Can Capitalism Be Amoral?

At the end of last class, we began to discuss whether capitalism should be considered immoral or amoral. In some sense capitalism is not a moral system, but an economic system, and doesn't make moral valuations. We brought up a few of the "moralities" which seem to result from a capitalist mentality--that the poor are underemployed because they are lazy, for example--but demonstrated that these kinds of moral pronouncements are in no way essential to capitalism. Certainly, a thorough identification with a capitalist mentality and lifestyle--and its attendant valorization of efficiency and condemnation of leisure--seems to foster these sort of moral biases. But, as we also mentioned, it is possible to imagine a capitalistic system that doesn't involve this sort of "moral" framework.

Despite this, I can't seem to get past my (at this point pretty deep-seated) belief that capitalism is, in fact, immoral. (Note: I wouldn't actually say immoral, but unethical, but for simplicity's sake I'm going to stick to the terminology we used in class). I understand that many of the "immoral" consequences of the capitalistic system are not essential or necessary. But as we also discussed last class, capitalism leads to an uneven distribution of goods which over time only worsens until the poor become poorer and rich become richer. This already strikes me as a morally problematic situation (to say the least). And in so far as the purpose of capitalism is to generate surplus value, the success of this system depends upon valuing commodities more than the workers that produce them, and "with the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men" (71). This also seems in and of itself immoral. Or at least, it seems impossible that an economic system whose success depends on the devaluation of men could not lead to immoral consequences. Which, for me, doesn't seem much different than saying the system is itself immoral. Again, we might say theoretically, that capitalism in and of itself is amoral; but if its practical and material consequences are immoral, what good does it do to say its theoretically amoral?

Now, however convinced I am of capitalism's immorality, this issue becomes much more slippery in the context of "late" capitalism. The fact that the estrangement of labor and private property lead to the devaluation of the worker is much easier to see in the industrial revolution, where the connection between the growing wealth of the factory owners and the growing poverty of the factory workers seems almost self-evident. Factory (or property...insert any industrial means of production) owners exploit the factory workers in order to generate a greater profit for themselves--it's a pretty clear illustration of the disparity between the bourgeoise and the proletariat. But this relationship between the property-owner and the property-worker is harder to trace when a significant portion of late capitalism's surplus value is generated in very nebulous situations like venture capitalism, as we mentioned in class. In short, though the disparity between the 1% and the 99% is obvious, what causes this disparity isn't quite so obvious. This disparity isn't the result so much of actual exploitation of the 99%; rather, it seems to be orchestrated on a much larger scale, one more easily obfuscated by all kinds of finagling. Again, this is not to say I've conceded that capitalism is amoral. But it does seem that the context of late capitalism could make it easier to argue for some kind of moral exemption...even though I would argue this type of capitalism poses an even greater moral problem. How such arguments would even begin to deal with the effects of global capitalism totally escapes me.

Frankly, I'm not so sure I agree that "capitalism doesn't tell you what to value, it tells you what you do value." Capitalism does seem to provide a framework for valuing not only other people but ourselves. Sure, it doesn't force me to value commodities over other human beings, and in that sense it isn't morally prescriptive. But it does encourage this mindset, and in fact its success as an economic model depends on people adopting this mindset. It may not be a moral system, but that shouldn't necessarily permit us from evaluating certain assumptions of its system from a moral standpoint.

Labor: Materialism is a Necessary Thing for Human "Being"

                As demanded by propriety, human beings often attempt to devalue the material world. We say that life is not about material things. Usually, what underlies this opinion is a belief, however subtle it may be, that what is important to human being is the soul, or the mental capability, or the possession of virtue. This belief does away with materialism.  Not only  this be we often view materialism as a negative thing. When an individual appears too concerned with material things we call that person materialistic; a word which possesses a negative connotation. Is this belief correct? And does it help us to exist and flourish as human beings?

                I think Marx would disagree with this belief. Marx’s theory of alienation requires a material presence. Alienation is not transcendent, and it is not independent of the history. It exists here in the material world. Alienation occurs through a twisted sense of labor, and labor requires the material world to exist.

“The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour’s realization is its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realization of labour appears as a loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bonding […]”

This implies that the material world is very important to us. In a sense, we can lose ourselves to it through alienation. But we also see ourselves and flourish in some sense as human beings through labor and through imparting ourselves to and interactions with the world around us.  The kind of importance I want to show is a constant relevance of the material to the human being.  In his description of nature Marx shows this. Nature provides the means to life in the sense of the subsistence of the human being, and nature also provides labor with a means to life in the sense that labor cannot live with object on which to operate. Marx describes nature as the human’s inorganic body, and he intends this beyond mere subsistence. The higher “order” of human being that we so desire requires nature to operate, i.e. labor requires nature. 

                Thus the material is actually of grave importance to human functions of the higher order. The reason we tend to associate negative feelings with those who have material possessions is because we recognize on some level that we are alienated through system of capitalism. In this alienation, we are less able to flourish as human beings, and so we envy those who appear to us to be flourishing at the cost of our own ability to flourish.  

P.S. I welcome better formulations of this idea. 

Wage Theft

So my independent research in Sociology is on how the American Dream, as a cultural narrative, foregrounds everyone in American society, and how that foregrounding is even present in the meaning making and motivations of activists involved in the fight against Wage Theft. Wage Theft is a buzzword created by the labor movement to describe a set of exploitative labor practices including failing to pay workers minimum wage, failing to properly compensate workers for overtime, misclassifying workers as "independent contractors," which places the tax burden on the worker, and worst of all, complete failure to pay workers at all. Wage theft is bad all on its own, but when we think of it through the Marxist lens, it becomes all the more horrifying.

For Marx, the labor process is inherently alienating because work is always forced. Workers must choose between work and starvation, and when they choose work, they are forced to self –alienate; they must put themselves into an object from which they, by the very nature of capitalism (i.e. surplus value), will never receive their just compensation. Furthermore, because their labor creates an object which, is, and will always be, alien, they become alienated from not only their own labor, but also the object and nature. In the hostile and hierarchical relationship between the worker and the capitalist and in the competitive struggle against their fellow workers to find jobs they become alienated form their fellow human beings. Finally, in existing not as an end in themselves, but merely as someone else’s' means, while still seeing oneself as a human universal, one is alienated from one's specifies being.

Marx assumes that workers have a certain value, use value; they are allowed to remain alive because they are useful to the capitalists, and their wages are set by capitalists to allow for subsistence and the creation of a future workforce (workers' children). We have gotten to a point today in which there are so many people available to work, that low-wage workers have perhaps even lost their use value. With the loss of the manufacturing sector in the United States and a full scale shift to the services, even more than ever, low-wage workers, working in low skill service jobs, are almost entirely expendable to employers.

If you are familiar with ideas about "rape culture," you may know that many theorists understand the rape as the ultimate representation of an underlying culture of masculinity. It is not that rapists are "crazy people" hiding in the bushes, but rather they are simply men who represent a deep socialization and extreme externalization of an underlying masculine culture which lionizes male power, and devalues women. I understand wage theft in a very similar manner. We have an underlying culture of exploitation, and in its extremes, it is manifested as wage theft. We operate under the assumption that we live in some sort of meritocracy, and that the hierarchical relationship of employers and employees is somehow natural and just. Ultimately, the embedded nature of that hierarchical power structure finds expression in all businesses, but because it is a continuum of sorts, it finds its most extreme expressions in instances of Wage Theft.

Understood thought he Marxist idea of the super-structure, this is merely an example of capitalism’s influence on our culture. However, the superstructure is even more clearly defined in the wage theft example, in the lack of enforcement for labor laws. For many employers, the threat of being caught is so low, and the profits to be made so high, that they can exploit workers with impunity.  Many states, including Tennessee, do not have minimum wage laws, and so much of the enforcement burden falls on the incredibly overworked and understaffed federal department of labor, which represents a legal system in which a worker who steals from his or her employer goes to jail, yet an employer who steals merely has to pay a fine and agree not to do it again. Wage theft does not simply represent "a few bad apples," but instead a culture of exploitation, infect a study by the National Employment Law Project has estimated that as many as 2 out of 3 low wage workers suffers some form of wage theft every week! That seems pretty cultural to me…

NELP study: http://www.unprotectedworkers.org/index.php/broken_laws/index

You look at the world, and see only yourself.

When I heard the quote "For those who look at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back," I had many different rewording go through my head. The following is an account of a solipsistic rewords of a Hegel's formula, where reason is not so much as important as unique consciousness: you look at the world and see only yourself.

To understand what this would mean, I imagine the following scenario: From upon park bench perch, you watch someone walking down the street towards you. She says hi, and you reciprocate.

According to my reinterpretation, you just greeted yourself.

It will take awhile to break it down, but bare with me. 

The first thing to understand is you. I should first clarify that there are two kinds of you, and this is why you can greet yourself.

One that is first and immediate. This is the situated-you. This is the you of intent, location, and particularity. This situated-you is looking out at the world, it only has particular sense-certain experience, which I call the what it is like for you, and it is always certain of where, when, and who it is. This you is uncomprehending and incommunicable. 

The second is the universal-you. This is the you of objective understanding, and it is born from the situated-you by a process of universalizing what it is like to be for you and applying it to the world as communicable concepts.

The third is the defining-you. Because universal-you is aware of the many particular situated-yous through time and space, it creates a identity that persists through change.  This new you is both the definer, as it sees the world in its own terms, and it is the defined as it finds itself in the world (it is the subject that makes itself its own object).  As a consequence, it can act intentionally through understanding of universals, which importantly includes acts of communicating universals.

In the park experience, universal-you are on a park bench looking at the world. Everything universal-you understands in sitting and seeing is in terms of what it is like for you because what do you have other than situated-you to understand situated-you's actions.

The second thing in the question is the someone. How do you understand her? Universal-you only has situated-you to draw upon to create experiences. The universal-you understands someone walking but by applying what it is like for you to walk on her. She becomes another situated-you in your mind, and any inadequacy between you and her may be acknowledged but it cannot be communicated because universal-you does not have access to her situated-otherness.

She is also walking down the street and towards you. This is a duality of both general terms and personal terms. 'Walking down the street' is the universal-you's perspective.  It understands act as the universal walking, understood because a situated-you has walked before. It understands the direction from an abstract from the perspective of the general town or city because it has abstracted from many situated-you being particularly located, a general location.

The 'towards you' is the situated-you's perspective because only it is certain of where it is.

Next, when the someone says hi, universal-you understands the act from situated-you's relationship with the term over time. Having imposed the laws of etiquette upon your defined identity, defining-you reciprocates the greeting. Situated-you makes the noise 'hi.'

There is much more to both senses of you, but I don't have space, so without going any much further, a rereading of experience in these terms in these terms: From upon situated-you's perch on the park bench, situated-you watches something come towards it. Universal-you understands that one situated-you is watching another situated-you, who is walking down the street towards the first.

Again, this was just one way I thought about Hegel's quote. I also changed it to "People look at the world biasedly, and the world confirms that bias." Did any of you guys have rewordings of the quote and unique applications?

            In his first manuscript, Karl Marx discusses the estrangement of labor. He explores the idea that the worker’s objects of production, which should theoretically be a part of him or herself, becomes something alien. Even though the significance of the object relates to the worker who creates it, society places more importance on the product than the worker who produces it. This leads to a disconnection between the fates of the worker and his or her product. “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates” (Marx 71). This basic idea begins Marx’s critique on estranged labor. He explores how the worker’s alienation from his or her product is tied to alienation that occurs within the scheme of production and alienation from his species (important parts of his argument, but not ones I’m discussing in detail here). Towards the end of this essay, Marx gets to the point in which he establishes that the alien product the worker produces belongs to the one “in whose serve labor is done” (78) who necessarily is another human. This seems to imply that the worker’s work belongs to his or her bosses or the wealthy elites of society. Marx builds on this to critique the idea of private property, as private property is a concept that stems from alienated labor.

            This argument, especially the parts about how the object of labor becomes alienated from the laboring person, that labor belongs to someone else, and that the whole process creates and serves as an indictment of private property, was especially interesting to me given the work I’ve been doing in another class. Although in this other class, we haven’t discusses Marx in depth, he has come up a bit. Furthermore, some of the material I’ve explored in the other class in a sense supports Marx’s argument, which at least seems to me to imply that private property comes from and goes against the interest of the worker’s relationship to his or her product. In an iconic economic essay called “I, Pencil,” Lenard Reid explores the pencil’s “family tree.” What he finds is that no one person creates a pencil, just in the sense that no one person creates another person but is instead a product of families and unions. The argument is that no one person can create a pencil. Multiple workers doing different kind of job create the pencil. If only one of those workers was placed in a room and told to make a pencil, he or she would be unable to. This idea is accepted today in modern economic theory, and it provides an interesting insight into alienated labor: Can one really be alienated from something that never really was entirely his or her own? On another note, in the book Free Market Fairness, John Tomasi briefly makes the point that Americans today, even Americans in the working class, respect the riches and private property of the rich and do not wish to do away with private property. Mt question is this: is it possible that the conception of work that does away with estranged labor is related to the modern view of the working class towards private property?

Phenomenology vs. Philosophy: Should Hegel's Work be Used as Ground for Philosophy of Human Beings?

                          

                   Though there are sections  of Hegel’s Phenomenology of consciousness where attempts to make connections to concrete humanity have been made, I wonder if these attempts are justified, and I wonder if Hegel himself would find these valid and proper. There is no argument that parallels between Hegel’s descriptions of consciousness and actual human consciousness can be found, but this is only because humans possess consciousness.  Hegel does not tour the development of consciousness  as it relates to the human being, but as it relates to itself. In other words, he examines consciousness as consciousness, or as consciousness in general. Perhaps, then, we could make connections between the experience of the human consciousness and consciousness in general, but I do not think we can so far to make philosophical claims based on Hegel’s account. At least in terms of what Hegel intends to be philosophy, which I find to be more akin to the Science he speaks of. In this respect Hegel views the Phenomenology as more of a preparation for Science, than actual science or philosophy itself.

                To make this distinction more clear, we should determine the differences between Hegel’s view of what a Phenomenology is and what Science is supposed to be. At the end of paragraph 37 in the preface and after essentially completing a summary of the development of consciousness Hegel says:

“With this, the Phenomenology of Spirit is concluded. What Spirit prepares for itself in it, is the element of [true] knowing. In this element the moments of Spirit now spread themselves out in that form of simplicity which knows its object as its own self. They no longer fall apart into the antithesis of being and knowing, but remain in the simple oneness of knowing; they are the True in the form of the True, and their difference is only the difference of content. Their movement, which organizes itself in this element into a whole, is Logic or Speculative philosophy. “

                With that, Hegel intends to indicate a shift from Phenomenology to the consider of philosophy or Science. The task of philosophy is to know ontology in thought, and it begins with a unity of thought and being, or knowledge and being, or being-for-another and being-in-itself. As opposed to Phenomenology whose aim is to study the experience of consciousness as it develops. Phenomenolgoy is concerned with with the relation between consciousness and its object, to examine the separation of knowing and being. In the section on Absolute Knowing, paragraph 805,  Hegel further emphasizes this difference:

“Whereas in the Phenomenology of Spirit each moment is the difference of knowledge and Truth, and is the movement in which that difference is cancelled, Science on the other hand does not ccontain this difference and the cancelling of it. On the contrary, since the moment has the form of the Notion, it unites the objective form of Truth and of the knowing Self in an immediate unity.”

                So not only do we see that phenomenology is as I claimed, but we see that Science lacks  the fundamental motivation for even considering a phenomenology of consciousness as Hegel sees it: a difference in knowledge and Truth. Science (or philosophy) begins with a unity of knowing and Truth (being-in-itself).

                Thus, I do not think we should make philosophy claims based on Hegel’s phenomenological account. One may say, “Well that’s obvious from Hegel’s understanding of philosophy, but phenomenology is merely distinct kind of philosophy as we view it today.” It is not ontology or metaphysics for example. I say yes this is true, but even in that point, the argument can be made that Hegel’s phenomenology is abstract and too far-removed from what we as human beings experience. As far as abstraction goes, the most concrete explanation Hegel provides is that of the Master-Slave, and as a result it’s the most reference part of his text. Where this concreteness is lacking, the text is largely ignored by the philosophical community.

And here's a cool picture of a tiger because you've made it this far in my post: 

                As far as what Hegel would say about using his phenomenology in pieces and parts for the use of philosophy… First of all he would take issue with regard to his view of the whole. Secondly, and more surprising to me, Hegel actually claims that once we have achieved a unity in being-for-another and being-for-itself we should simply proceed as if we have learned nothing.  Here’s the quote from paragraph 808:

“In the immediacy of this new existence the Spirit has to start afresh to bring itself to maturity as if, for it, all that preceded were lost and oit had learned nothing from the experience of the earlier spirits.”

Take that as what you will... But this seems to indicate that Hegel himself might not approve of how others have used his work. 

Species Being and the Sixth Extinction

This past Tuesday on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart spoke to Elizabeth Kolbert about her book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which addresses our role in an impending mass extinction. Kolbert notes (jokingly, naturally) that “the really impressive thing” about our self-extinction “is that we’re doing it without even trying.”

http://screen.yahoo.com/elizabeth-kolbert-050000728.html

This segment came to mind as I was reading “Estranged Labor,” and struck me as a particularly powerful illustration of estrangement from “species being.” Species being implies, I think, not only an awareness of other humans, but also a historical consciousness of the human species—an awareness of the past and future development of the species, and a recognition of the individual’s participation in this larger historical development. As species beings, then, humans understand their relationship to a natural system that exceeds their individual needs. Estrangement from the species being turns “the life of the species into a means of individual life” and “makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species” (75). This prioritization of the individual over the species reminds me of Hegel’s Acting Consciousness and its confusion of individual needs with universal good, though the estranged human does not mistake his individual needs for the universal so much as disregard the universal altogether. The human estranged from the species places individual, and short-term, needs and wants above the long-term development of the human species. Relationships with other humans and with nature become means to individual ends, and perhaps become expendable in this process.

It seems the extinction Kolbert discusses illustrates the estrangement of the individual and the species. This estrangement enables us to drive the world towards extinction “without even trying”; no matter how many times we’re told about the consequences of our actions, we can’t seem to relinquish our individual needs for the sake of the “species being” and the environment that sustains it. Environmentalist arguments reminding us that the continuing depletion of resources will eventually prohibit certain lifestyles fail to reinstate the individual’s relationship to the species. In fact, this type of argument only encourages us to curb certain behaviors so that we can continue to use nature as a “means to individual existence” (77). Perhaps the only way to reverse the “sixth extinction” (if we haven’t already run out of time) would involve reorienting our relationship to our “species being.”