Leaderboard

The views of capitalists and liberals historically developed out of opposition to things that came before them. Locke developed the natural rights doctrine and laid the foundation for liberalism, but was a bit of a mercantilist in economics. Late 17th and early 18th century thinkers like North, Cantillon, and Quesnay began to develop free trade movements out of opposition to mercantilism and utilized Lockean and generally Enlightenment-influenced arguments about "rights of man" and "laws of nature." The physiocracts and French liberals in the 18th century were among the first to mix laissez-faire and free trade economics with anti-slavery doctrines, foremost among them Mirabeau. The Manchester School and the American individualists in the 19th century also combined abolitionism and free trade as basic positions. Thomas Jefferson, if anything, is representative of a movement that certainly did exist mainly in America that combined rights-and-free-trade-talk with pro-slavery views. See Calhoun for example. The point there is simply that these just wouldn't count as genuine liberals precisely on those grounds. There, a distinction could be drawn between rhetoric and deeper value structure.

"What about-ism" isn't a counterargument. It's a distraction. Communism and Maoism are more like Marxism+, that is, there are elements of Marxism. What would change about her argument if she mentioned them? She easily could condemn them on grounds of expropriation. An anticapitalist could say that every attack on Marxism should mention imperialism of the US, but you would rightly respond that the essay is about Marxism, not about the ways that capitalism has been corrupted in the US. The essay is about capitalism, so let's talk about capitalism. By the way, my basic response would be what 2046 wrote, but I felt some things were worth analyzing in more detail. First we need to consider exactly how she is defining capitalism. "By definition, a system devoted to the limitless expansion and private appropriation of surplus value gives the owners of capital a deep-seated interest in confiscating labor and means of production from subject populations. Expropriation raises their profits by lowering costs of production in two ways: on the one hand, by supplying cheap inputs, such as energy and raw materials; on the other, by providing low-cost means of subsistence, such as food and textiles, which permit them to pay lower wages." For us, we probably would usually respond by saying that capitalism requires individual rights. Expropriation is an explicit violation of individual rights, so what she is describing isn't actually capitalism. (Although low-cost means of subsistence sounds like a good thing to me, so even the description is a little weird, unless she is claiming something like exploited at poverty levels). Fraser seems to anticipate such a response from a capitalist. "The common thread here, once again, is political exposure: the incapacity to set limits and invoke protections." She is saying that capitalism and rights are incompatible. As much as capitalists like us might want protection of rights, she would say that we will never get what we hope to achieve. But I think she fails to make this argument. She gives examples of expropriation, without making a clear-cut case why capitalism necessarily requires expropriation. Look at the definition before. It amounts to saying that it is advantageous for capitalists to expropriate people, especially with imperialism. But I'm not seeing why we must assume that a system of rights cannot exist that is rigidly enforced. Her argument might apply to anarcho capitalists, and that would make sense. Rand made arguments against anarchism on grounds that it would necessarily lead to rights violations. If Fraser were talking about capitalism without government, she'd probably be right. But when you throw in everything about exploitation, she is trying to talk about any kind of profit as denial of workers of what they earned. "Advantageous even in “normal” times, expropriation becomes especially appealing in periods of economic crisis, when it serves as a critical, if temporary, fix for restoring declining profitability. The same is true for political crises, which can sometimes be defused or averted by transferring value confiscated from populations that appear not to threaten capital to those that do—another distinction that often correlates with “race.” " All she really has to go on is that expropriation is "appealing". This is about as strong as her case seems to be that capitalism *cannot* protect rights. For the most part, she goes over the ways that people can be expropriated: "And it is largely states, too, that codify and enforce the status hierarchies that distinguish citizens from subjects, nationals from aliens, entitled workers from dependent scroungers. Constructing exploitable and expropriable subjects, while distinguishing the one from the other, state practices of political subjectivation supply an indispensable precondition for capital’s “self”-expansion."

I don't think Fraser is trying to suggest that none of these things are present. I don't think any of them are subsumed under exploitation or expropriation. Perhaps she would say that any presence of innovation or use of reason is hindered by the exploitation and expropriation inherent in the system. Part of her point is that under capitalism, some will benefit at the cost of others through expropriation and exploitation. Imagine I'm a rich capitalist in California during the 1870s funding the development of railroads and the technology to construct them. I managed to do this by hiring Chinese immigrants. So far so good. But then imagine that further, I use my money to promote laws that actively and forcefully discourage Chinese immigrants from bringing their family from China, starting businesses, or from holding public office. Not only would I be benefiting as a capitalist from the wonders of capitalism, but I would be benefiting from the alleged evils. Fraser is trying to get us to believe that a narrative like this will always happen, no matter what we do, that all the incentives are in place for exploitation and expropriation. I guess to her, such incentives are so overwhelming that even if capitalism begins on the right foot, it will always become corrupted. If you make more money through expropriation, why not do it? All we have to do is look at the imperialism of the US and Britain, and Jim Crow laws! I don't think she completes her argument that a profit motive incentivizes expropriation, or that proper laws can't completely eliminate possible incentives of expropriation. In my mind, profit motive disincentivizes expropriation. If I really want to have the most profitable, best quality, completely desirable product or company, I don't want to expropriate any possible customers. Why would I want to expropriate a viable market? The only way I see expropriation cropping up as desirable is if a person is racist to begin with. If slaves are thought of as subpar humans, they wouldn't be thought of as a viable market. They would be resources to harvest. The Spanish expropriated the Inca, partly motivated by religious fervor, partly motivated by seeing some of them as savages, partly motivated by desire to dominate in itself. If a profit motive was truly in place, it would have made more sense to trade with the Inca, figure out how to use their expansive roads and complex communication techniques, learn about agricultural practices, learn how to build earthquake resistant buildings, and so on. There was a viable market, and expropriation would go against that. As far as exploitation goes, there isn't anything to say except that I think it's insane that profit is viewed as exploitive by definition. Fraser might say that the Spanish would have acquired those skills through exploitation of the Inca people, which would in turn dehumanize them, which would then in turn create the conditions for expropriation. But she doesn't make arguments like this, nothing very substantiative as far as making clear the alleged necessary connection between expropriation and capitalism. Sometimes I feel that the word capitalism causes more confusion than anything, mostly because it doesn't have a clean historical trajectory. Sometimes I've heard the distinction "freed markets" instead of "free markets". My notion of capitalism when I was in high school was also very vague, I couldn't really get a handle on what it was supposed to be. I just thought of it consumerism, with a connection to imperialism, and that was it. When I got the definition of capitalism from Rand, I got a much more cohesive story of economic freedom and its benefits along with the inductive evidence to judge for myself, as compared to the Marxist definition, which is highly specific and almost mechanical without much inductive evidence.

Which "comes first"? (So to speak). Something I've wrestled with and I'd estimate that if the concept "Leave us alone" Capitalism had not been arrived at, individual rights had to have naturally and logically given birth to it. The simplistic upshot to me is they interact in a symbiotic concert. I.e. the proper relationship of the one to the many and they to him/her ("in a social context": AR) prescribes a (protected) voluntarism of the meeting of minds with minds, in the form of the products of, in mutual trade. The complexity of writings and the ideas of capitalism by many thinkers, can be reduced to that principle, but I admit to my simplisticism and shortage of knowledge of those thinkers. A possibly needed expansion on Rand's conciseness - "individualism" by Nathaniel Branden which uncommonly goes outside the exclusively political sphere and connects them: "A political system is the expression of a code of ethics. Just as some form of statism or collectivism is the expression of the ethics of altruism, so individualism--as represented by laissez-faire capitalism--is the expression of the ethics of rational self-interest". [So far so good, all well known. His next is telling and quite original framing, I think]. "Individualism is at once an ethical-psychological concept and an ethical-political one. As an ethical-psychological concept, individualism holds that a human being should think and judge independently, respecting nothing more than the sovereignty of his or her mind; thus, it is intimately connected with the concept of autonomy. As an ethical-political concept, individualism upholds the supremacy of individual rights, the principle that a human being is an end in him or herself, and that the proper goal in life is self-actualization". (Self-actualizing - the pursuit of one's happiness, as one views it to be - I read as certainly not indicating that everyone in a society needs to have the same personal ethics - the religious/secularist/libertarian/egoist/ etc. etc. need only share this ethical standard in common: to be left alone to do it their way. But that's another debate, and I've gone off topic enough). Branden offers a total perspective leading up to the "political-economic context", where "... freedom means one thing and one thing only: freedom from physical compulsion". Of course there's much more value in this chapter, recommended to those who haven't read it (Individualism and the Free Society - Honoring the Self)

If you've never encountered this piece before, I can't recommend it highly enough. Particularly the part about how the UK (and if you'll allow, by extension, capitalism) ended slavery. Which is different from racism...though probably not from Fraser's perspective.

Fraser gives three perspectives on capitalism: exchange, exploitation, expropriation. That implicitly sweeps production under a rug or reduces it to exploitation and/or expropriation. She says nothing about using reason, how markets form or change, the role of knowledge and information (such as described by F. Hayek), entrepreneurship, innovation, supply and demand, prices, goal setting, resources, and organization or management. All these are subsumed under exploitation or expropriation. She remarks that using the exchange perspective, others could say that capitalism is indifferent to color, but she says this delinks capitalism from racism by definitional fiat. She similarly delinks production from capitalism by definitional fiat. Fraser uses “power” a few times. The first four times are “labor power.” The rest are in the sense of the power to coerce or subjugate. None are really about the power to create. The term “labor power” was coined by Karl Marx and plays a large role in his view and critique of capitalism. It basically views laborers as “tools” for doing what’s demanded by capitalists.

"Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Marxism was an instrumental theory in African-based liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea Bissau. Amilcar Cabral, the revolutionary leader of Guinea Bissau, linked class struggle to anti-imperialism, demonstrating the necessity of “incorporating the proletarian project into the project of national liberation” (Magubane 1983, p. 25). Also, antiapartheid ideologists in South Africa adopted aspects of Marxist dictum even as they emphasized national and racial identities (see Marx 1992). Marxism continues to inform the spectrum of black progressive politics, even as Afro-Diasporic intellectuals argue for the autonomy of black liberation struggles and their “organic political perspectives” (James 1992, p. 183). Contemporary black intellectuals urge that a tripartite analysis, stemming from “the nexus of three crucial sites of struggles, community, class and gender, be at the center of Black liberatory projects” (Marable 1997, p. 8). If they adhere to this perspective, social justice movements constituted by black people can remain “avant-garde” formations of contiguous race and class struggles". ----- And look at them - Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, etc. and missing, Zimbabwe - now. It's those very "national liberation" and "Black liberatory projects" which hold and have held African citizens and their countries back - No more excuses and no one left blame, the colonists/colonials/"imperialists" have been gone for thirty to fifty years. South Africa has been 'free' for 25. Albeit that the Apartheid regime was proven by economists to have been de facto Socialist, apartheid is still irrevocably (and conveniently) equated with capitalism. Many of the original ANC cadres were trained in and had ties with Moscow back then, and I sometimes read the new wave of intellectuals spout the identical, worn-out doctrines, e.g. the LTV, above. Again, it is the neo-Marxism of the governing elites that did most of the damage, along with grand scale corruption in government. For all its official, systemic racism, at the change over in '95, SA had the No.1 economy in Africa, little poverty and very high (Black) employment. From that height, just five months ago Moody's down-rated SA's status to "Junk", and a pre-lockdown unemployment number around 30% - clearly doubled at minimum, since.

Boydstun invited “feedback on the specifics as advanced in this paper”. There is near nothing in the paper about what kind of political economy or society that Nancy Fraser advocates or endorses. She asks some questions about capitalism/racism that “form the heart of a profound but under-appreciated stream of critical theorizing, known as Black Marxism.” Here is a clue to what that is. Thus she merely hints at what she advocates or endorses, which is at least very Marxist. It’s much easier to be a critic than to construct and propose a better alternative. To answer her title question, she makes an assault on what she regards as the history of capitalism, which is obviously and negatively biased. Thus it should be as fair to describe a little of the history of Marxism. Consider that of the Soviet Union and China, where Marxism has been most put into practice. That history is filled with exploitation, expropriation, and causing death to many millions of people. Yet Fraser is completely silent about that.

The presentation admits to definitional considerations and how they weigh in. Starting with Capitalism, the trichotomy between exchange, exploitation and expropriation takes on a different flavor adding to it an Oxford dictionary refinement of: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. Per the author racism goes away under the egress of exchange only considerations. The distinction between private or state ownership is set aside. Exploitation of natural resources allows the material world to be reshaped into more valuable goods and services. Under a state that upholds individual rights, exploitation would be delimited to said natural resources while disallowing "the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work." Expropriation, under the Oxford parameters, should be considered a clear violation of an individuals right to his property.