule
the town he owned exactly as he ruled the factories he owned.
Indeed, the two sorts of rule are similar to one another, and both of
them resemble what we commonly understand as authoritarian politics.
The right to impose fines does the work of taxation....Rules are
issued and enforced without public debate by appointed rather than by
elected officials.  There are no established judicial procedures, no
legitimate forms of opposition, no channels for participation or even
for protest.  If this sort of thing is wrong for towns, then it is
wrong for companies and factories, too.  

Imagine now a decision by Pullman or his heirs to relocate their
factory/town....The decision, they claim, is theirs alone since the
factory/town is theirs alone; neither the inhabitants nor the workers
have anything to say.  But how can this be right?  Surely to uproot a
community, to require large-scale migration, to deprive people of
homes they have lived in for many years; these are political acts,
and acts of a rather extreme sort.  The decision is an exercise of
power; and were the townspeople simply to submit, we would think they
were not self-respecting citizens.  What about the workers? 

....Today, there are many men and women who preside over enterprises
in which hundreds and thousands of their fellow citizens are
involved, who direct and control the working lives of their fellows,
and who explain themselves exactly as George Pullman did.  I govern
these people, they say, in the same way a man governs the things he
owns.  People who talk this way are wrong.  They misunderstand the
prerogatives of ownership (and of foundation, investment, and risk
taking).  They claim a kind of power to which they have no right.

To say this is not to deny the importance of entrepreneurial
activity.  In both companies and towns, one looks for people like
Pullman, full of energy and ideas, willing to innovate and take
risks, capable of organizing large projects.  It would be foolish to
create a system that did not bring them forward....But there is
nothing they do that gives them a right to rule over the rest of us,
unless they can win our agreement.  At a certain point in the
development of an enterprise, then, it must pass out of
entrepreneurial control; it must be organized or reorganized in some
political way, according to the prevailing (democratic) conception of
how power ought to be distributed.  It is often said that economic
entrepreneurs won't come forward if they cannot hope to own the
companies they found.  But this is like saying that no one would seek
divine grace or knowledge who did not hope to come into hereditary
possession of a church or "holy commonwealth," or that no one would
found new hospitals or experimental schools who did not intend to
pass them on to his children, or that no one would sponsor political
innovation and reform unless it were possible to own the state.  But
ownership is not the goal of political or religious life, and there
are still attractive and even compelling goals. Indeed, had Pullman
founded a better town, he might have earned for himself the sort of
public honor that men and women have sometimes taken as the highest
end of human action.  If he wanted power as well, he should have run
for mayor.
[Michael Walzer, *Spheres of Justice*]
___________________

Richard Carnes