What Do We Do With the Rich People?

In the course of establishing a revolutionary society, we will eventually have to deal with an important problem: what do we do with the rich people? Being non-coercive, we don't want to just kill them. And having a respect for personal property (i.e. possession, c.f. private property or capital), we don't just want to dispossess them of all their wealth. But we also want to create an egalitarian society, so surely we can't just let them keep their yachts and mansions and golf courses! ...can we?

Well, let's think this through: is property the extent of wealth? No. Let's see why:

Wealth depends on public power to defend it both from roaming hordes of peasant criminals who might wish to take it by force and the pesky egalitarianism of real democracy — the Founding Fathers of the United States consciously established a state that would defend the rich against the poor. In a real democracy, the accumulation of wealth would be impossible since the poor could just vote to redistribute land and capital; this, in fact, has been the main cry of every peasant revolt in history — cancel the debt and redistribute the land.

Wealth just as crucially depends on something a little more subtle: the private power of the wealthy to command the resources needed to sustain and maintain their property. By this I mean the army of servants, groundskeepers, housekeepers, mechanics, drivers, sailors, caddies, security guards, technicians, etc, that are needed to keep a mansion, yacht, golf cart, kitchen, etc, stocked, operational and convenient. Without the economic power to hire and fire the said army, the lifestyle of the rich becomes impossible for any length of time. Machines break down, houses become decrepit, country clubs grow weeds.

With the rapid or eventual elimination of the State, the public power to defend the rich obviously disappears. But less obviously, with the rise of socialism (that is, the control by workers of their own labor) the private power disappears as well. When workers are not dependent on the workings of financial and labor markets to feed themselves but instead organize work and distribute goods based on principles of mutual aid and the needs of the many, there's no time to do upkeep on the toys of the rich.

The upshot of all this is, a libertarian socialist society doesn't need to do anything with or to rich people. It's almost certain that we'll never really need to commandeer the land that mansions sit on, or the harbors that yachts are docked at (not to mention the mansions and yachts themselves). The rich can keep them, for what they'll be worth with no workers willing to do maintenance on them, or provide them with fuel and food and service besides the basics that anyone would be entitled to. We can let the rich keep everything they can make a reasonable claim to using, and just wait for them to get sick of living in broken-down palaces, with rusting yachts in their rotting docks. No coercion, appropriation or, really, action necessary.

(This of course says nothing of what we do with those things that the rich cannot reasonably claim to use, such as huge tracts of empty land, factories, business places, etc, which can in no way be construed to be personal possessions as they fundamentally depend on the labor of others for their very existence.)

A More Efficient Method?

What follows is a conditional. If you reject the antecedent, then obviously you reject the entire conditional.

Let us assume that you are a member of a large-scale libertarian socialist society. Almost all the world runs along collectivist or similar lines in some way or another, and runs well enough that no one is starving or suffering due to systemic failures. But you get a good idea. Well, two good ideas. The first is some very efficient new method for producing some desirable good or service. The other is that, since the idea is yours, you're going to see if you can't use it to benefit yourself more than other people. What's to stop you? Surely there's nothing wrong with hiring some workers on relatively exploitative terms (although probably still far, far less exploitative than those in modern society) and produce said good or service to the net benefit of all society! Why would anyone be opposed to that, so long as everyone involved agrees to the arrangement?

This was a question I was unable to answer in a recent conversation. However, having had time to reflect, I have not some several answers.

Let's start with the least obvious: if you try to create a subset of society where such exploitation is driven by anything other than survival necessity, you will inevitably be reintroducing all the problems of classism and authoritarian hierarchy — in this case, though, those are your problem, not the workers' problem. In capitalism, exploitation works out fine because workers have pretty much no other choice except to participate in a capitalist economy. If they lose or leave their job at a capitalist firm (and a magnanimous welfare state won't subsidize their unemployment) all they can do to survive is get another job at a capitalist firm (which might be a firm where they are their own boss, but that doesn't really change their relationship with the material wealth of society). In a libertarian society, if they are dissatisfied with work at your firm, they can simply leave and go work anywhere else in a voluntary organization. That is, unlike in capitalism, there is almost no cost to leaving your job, outside of purely physically practical considerations. So unless your hypothetically superior good or service is SO desirable, and SO beneficial to the people working for you (not to mention society at large), then there is little chance that people will be willing to continue working under inferior conditions. It is easy, when one holds the mistaken belief that we currently live in a free society, to forget that there are huge social and economic impediments against most people actually improving the conditions of their lives, set up both consciously and implicitly by capitalists and the institutions which they support and which support them. Such barriers would not exist in a free society, so there would be nothing to stop brain-drain (and hand-drain, as it were) away from any given exploitative firm and towards voluntary, libertarian firms.

A second reason this would be unlikely to work is illustrated best by the results of the Ultimatum Game. Expanded to a larger society, it seems highly unlikely that a group of people would be willing to bequeath to any one individual so large a share of their collective wealth that a productive firm could be established with the resources. On a smaller scale, it seems unlikely that you would find many people who would be willing to work for a firm where they would earn relatively less than another worker, even if they (somehow) earn more than workers in other firms (again, without the societal and institutionalized economic coercion of capitalism). (That this entirely begs the question of what they are earning in a largely collectivist society without large-scale fiat currencies is left aside for the purpose of this discussion.)

A final reason this is unlikely to arise is the lack of institutionalized secrecy in a free society. If you were the manager of a firm which had a superior method of production, the only way to keep it from being copied by anyone and everyone (including all the libertarian, collective firms in that particular line of business) would be to keep it completely secret — high fences, pledges of confidentiality, dark windows. But whatever facility you use to run your firm would be owned by society at large — after all, outside of a capitalist system (including state capitalism), no one seriously thinks of a factory, a storefront, or a suite of industrial machinery as belonging to a single individual for their personal use. And outside of a society with capitalist-style property rights, you would have no right to stop people entering your factory or store or whatever to observe your methods and use them elsewhere. After all, if your firm can produce SUCH excess wealth that it's worth reinstating exploitative labor relations for, then everyone else will want to use it too. And since no capitalist firm is an island, huge chunks of the rest of society will have to be involved in you establishing your firm (building your factory, supplying your raw materials, etc, etc.). So, pretty soon, workers will have no reason to stay with an exploitative firm to produce that exact good or service, and will instead move to collective ones the first instance the exploitation outweighs the benefit.

There are probably other reasons besides the idea stated at the beginning of this post wouldn't work in a free society, but those three are the ones that I was able to articulate to myself in the last couple of days. They are, like any highly hypothetical discussion like this, premised on many assumptions which not everyone agrees with, including, I'm sure, the person who raised the hypothetical scenario in the first place. But they are all, I believe, answers consistent with the view of society, politics and ethics I advance.

The Institutional Imperative, Part 2

One important consequence of the institutional imperative is that institutions tend to staff themselves with exactly the sorts of people who would tend to work to preserve those institutions. That is, someone who would not make it their first priority to preserve a given institution would not be knowingly selected for a position in that institution. This is why a country would not elect a leader whose stated goal it was to destroy that country's government — a so-called revolution is needed for that. Likewise, it is why a corporation would not hire a CEO whose goals did not match up with the company's.

This is why the heads of corporations, despite any contrition to the contrary, will never work toward the interests of people in general, but only toward the interests of the corporations they work for. When the legally required goal of a corporation is profitability, anyone who becomes a head of a corporation must consent to their actions being directed primarily towards that goal, rather than any humanitarian or just one (profitability, after all, rarely aligns with humanity or justice). No matter how much a CEO or board of directors might in their heart of hearts wish to improve the lot of their workers or the people they generally exploit, they only come into their positions if they are already willing to put these better natures aside for the sake of the corporations survival in the market. And should their consciences prevail, they would promptly be fired and mocked as weak and incapable.

This is why the claim that merely selecting better people to fill the positions in an institution can change the fundamental values of that institution is mistaken. An institution has its own values and priorities, which must be accepted by any person who fills a role in that institution before they would be allowed to do so. The institutional imperative results in a continuous vicious cycle whereby institutions are established with nominal goals, adopt the primary goal of survival, and then staff themselves with people already willing to carry out those nominal goals and necessarily the primary goal, and maintain this state for as long as possible, until collapsing.

Compare this to what I earlier called a group of individuals. Such a group would come together with the primary goal of solving a certain problem. However, unlike an institution, there would be no formal organization to the group that did not arise from the very character of the problem to be solved. The group would be recognized from the outset as a temporary, fluid system for dealing with the specific problem at hand. If the problem were a permanent one (for instance, waste management in a city) then the group would be constantly working, but would have no offices or formal rules. Rather, it would shrink and grow as needed, with procedures determined by the needs of any given moment. This would certainly be more difficult to maintain and run, but would ultimately be worthwhile, I believe, in that it would avoid any chance of corruption, as well as the risk of deviating from its stated purpose.

There are, of course, many other aspects which would have to be explained to account for how a dynamic, informal group could run any of the complex systems which make up modern society. The previous paragraph was meant simply to provide contrast to the way institutions work. At the least, I hope I made clear what I mean by the institutional imperative, and why it can lead to serious problems in society.

Why I No Longer Argue with Libertarians

There is an important distinction between lower-case L libertarians, of which I am one, and capital L Libertarians, of which Ron Paul is one. The former is simply the philosophical position that liberty ought to be maximized. In practice, this implies the elimination of coercive State government and exploitative capitalism (setting aside anarcho-capitalism, whose coherence I will address in future). The latter is an American invention, and is a hybrid of Austrian economics and Randian political philosophy (if it can be called such). To compare and contrast these two positions: the former is anti-State and anti-capitalist; the latter requires a state to enforce property rights, and is extremely pro-capitalist and against government intervention in the economy. The former is generally strongly federalist and socialist; the latter largely individualist and laissez-faire. Both oppose the intervention of any form of government into people's private lives, as well as some measure of positive enforcement of certain rights, although both view liberty as essentially negative (although many would argue that the distinction is meaningless).

There is another important distinction that needs to be made. It is between what I will term capital C Capitalism and lower-case C capitalism. Capital L Libertarians are also, necessarily, capital C Capitalists. That is, they hold the belief that capitalism is a desirable state of affairs, and a positive good for the world. Lower-case C capitalists are merely those people who own capital. They are business owners, CEOs, managers, bankers. Lower-case C capitalists can be Libertarians, conservatives or liberals, progressives or reactionaries. The former is an ideological position; the latter is a position in society.

Left socialists often rail against Libertarianism, which is fun to do, no doubt. However, Libertarians  don't actually matter in society. Maybe in the future, when the Libertarian Party has a majority in the Senate, we can worry about their ideas. The real opponent of the left, though, is not the Capitalist Libertarian. The real opponent is the capitalist. So while it's intellectually interesting to get into shouting matches with the local Randroids, anarchists and other leftists should really save their energy, both physical and intellectual, for opposing actual capitalism! Arguing against right-wing Capitalists is easy. What's hard is convincing a liberal capitalist why stateless socialism is desirable (not to mention feasible). That's why I'm not gonna argue with Ron Paul supporters and Ayn Rand fans anymore. It's a waste of breath, both on principle and in effect. My task from now on will be to convince capitalists of their error.