Occupy Philosophy

New Website....

2011-11-06T00:09:00.001-07:00

We've moved to the new Word Press site at http://occupyphil.org ...you should be redirected in a moment.

No news is good news...for the 1%

2011-11-02T11:40:00.000-07:00

Right now on the streets of Oakland, CA thousands of people have gone on strike, joining with Occupy Oakland, and marching to protest the crimes of the Plutofascist Corporatocracy that is largely responsible for the dystopian nightmare that is the day to day life of the 99%.

I checked the homepages of our major news providers. It seems that our corporate paymasters have ordered a blackout in reply to the strike. None of them so much as mentions what is happening in Oakland at the moment. Most are leading with Stories about Lindsay Lohan's alcoholism, and Justin Bieber's being a typical teenage boy with a lot of money. At least Fox News's top story is something important...namely our paymasters most recent push for a nuclear war in the Middle East....

Blackout Roll-Call
1. Fox News
2. ABC
3. NBC
4. CBS
5. MSNBC
6. NPR

Shame on them all.

Update: By 8:30 pm all news sources were carrying the story except for Fox News.
Update: 12:00 am Nov 3: FNC finally posted their (fairly unbalanced) story.

Why the 100% Should Support the Occupy Movement

2011-11-01T15:50:00.000-07:00

I'm curious what readers will make of the following argument for the claim that not just the 99% but indeed everyone should support the Occupy Movement.

Either you are part of the 99% or you are a part of the 1%.
Assume you are part of the 99%.
If you are part of the 99%, then it is in your interest to support movements that promote a more equitable distribution of power (wealth) in society.
The Occupy Movement promotes a more equitable distribution of power (wealth) in society.
Therefore it is in your interest to support the Occupy Movement.
Now assume you are a part of the 1%.
If you are a part of the 1%, then it is in your interest to support movements that promote a more equitable distribution of power (wealth) in society.
The Occupy Movement promotes a more equitable distribution of power (wealth) in society.
Therefore, it is in your interest to support the Occupy Movement.

Now clearly (7) is the most contentious premise. What is there to say in its favor? It seems to me that history teaches us that precipitous inequities in power (wealth) distribution almost unfailingly lead to mass revolution against those few hands who hold all the power (wealth). The French Revolution, The American Revolution, The Bolshevik Revolution, and revolutions in countries throughout the world always seem to occur when the balance of power (wealth) skews to far toward any minority.

Thus it behooves the 1% to occasionally relinquish their hold on their ill gotten stores of power (wealth) so as to avoid mass uprising. To do anything else is contrary to their own interests. Sure, they'll have less power (wealth), perhaps much less, but they will survive and even flourish. If this argument is sound, then regardless of one's position, whether among the 99% or the 1% one should support the Occupy Movement. The alternative is too ugly to fathom.

“Security” & “Safety” at OWS

2011-10-31T19:59:00.000-07:00

The Oakland occupation was shut down last week, albeit temporarily, on the grounds of concerns about safety and security. Rather than assume we know what ‘safety’ and ‘security’ mean, this invites some inquiry. Can ‘safety’ be secured in the midst of an activist movement?

Sexual assaults of various sorts had been rumored in Oakland, as well as thefts, drug use, and transgressions on public property. Marijuana use is hardly a major concern in Oakland California, where it has been effectively decriminalized through medical permissions, and the smell pervades the city's parks, but the possibility of a lawless space inviting violence of one sort or another is an image that could certainly garner public support for a crackdown. Images of Waco might come to the surface, the religious cult in Texas where a culture of child rape instigated a heavy state response that cleaned out the compound with resultant deaths. In Oakland, the state actions on October 25 were similarly extreme, seriously injuring Iraq veteran Scott Olsen.

Clearly, today’s political occupations, whether in Oakland or in New York, where I live, are not in any way analogous to Waco. They are not closed cults, vulnerable to abuse by charismatic leaders who are accountable to no one, but open communities with totally open borders. That openness is precisely the challenge to safety and security. As a survivor of child sexual assault myself, I want the problem of sexual violence taken seriously in its own right, not as a pretext for some other agenda. And I want a realistic approach to security.

It's difficult to get clarity on the nature of the problems that have occurred, or to find any exact numbers or precise descriptions. Rumors abound, Facebook tales are shared and re-shared, stories with unknown origins are passed around. In a way, this is as it should be. The attempt to limit and control women’s talk is usually an attempt to limit and control women. The effort to reduce rape and sexual violence is not enhanced by sequestering all speech to the highly proscribed legal arena, or attempting to shut down the flow of information. Women, the usual targets, share information with each other as a safety tactic, have always done so, and will continue to do so. Watch out for that guy, let me tell you what I heard, or saw, or had happen to me. Such sharing of information among trusted friends or coworkers has often been the best and most reliable way we have to protect ourselves, and has enacted a shift in testimony credibility and the enunciative modalities of speech that Foucault and Lyotard could only dream of. Women know not to rely on official channels of regulated speech for ensuring our security. The so-called authorities, whether cops or sexual harassment ombudspersons, are not reliably reliable, as we all know. This varies by communities, but it's still difficult in a lot of places to get credible concerns taken seriously.

The sharing of information, stories, rumors, and secondhand reports about the various occupation sites will no doubt continue. They cannot realistically be shut down, nor should they be patrolled or criticized, unless there are good grounds to believe that a false accusation is being made. Survivors ourselves should go after those who make false claims. We need truth on our side, not bullshit.

Yet there is also the possibility of hysteria mongering by critics of the occupied movement, and even orchestrated rumors from the right wing. So after the Oakland crackdown, I made an effort to find out the real state of things at least in New York, the epicenter that still operates as something of a model for other occupations. I listened in on a working group addressing issues of safety where one of the leaders of the OWS security detail was facilitating a discussion. I was interested to find out that the problems are being taken up in serious, and inventive, ways. There was much discussion of new protocols that honor survivors, that acknowledge the limitations of the police, and that try to work with, rather than ignore, the differences of power and privilege among us. Don't shout at someone like you're military, talk about shared community space, use “I” sentences rather than “you” sentences, think about how white and male and heterosexual privilege can affect our interactions, and our judgments. A discussion the NYPD could have benefited from. And an innovative approach to security that recognizes the informal operations of power that always function alongside the formal ones. But also, I was relieved to hear, people are not being liberal, i.e. permissive, about this issue. A groper who harassed several women was called out and pushed out of the park, even though he was homeless. Two assailants were turned over to the police. New protocols have been developed for sharing tents or space under tarps. There is a survivor group, and they speak out. OWS takes the building of a community space seriously. It knows it has to be a safe space for all, and knows that for some safety is all too precarious. The security squad, mostly folks of color, has members experienced in conflicts and negotiations. I witnessed one effectively pushing a hustler out of the park with the threat of publicizing his activities through the people’s mike.

The point is that the occupation in NY is dealing with this problem proactively and as far as I can tell, pretty effectively. There have been three incidents of safety concerns at OWS: two gropers, one person who threw a punch. All were dealt with aggressively. Sexual assault is a rampant social epidemic, and it is not to be expected that any park—any public or private space or community—can become 100% free of it.

This cannot be used as an alibi for state violence to shut down the occupations. Sexual violence is never the priority of the state until it serves some other agenda, to create a scare about daycare, or fan the flames of white racism, or increase surveillance opportunities that might be useful for other purposes. I write this as a survivor who lives with PTSD and continues to feel lifelong effects. I take sexual assault very seriously. But this is a totally bogus reason to go after the occupations.

We need to reflect carefully on how 'safety' and 'security' concerns are defined and approached in the discourses surrounding the occupations. There should be zero tolerance for groping or other violations of bodily integrity, yet the best resources for our security may be the decentralized and bottom up mechanisms of free flows of information united with the democratic and proactive efforts of the occupiers.

Linda Martín Alcoff
Professor of Philosophy
Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center

God & the 1%: The Corporatizing of Religion

2011-10-30T15:13:00.000-07:00

An element of the oppression of the 99% that has as far as I can tell gone unremarked upon (at least in the context of the new discourse being raised by the Occupy movement) is the increasing Corporatization of religion in the United States in the last 50 years or so. Televangelists like Joyce Meyer,* Binny Hinn, Paula White, T.D. Jakes, Rod Parsley and Joel Osteen (the posh-looking stadium pictured above is Pastor Osteen’s megachurch and corporate headquarters) prey on the fear and despair of the 99% in the most repugnant way, offering them worldly comfort and security and even eternal salvation in exchange for a small donation to their “ministry.” And business is booming. Joel Osteen’s ministry took in a staggering $75 million (US) last year. That’s a lot of books, videos, television rights, trinkets, speaking fees, and Church “offerings.” Osteen lives in a multimillion dollar estate and his ministry owns a private jet.

Regardless of one’s commitments to theism or atheism, surely all rational people who are capable even moderate reflection can see that there is something seriously morally wrong about filling a stadium full of mostly middle class and poor people and using the technical wizardy and audio/visual razzle-dazzle typically associated with rock-concerts and major sporting events to soften up these unsuspecting “marks” and coerce them into a scheme of wealth redistribution which robs them of money they need to live in return for vague promises of divine favor and a better hereafter.

But you don’t have to be a televangelist to cash in...

The fact of the matter is that Churches of all sizes, from the megachurches of Osteen and Meyer, to small town Baptist Churches, to Catholic Dioceses, have become all about “church growth” a thinly disguised term for religious marketing designed to drive paying parishioners into the pews, and to streamline incomes. According to Salary.com the average income for a pastor is now between $71,000 and $97,000 annually—that’s 2 to 3 times the income of the average American.

Perhaps a case can be made that pastors—who serve as educators, administrators, de facto (often unqualified) psychological counselors, marriage counselors, and hospice caregivers, and who often have heavy stresses placed upon them by their own flocks (in the form of unreasonable moral standards)—offer at least some value for the churchgoers’ dollar.

But as with everything else in Plutofascist Corporate America these local providers are in competition with regional, even national, megachurches, whose slick design and deep pockets make for a potent mix of spectacle and salvation. And the local providers are losing as the megachurches continue to grow. And the pastors of these megachurches, like Osteen, tend to be pastors in name only. They don’t counsel their flocks—how could they with flocks that number in the hundreds of thousands? They give nice speeches to adoring throngs and collect obscene amounts of money, and they pay underlings to do the actual ministerial work. In essence they function as CEOs of large corporations.

They even justify their extreme greed with same tactics as corporations. When asked about their exorbitant incomes, they talk about their charitable giving, as though throwing millions to the hoi polloi could excuse their backward wealth redistribution scheme. They’re criminals and robbers and they deserve to be punished. Osteen is particularly egregious for his preaching of the “prosperity Gospel,” according to which God’s plan for your life is that you should be wealthy, and the only reason you're not is that you're morally or epistemologically lacking. The cure? attend more conferences, buy more books, give more to the ministry to “sow your seed of faith” as they put it.
So the poor are told that by handing over their money they can get wealth from God. If they ever realize they’ve been had there is no way for them to seek restitution or redress. There is no law against a Church soliciting contributions. So megachurch pastors get off scot-free and the poor are left holding the bag.

Regardless of one’s views on religion, we as philosophers should be vocal in calling out these Plutofascist fat cats. They’re absolute moral reprobates. Theists have as much reason to despise them as the most ardent atheist. Christ (if we can speak of him in a historic fashion) reserved his only act of violent aggression for those who profited from religion. He called them vipers. Dirty things that crawl on their bloated bellies across the Earth. These modern vipers are no different. We need a mass awakening of the rank and file religious.

These megachurch pastors are the 1% and it is high time the 99% took a good long look at what they are doing.

◊ ◊ ◊
*A congressional committee discovered in 2007 that Joyce Meyer Ministries purchased a $23,000 toilet for Mrs. Meyer's use at the office. (Source: NPR)

’Tis the season for Justice!

2011-10-30T13:29:00.000-07:00

That is, a Rawls virtual reading group. In light of all the Rawlsian interest (or, okay, I was planning this anyway), I’ll be facilitating a Rawls reading group on the SFSU philosophy blog.

We will have Tuesday and Thursday reading “deadlines,” and I will be posting on Wednesdays and Fridays in the dreamy hope that others will be similarly inspired.

The supplementary texts are:

Justice as Fairness
The Cambridge Companion to Rawls
Rawls (Routledge Philosophers series), Freeman
Reading Rawls, Ed. Daniels

Two optional critiques:

Understanding Rawls, Wolff
Justice, Gender and the Family, Okin

The first reading for Tuesday is posted on the blog: TJ (2nd ed.), Sections 1-4. See also the supplementary readings for this week. A finalized schedule will be posted soon.

It will also extend into next semester (and beyond?) as we move from TJ into PL and some critiques. I definitely want to eventually cover at least Nozick, Sandel, Kymlicka, Taylor, Cohen, Murphy, Beitz, and Pogge. Other suggestions welcome. I was going to structure the reading load roughly equivalent to a class, but am open to reducing it down. I will not “assign” reading over winter break, so those of you that can't commit now will have the opportunity to “catch up” quickly.

Let Them Eat Cake, Or, the Spectacle of Suffering

2011-10-30T12:11:00.000-07:00

First there was this:

And then there was this:

And now there’s this:

All of the talk emanating from the right about “class warfare” rings somewhat hollow in the face of such ostentatious displays of cruelty and indifference. This is sadism in its purest form; it is the One's deriving pleasure not just from the abject suffering of the Other, but from the One's ability to inflict suffering on the Other coupled with the Other’s inability to defend itself. To be the Master, it is not enough for the One to make the Other into a Slave; the One must glory in its power to enslave the Other, to push the face of the Other into the dirt with its jackbooted (gilt?) heel and force the Other to recognize that the One is Master and the Other is Slave.

Practical Stuff

2011-10-30T10:18:00.000-07:00

So, talking about OWS is fun and all, but is anyone watching this on the ground with any of the protests? Everyone who can should, of course, respond to the call for hard-weather gear, but are there ways that philosophers can be better contributors to the movement, qua philosophers? Teach-ins, reciting Platonic dialogues for entertainment, that sort of thing.

SPEP Supports OWS!

2011-10-30T07:42:00.000-07:00

A reader associated with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, the second largest body of professional philosophers in the country, sent us a copy of the following statement of solidarity with OWS.

SPEP Statement in Support of the Occupy Wall Street Movement:

A massive protest movement has emerged in response to an economic crisis, rapidly increasing wealth inequity, and diminishing employment and educational opportunities for an entire generation. The recent financial crisis, facilitated by Wall Street malfeasance, has only exacerbated a devastating decades-long trend that continues to socialize risk and privatize profit. This trend toward increasing economic injustice has disproportionately affected communities of color and left tens of millions homeless, jobless, and overburdened with student loans and underwater mortgages.
As educators and students, we have witnessed decreases in state funding for education, coupled with increases in tuition costs, the privatization of research, the commodification of campus spaces, the use of precarious and part-time positions, and attacks on collective bargaining. This has had a disciplinary effect on educators and students alike, hindering the pursuit of higher education, open and critical inquiry, as well as democratic participation.
SPEP stands in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement, which represents a direct challenge to these social and political inequities and economic injustices, as it reclaims social spaces for democratic deliberation and participation and pushes back against a growing suspicion of social solidarity and the public good. SPEP encourages its members to support these principles and practices in the Occupy movement through any and all of the unique resources available to them.

URGENT: OWS Needs Winter Supplies!

2011-10-30T07:28:00.000-07:00

See: OWS Urgent Winter Donation Needs

In light of the cold, snowy weather in New York and the sudden confiscation of its generators by the NYPD, Occupy Wall Street is in dire need of winter supplies. See the link above for details.

On a more general note, winter is coming and occupations around the country will soon be faced with their biggest challenge yet: mother nature! Whether you live near (or are involved in) an occupation or not, please consider donating money and/or supplies. Better yet, why not start a donation campaign or supply drive on your campus?

Let's help!

Media Watch: Chris Hedges and Amy Goodman on OWS on Charlie Rose

2011-10-29T17:52:00.000-07:00

In these two videos Charlie Rose talks OWS and the future of the growing global movement with Pulitzer prize winning author Chris Hedges and author Amy Goodman. The interview is in 2 parts.

(Part two after the jump.)

We Are the 1% (Or at least I am, I'm not sure about you)

2011-10-29T17:15:00.000-07:00

This is a sort of meta-post, but (a) it’s been bothering me and (b) after closing comments on my post below, I feel like there should be a venue for people telling me I'm an idiot that’s open.

I’m currently in Ghana, which is why I’m not finding ways to be at Occupy Baltimore at least part-time (I have a three year old who gets cranky if we’re out occupying public space past 7PM, though she has been asking about camping recently...). But, beyond that, I’m not sure what to make of being in another part of the world watching OWS from the outside in.

As far as I know, there are no sympathetic movements in Ghana (and the only OWS-related protest I know of was in South Africa). Which is not to say that there aren't various moments of resistance around the continent, many of which have grievances that would be familiar to OWS (I could have sworn that Tom Friedman said there was no Arab Spring in sub-Saharan Africa, but I can't find it now, so it may just be that it's the sort of thing I'd imagine Friedman saying). Just off the top of my head,

Ugandan "walk to work" protests sparked by high fuel prices
Sudanese food protests
South African protests over poverty and unemployment
All sorts of protests in Zimbabwe (this is one)

I'm sure there's more that I'm missing.

Here in Ghana, doctors just ended their strike. This was over the delay in moving publicly-funded doctors onto the new pay scale for public servants, which would raise their pay. Last week, on my walk to my office, there as a giant pile of burning tires on the median, which I’m told—variously—was either about raising tuition or increasing the number of students to a dorm room (word on the street was that the University was talking about raising it to 6).

None of this stuff is too remote from the goals of OWS, but lumping it together as if it’s a movement waiting to be born seems to level the serious differences between the situations.

And I hate being that guy, the one who’s always on about how much better we have it, and how we should worry about having real problems, but... if you’re even middle-class-ish in the US, you have it really good. I don’t know many people in the US in my circles who would be totally comfortable living the way that middle-class Ghanaians do, let alone poor Ghanaians. And Ghana’s not that poor.

This is why, in my earlier comments, I pointed out that the game many people seem to be frustrated had the rules changed, was rigged from the start. It’s rigged worse than ever now in favor of the 1%. But, I'm not in that 1% in the US, and the game was massively rigged in my favor—I would (likely) not be where I am, precarious as it may be, were I born in Mogadishu, or Lagos, or Accra.

So, on the one hand, I worry about appropriating the situation of folks around here, as if saying “global capitalism!” solves, like, chieftancy disputes and the argument over whether the NDC has been using thug tactics against Rawlings’ wife. On the other hand, it strikes me that OWS should have cosmopolitan reach.

I throw myself on the mercy of more perceptive minds to make sense of all this.

Commenting Policy

2011-10-29T16:41:00.000-07:00

Friends,

I was hoping I would not have to make an authoritarian announcement like this one, but comments made in Daniel Levine’s post below have forced my hand. We strive to be egalitarian, inclusive, and serious here, and we want everyone to participate (including conservatives), but we won’t tolerate certain kinds of behavior:

Don’t be an asshole. Keep your comments as polite and inclusive as possible.
Don’t disparage philosophy. This is a blog for philosophers and people interested in philosophy.
Don’t derail, hijack, or otherwise subvert the comments away from the topic of the post you are commenting on.
No anti-semitic remarks will be tolerated.
No racist language will be tolerated.
No language oppressive to women will be tolerated.
No language oppressive to the LGBTQ community will be tolerated.
The comment section is not a place for you to endorse Social Darwinism.
The comment section is not a place for you to proselytize for your religion.
Don't be an asshole.

Really, if you just follow 1 and 10 we’ll all get along fine. If you violate any of these rules at anytime your post will be removed by myself or one of the other admins. Two violations, and you won’t be allowed to post again.

What are Demands Good For?

2011-10-29T02:25:00.000-07:00

When the idea that OWS does not need or should not have demands has made not only this blog but a Planet Money podcast, we may be moving beyond the assumption that it’s alleged incoherence is, in some sense, a failing. Though I have heard some vague rumors that the NYC group is planning to have a “platform” by the end of the month—anyone on the ground know anything about that?

But I’m a policy guy (and a boring analytic philosopher, who can’t discuss Deleuze), so I think it might be worth asking: why might you think a group like OWS needs demands?

There are two obvious pitfalls to having demands, which seem to be pretty well understood now.

First, the elements of the 99% that have been coming out to various Occupy protests are pretty diverse in terms of substantive politics. They may be united by a sense that something is wrong, and even a general idea that what’s wrong is that 1% have too much stuff and 99% too little, but not necessarily by much else. Keeping them all together may be in some degree dependent on keeping the plan vague. Any demands made would alienate lots of people—e.g., I imagine that the Tea Party might have a broader base had it stuck to the “we're mad about government bailouts” identification of the problem, rather than becoming focused on policy proposals that were more or less on the political right.

Second, having a set of demands would require bringing to a close the open-ended discourse that people are currently engaging in, and which seems to be a significant part of the draw.

The “pro-demand” side of the argument would basically be, “Okay, but what can you do unless you have a proposal?” I think it’s a good question, but the situation is a bit more complicated than it might appear.

First, there are plenty of things you can do without demands. Off the top of my head, here are a few that OWS seems, from my distant vantage point, to be doing already:

Have a conversation
Engage in mutual aid
Raise awareness about a problem
Make people feel good (if you think this is trivial, reflect on how much we consume corporate-produced media to accomplish this)

So, you can do plenty without demands. The one thing you can’t easily do without demands is change the behavior of elites. The concept of a “demand” is not at home in democratic theory—it is an immigrant from negotiation theory. Demands are fundamentally things you demand of people, typically people who have power you do not have to change a situation.

Without demands, the main thing you can’t do is go to members of the political and/or economic elite and say, “do x or we will retaliate thus-and-so,” where the thus-and-so is: not buy your stuff, not vote for you, burn your institutions down, etc.

This is one of those things that sounds stupidly obvious when I say it, but I think is important to any discussion of demands. You don’t have demands for yourself. You have demands because you accept the power of another actor. To have demands of Wall Street or Washington is to accept that Wall Street and Washington will continue to largely control your fate.

I also think the question of demands marks an important option for the OWS movement, as a result.

On the one hand, the regulative ideal of the demand-less approach is to create a space where the role of the existing elites becomes irrelevant. Enough people join the movement that we don’t make the system fairer by fixing the system; we make it fairer by displacing it with something else (and the crux of this would be the “engage in mutual aid” thing—I don't have to love your politics to be willing to feed you or teach you). I like this ideal, but it’s a big project, and I’d be dishonest if I didn’t admit that I’m pretty pessimistic about it happening. I’d love to be wrong!

On the other hand, forming demands might allow significant changes to be made—the Tea Party has been a fairly important factor in GOP politics and OWS could be a significant factor in national and local politics as well (likely, regardless of critique, on the Democratic side of the aisle). But these changes will be modifications of the existing system, to a large extent. No one will accept a demand to commit class or political suicide.

◊ ◊ ◊

Note: I want to put in a more public place than buried in a comment thread that I was probably too snarky by half in my response to Steven Mazie’s article in the comments to this post. I stand by my view that Rawls is more radical than he’s often made out to be, but I didn’t need to be obnoxious about it.

Phronesis & Political Conversation of the OWS Movement

2011-10-28T11:57:00.000-07:00

J.E. Hackett (SIU Carbondale) offers an Aristotelian reflection on the OWS Movement

In this short piece, I want to explicate the OWS’s “Aristotelian moments.” I have two short intuitions I’d like to share. First, I think the political conversation in Zucotti Park is about a deliberation concerning the ends to which we structure society, and secondly that while this is the aim of the openness of dialogue, the movement must adopt phronesis in order to secure the search of virtue from incommensurability. Too much inclusiveness can be undermining just as much as a blanket exclusiveness.

The OWS movement is an attempt to sustain an awareness of how we initially establish the ends or end in order that more may flourish. By “flourishing”, I do not mean that the 99% acquire more access to material wealth (though we must admit that wealth makes it easier to live a flourishing life), but a political condition that creates an environment in which others may realize the potential of their own lives. One doesn’t need to be a Marxist in America to see that how we structure society has a direct consequence to how people can realize their own lives and achieve the Good Life.

For the purposes of this entry, by “Good Life” is when all the goods of our lives are present in a balanced way and moreover we fairly have access to develop these goods in our lives. These goods might be knowledge, friendship, and family—they are simply things we want present in our life to make it complete. In this piece, I remain non-committal about what these goods ought to be for America on a whole since, I think, that the deliberation about what goods ought we to promote is a central line of inquiry for the OWS movement.

In political conversations, the OWS movement sustains an awareness of ends at great length by maintaining an openness without being quick to determine any particular policy or inherited political category about those ends. It is common for facilitators to make a list by stacking everyone that wants to share. Participants do not make noise when they disagree or agree with a speaker, they simply wiggle their fingers in a given way so they will not drown out someone’s voice. Everyone is respected in sharing their voice.

As I see it, the starting point of the OWS movement is a question about the ends we ought to aim for as a society. Previous political categories and policies are part of the problem in promoting an end that destroys the capacity for others to lead the Good Life. Hence, it is necessary to have conversations about exactly how to address these concerns. Given this assumption, how exactly do we go about changing America such that the ends our society promotes allow for flourishing? What ends ought we to endorse over others such that justice may be realized?

The indeterminacy of the OWS’s message is an open refusal to stop the conversation about the virtue of our political process from being co-opted to an end in which corporations, banks and a powerful elite garner more entrenched self-interests over and above what is necessary for the entire American community to flourish. No solution is offered in the status-quo. However, we are unclear how best to foster flourishing ourselves. That’s why we are asking questions, having dialogues and this is why it is wise for the OWS Movement to refuse translation into partisan frameworks of the Democratic and Republican parties. It is the search for new concepts, interpretations and frameworks to address the challenges we face. In this way, I can also see the following questions striking a chord with the OWS Movement: What combination of virtues are necessary to establish are more just society than the one we now have and ultimately what will those virtues require in the specific American context? I’d be open to the fact that some virtues might be more culturally necessary than others.

In order for us to ask these questions, there are a few requirements that our conversations must fulfill. I offer three capacities necessary to maintain the openness in deliberation. First, there must be “comprehension.” This is our ability to size up a situation and maintain a view to its conceptual wholeness; it is our ability to exercise judgment. However, the exercising of judgment necessitates that we have the appropriate “sense” as to what is truly relevant in our moral situation. We must be able to distinguish the morally salient features of our particular situation in this country. Lastly, not only must we be able to judge the relevant features in our particular situation, and do so with clear understanding, but we must execute this deliberation into action. Execution requires that we must have a “cleverness,” a type of ingenuity in knowing how exactly to put together the means to achieve our end.

Philosophers will recognize my threefold requirement for political conversations as phronesis or practical wisdom. This is the contribution that is mostly relevant to the OWS movement from Aristotle. Indeed, we want a very inclusive discourse, and we require new political categories, conceptual landscapes and methods of inquiry to address the concerns of plutocracy in America. We want very open discourses fostered to meet that challenge. Yet, there will come a time in which these discourses must sift out perspectives, make decisions and bring about an end in action. The ends pursued must come about wisely and rationally. There are many different things being said, and possibly a great many contradictory proposals. It is very likely that we have stacked perspectives that are inherently contradictory to each other. Therefore, to prevent a deliberation with incommensurable results, it is necessary to adopt the intellectual virtues of deliberation in Aristotle such that these conversations can maintain the end in view proper to what we want, and what we want can only come about from a virtuous inquiry into the particular problems America faces.

Charlie Chaplin: The Original Occupier?

2011-10-28T08:23:00.000-07:00

In 1940, before anyone was aware of the true extent of the crimes of the Nazi regime, Charlie Chaplin produced, wrote, directed, and starred in The Great Dictator, one of the greatest satirical films ever. The film was nominated for several Oscars (including best screenplay and best actor nods for Chaplin himself). And it was widely loved by American moviegoers and critics of the era.

In the film, Chaplin plays a lower class Jewish man who happens to bear a great resemblance to Hynkel, a bloodthirsty, despotic, politician with designs for world conquest. Through a series of events he replaces the dictator, as the country wages an extended and bloody war.

In the movie’s climactic scene, Chaplin gives a stirring anti-authoritarian, anti-war, anti-fascist oratory. Calling the army to embrace their humanity and imploring the people to live in a spirit of democracy and fraternity.

It would be anachronistic to think that all of what is said in this great speech is applicable to current struggles of the OWS movement. But if you give it a listen, I think you will agree not only that is one of the greatest soliloquies in the history of cinema, but also that Chaplin would have loved to see the OWS, which is after all a very real uprising against “machine men, with machine minds.”

How the Wachowski Siblings May Have Saved the World

2011-10-27T15:53:00.000-07:00

Assuming that the average age of the current OWS protester is about 26 years old, then most of them would have been about 14 years old when The Matrix was released in 1999.

In the now famous scene (at left) from that iconic movie, Morpheus, leader of a revolutionary underground, explains the true nature of the Matrix to Thomas Anderson. It is a system of control, a world “pulled over your eyes” to blind you from the awful truth that human beings are nothing more than batteries to power the regime of a race of intelligent machines.

The idea of a “world pulled over your eyes” is nothing new to philosophers, of course. 2000 years before The Matrix, the Greek Philosopher Plato, in his famous dialogue The Republic told a similar story—the Allegory of the Cave. There Plato had his readers imagine a group of people held hostage to appearances, forced to accept a shadow play for reality, and he imagined what might happen if one of them managed to get free, and see past the shadows, and look at the world as it really is. What would we he tell his fellow captives then? And how would they react? I don’t want to spoil it for you, but it doesn’t end well.

The Wachowski siblings tapped the same rich philosophical vein in The Matrix. What is real? But they added an interesting layer to the allegory. Their contribution? The people in the Cave are not just stationary captives ala A Clockwork Orange (another masterpiece of dystopian filmmaking) but they are exploited workers, their production in captivity literally empowers the very system that oppresses them.

Sound like anyone you know? (Or perhaps like 99% of everyone you know?)

I find it interesting that one of the major cultural myths of the OWS generation is about a group of oppressed humans, living in a system that unfairly exploits their productivity who rise up in a revolution and overthrow that inhumane system. It may be a stretch for a philosopher to make such a broad psychological generalization, but surely a group of people who share that formative cultural myth are more primed for radical political action (if not outright revolution) than say, those of our grandmother’s and mother’s generations, who were told stories about elite members of the wealthiest 1% (e.g., Bruce Wayne, Oliver Queen, Ted Cord, Stephen Strange, Sherlock Holmes, Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Francis Xavier, Thor, Henry Pym, et al...) and even super-powered Space Aliens (e.g. The Martian Manhunter, The Silver Surfer, and Superman himself) who were so enamored of the America of the 1950’s where law and order and fair play reigned that they shun their lives of comfort, or even the extra-terrestrial homes, to make a life for themselves in the Good Old US of A.

In a generation, we went from Clark Kent, alien immigrant in the most literal sense turned defender of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” to Thomas Anderson (Neo), a living battery in an indifferent machine, who realizes his plight and joins a desperate struggle to cast off his shackles. The Wachowskis might not have been the first to go there, but it was their enjoyable iteration on Plato that reached millions of young people the world over with message that appearance is not reality, that appearances can be tools of oppression, and that revolution is sometimes the only sensible course of action.

The Wachowskis followed up the Matrix trilogy with another grand revolutionary spectacle. In 2006, they released their film adaption of Alan Moore and And David Lloyd’s classic graphical novel V For Vendetta. The graphic novel tells the story of a anarchic terrorist, compulsively clad in a Guy Fawkes mask, who carries out a personal vendetta against a brutally fascistic 80s–90s British regime with startling acts of violence and fiery demolition. The Wachowskis tweaked this plot, much to the ire of Alan Moore, by revising the character of V, and making him more overtly heroic liberal freedom fighter, where the original V was an outright anarchist, not given to what Moore called “American liberal” sentiment.

Be that as it may, the film retained many of the revolutionary overtones of the graphic novel. This was especially apparent in the memorable scene where V addresses the nation via television about their Gov’t.

Though V for Vendetta performed poorly at the box office compared to the Matrix trilogy, this particular scene, and the character of V himself, has taken on a life of its own as an internet meme.

This is evident in the way that the famous hacker/activist/anarchist network that calls itself Anonymous has appropriated the figure of V via there use of his trademark Guy Fawkes mask. Anonymous operatives regularly appear in Fawkes masks at any public protest.

Left: OWS protesters in France; Right: members of Anonymous protesting Scientology in Florida

And the meme of the protester in a Guy Fawkes mask has spread as well to many of the OWS camps around the world.

I take the ubiquity and obvious importance of the figure of V, represented by people’s willingness to wear his mask, as evidence of a generation that associates itself with the revolutionary narrative the character embodied rather than the “Truth Justice and The American Way” narrative of our parents and our parents parents.

As more and more people awaken, like the red pills in The Matrix, to discover that they have been commodified, dehumanized, chopped, bundled, bought, and sold as means to grow corporate capital, used as fuel for a reckless financial bubble to enrich the 1%, more people will be politically radicalized, and embrace the persona, and the narrative, of revolution.

The Wachowskis, who studied philosophy in college, have managed to make an impact on millions of young people around the globe. Through their craft, they’ve helped (in no small way I suspect) to change the narrative and mythos of a generation of young Americans. In the end, the changes they helped bring about, and the narrative they helped us to imagine, might end up being a vehicle of positive change in the lives of millions of people. They might help save the world.

More on Rawls & Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-27T12:55:00.000-07:00

My piece on Rawls and Occupy Wall Street from last week hasgarnered some critical reactions, and I reply to one of the more prominent responses in this rejoinder, posted today on Big Think.

–Steve Mazie

Quan = Quisling

2011-10-27T05:40:00.000-07:00

Video on The Police-State Reaction to Occupy Oakland

2011-10-26T10:59:00.000-07:00

In a press release dated October 25, Joanna Watson of the Media Relations office at the Oakland Police Department, denied that the police used non-lethal "rubber" bullets and "flash-bang" or concussion grenades on protesters. Here is the relevant quote from the press release:

Q. Did the Police deploy rubber bullets, flash-bag grenades?
A. No, the loud noises that were heard originated from M-80 explosives thrown at Police by protesters. In addition, Police fired approximately four bean bag rounds at protesters to stop them from throwing dangerous objects at the officers.

(The full press release can be found here)

After the jump...video of an Oakland PD Officer throwing a concussion grenade into a group of protesters who are trying to give aid to a woman who has fallen and injured herself.

I have to admit that I can scarcely believe what this video clearly shows. Namely that the police, at least in Oakland, can be easily persuaded to overlook their credo "to serve and protect", unless of course this is understood as applying only to the interests of the Corporate plutocracy. They certainly seem uninterested in protecting the rights of freedom of speech and freedom of Assembly of the protesters, nor do they appear at all concerned for the physical health and well-being of the people, who they lob concussion grenades at with callous disregard.

How callous is their disregard?

Here is a video at the scene by a filmmaker named Abby Martin with the group "Media Roots". Warning: There is some very free, and unedited, speech in this video:

What Ms. Martin captures very well here is the utter disregard for the people these police show. They seem to be, as one commenter on Youtube aptly puts it, "zombies" responding with violence to peaceful demonstrations, and protecting the (criminally) accumulated wealth of the 1% while blankly and silently staring off into the distance. Not one of them offers a non-pathological reply to the honest, humane, questions put to them.

I for one am in utter dismay at these developments, what do our readers think?

Thanks

2011-10-25T15:39:00.000-07:00

On behalf of all the authors and editors, I would like to thank our readers for getting the word out about the blog. Thanks in large part to Prof. Brian Leiter at Leiter Reports our site quickly gained readership last week. About midweek we were mentioned by Andrew Sullivan at the The Daily Beast and that sent page views soaring, and a day or so later we were mentioned in the New York Times philosophy blog, The Stone.

All in all, we had just over 20,000 page views in less than a week, which is a good (if unsustainable) start. We’ve also added several new authors. And we’ve developed some exciting plans, including and new WordPress homepage, that we’ll be sharing with you soon.

Thanks for helping us get off the ground running, for your continued support and interest.

Welcome to the Police State

2011-10-25T15:18:00.000-07:00

For the past few weeks the Occupation has been kept in the public-eye in large part thanks to the ongoing police pogrom being perpetrated against the peaceful encampments of the movement. As we all know, thousands have been arrested in New York City alone, and hundreds more around the country have been subject to humiliation, gassing, intimidation, and outright physical violence at the hands of police operatives nation-wide.

But it appears that in the race to be the first to appease their worried plutocratic masters the Oakland Police department has shed all semblance of decency and humanity and opted instead for 700 police in riot-gear, tear gas, flash-bang grenades, and rubber bullets to respond to the dire threat that is a peaceful democratic community.

Having lived most of my life in the United States, where I was raised to believe sincerely in the rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of speech, I have to admit that this unhinged and poorly planned reaction on the part of the sycophantic police-force of Oakland is not only deeply offensive, but utterly outrageous.

But the real outrage is that our police have not yet awakened to the realization of their true power. As long as they continue to serve the interests of the plutocrats, they will continue to be tools of oppression in the hands of callous and indifferent politicians and CEOs. But if they could be awakened, they would be a terrific addition to the movement.

I think we should make it a priority to reach out to police unions (where there are such) and to policeman's benevolent associations, and to policmen and women as individuals and implore them to join the vanguard of our movement. Imagine if those 700 police in riot gear had been met by 100 of their own? Would they have been so quick to terrorize the peaceful members of Occupy Oakland then?

And not just the police, we also need to reach out to returning war veterans. Perhaps march on V.A. Hospitals around the country, to tell them we appreciate their service to our country, and we need them to join with us in creating a better future.

The Fascist Reaction

2011-10-24T15:45:00.000-07:00

Brownshirts beat up commies in the streets.

From Crooksandliars:

Occupy Maine protesters say Sunday morning's attack with a chemical explosive has left them with a mixture of anxiety and resolve.

"We are more motivated to keep doing what we're doing," said Stephanie Wilburn, of Portland, who was sitting near where the chemical mixture in a Gatorade bottle was tossed at 4 a.m. Sunday. "They have heard us and we're making a difference."

Wilburn said she was startled and briefly lost hearing in her left ear when the device exploded beneath a table about 10 feet away. Wilburn's hearing returned and police said no injuries were reported.

Portland police Sgt. Glen McGary said the bomb was thrown into the camp’s kitchen, a tarped area where food is cooked and served. Protest organizers said the explosion lifted a large table about a foot off the ground.

"There was no fire . . . We had a good 20 feet of thick smoke rolling out from under the table," Wilburn said. They could see the "G" on the 24-ounce bottle and its orange cap, as well as bits of silver metal, she said.

She and a friend who ran over to look at it breathed in fumes that smelled like ammonia, she said.

Witnesses said a silver car had been circling before the attack, its occupants shouting things like "Get a job" and "You communist." They believe someone from that car threw the device, according to a statement from Occupy Maine.

The demonstrators are protesting what they describe as unfairly favorable treatment given banks and other corporate interests at the expense of working people and those trying to find a job.

Shane Blodgett of Augusta was sleeping in his tent in the middle of the park when the explosion woke him up.

"I heard a sound which I thought was a gunshot," he said, gesturing at the collection of three dozen tents that cover the south side of the park at Congress and Pearl streets.

"I was in fear for my life. I thought someone was walking around with a gun. I didn't dare poke my head out," Blodgett said. He eventually went back to sleep..."Get a job" and "You communist." They believe someone from that car threw the device, according to a statement from Occupy Maine

Is this the beginning of a violent right-wing backlash? Thoughtful analysis welcome.

Capital Architecture

2011-10-23T13:25:00.000-07:00

The New Scientist has an interesting article that uses mathematical modeling of transnational corporation ownership data to map the concentration of economic wealth.

Neat, right?

The article mentions what's useful (mapping the architecture of the economy, checking for stability, calculating exposure) and what's not (determining which individuals actually control the capital).

Protestors that allegedly claim that there is a vast global conspiracy are used as an argumentative foil. The article chortles that such a conspiracy is highly unlikely. I think that most of the protestors and the 99% would completely agree. We have to remember that the 99% is a highly diverse group, with a wide variety of different beliefs, some of which are more well-founded than others. We ought to be very careful when representing the entire group in a certain light based on the beliefs of very few. The way that the paragraph was written, it's ambiguous. One way of reading the sentence is that the protestors are a unified group with some coherent set of claims, one of which is belief in a global conspiracy. By highlighting the conspiracy claim, it suggests that the belief is somehow indicative of the group as a whole, or at least widespread enough to merit mention. Otherwise, the sentence might have been written, "one thing won't chime with conspiracy theorists' claims".

There is one major flaw in reasoning in the article, made by Dan Braha of NECSI: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

Quite simply, this statement is false.

The study models highly interconnected transnational corporate ownership, not ownership of personal wealth.

It may be that in a self-organising economy, a small percentage of corporations end up controlling most of the capital. If true, then this is a highly useful fact to know as we consider the merits of various systems of economic organization and regulation.

However, that does not entail that we permit vast concentrations of individual wealth. Resource inequality between persons undermines fundamental commitments to moral, political, and social equality. If we raised the top marginal tax rate, we could shift the wealth distribution into something far more efficient, equitable, stable and sustainable. Therefore, it is false that a self-organising economy logically entails concentration of wealth into one percent of the population.

It is also not the case that all of the 99% object to capitalism per se, or even that all of the protestors do. Capitalism can be defined in many different ways, but what I take to be distinctive is private ownership of the means of production. This contrasts with other ownership systems such as public or worker-owned firms.

Capitalism often operates in market economies. A market economy is one in which the price and quantity of goods and services produced are determined by some sort of market mechanism such as the free price system (signaling of supply and demand). Need a concrete, simple example? Ebay. The seller puts an item up for auction, the buyers bid. If the item is scarce, the price goes up. If it's worthless, the item fails to sell. Contrast this system with a command/planned economy: one where price or quantity of goods and services are set by non-market forces such as a government. The former USSR had a centrally-planned economy.

Naturally, the question of regulation arises at this point. It is important to note that even comparatively free market economies are still regulated. The question is always how much they ought to be regulated. The market is an intangible entity defined and created by humans for the purpose of coordinating resource distribution. It could take any form, and we shouldn't limit our imaginations to its present configuration.

Proponents of laissez-faire capitalism rarely agree that truly every transaction between individuals should be free of government intervention. This view is at bottom, completely anarchical and utterly absurd: we think that there should be rule of law, for instance. But of course, that requires enforcement, which means a full legal system with courts and police and such. Those who promote laissez-faire usually have some minimal conception of regulation. So then the question is not whether to have regulation, but rather how much.

After all, we do not presently permit individuals or their organs to be sold within the United States. We outlaw slavery. We tightly regulate prostitution and drugs, where they are permitted. Some things are, and ought to be beyond the scope of the market.

We don't think that the market ought to determine the worth of a human life, nor determine who deserves which set of political liberties. The ideal in the United States is a presumption of its citizens as free and equal persons.

Even those who trumpet 'free' markets usually imagine for the sake of argument that the transacting parties are free and equal with access to the same information. If they don't accept these as minimal conditions, it's hard to see how their view could possibly be justified. On what basis could we judge such a system as preferable to one that meets them?

One can accept certain regulations but reject others: for instance, that persons should be free and equal but that corn subsidies undermine what is valuable about specialization and trade.

Finally, as a society we determine how much individuals are allowed to profit off of the market. As our system is highly complex and interconnected, we understand that at bottom, this is a cooperative enterprise. Even so-called titans of industry need teachers to teach the next generation, medical professionals to tend to the sick, air traffic controllers to direct air traffic, and so on. It's not unreasonable to require that the most fortunate individuals pay back into the system that birthed and supported their venture. No one can possibly achieve greatness alone.

What I object to, as a 99%er, is the gross concentration of personal wealth, the complete corruption of political power with money, and a banking system that incentivizes short-term thinking and speculative asset bubbles.

I want to see a market economy.

I want to see a rise in the top marginal tax rate.

I want to see full public financing of elections and a decoupling of political and economic power.

I want a financial transactions tax and greater corporate taxes that adequately capture negative social externalities (such as the costs of pollution and environmental damage).

Cross-posted here.

Occupy Rawls Street

2011-10-21T17:45:00.000-07:00

Steven V. Mazie over at the Stone today talks about how `those' Occupiers ought to read and discuss Rawls. First, as an associate professor, I'm fairly certain he's one of us 99%ers. Second, `we' do. I agree that more of us should; Rawls shaped contemporary moral and political philosophy and has much to say on political equality and distributive justice. For those that are not familiar, however, I'd like to offer a few points of clarification.

He writes, "Some individuals may be more motivated and harder working, and thus can legitimately expect greater rewards for their efforts." This is part of a section of the article that is purportedly representing Rawls' view. But that was not Rawls' view.

It is not that individuals that work harder deserve a greater share of resources. After all, Rawls explicitly says that one does not deserve one's natural endowments. One's work ethic is one such character trait. It may be caused simply by good genes and/or the right sort of environment: in short, luck.

It's also not that individuals ought to expect greater reward for their efforts. The only proper motivation for individuals, on Rawls' view, is to uphold and affirm the principles of justice (including the difference principle). They believe that we ought to make the worst off as best off as we can (with some important restrictions.)

It is rather that, for whichever reason we might end up with an inequality, it can be justified (preferred to other distributions) because it benefits the worst off. If anyone can object to inequality, it's those disfavored by that inequality. Ex hypothesi, those very same worst off are better off than they would be under any other distribution. The fact that they are better off gives them a reason to prefer the unequal distribution.

Of course, it would be irrational for an individual to prefer a distribution where she gets $101, and another gets $1 trillion, than one in which both parties get $100. And this is where the restrictions become important.

The principles of justice are lexically ordered. The first principle requires that all citizens are to have the most extensive set of basic liberties compatible with the same set of liberties for all others. This includes the political liberties. If the level of resource inequality interferes with equal liberties, then it is prohibited.

This is clearly the case in the United States today. Money has a corrupting influence on political power in ways that undermine our status as free and equal citizens.

The second principle contains the difference principle: that inequalities must be arranged such that they are to the benefit of the worst off. But, it also insists that such inequalities must be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.

Of course, the wealthy today are at a substantial advantage. Working and middle class children are more likely to become less wealthy than their parents than to stay the same, much less rise above: the United States is one of the worst countries recently measured in a study of intergenerational income mobility.

Rawls is explicitly concerned with substantive, not formal (i.e., legal) equality of opportunity. So, it is not sufficient that the law does not expressly forbid members of a certain class (e.g., women, minorities) to occupy the favorable positions. They must actually be able to obtain the position. Suppose that some trinket is a necessary item for a favorable position. Then contenders must all have the means to acquire the trinket.

I take it that what is obvious to everyone protesting is that the inequality does not meet these conditions. Substantial resource inequality is incompatible with full social and political equality. The widespread sentiment is that the country is being run for and by the fortunate few.

What Mazie says, however, is that "inequality becomes injustice when the cooperative nature of society breaks down and a significant segment of the population finds itself unable to thrive, despite its best efforts."

This is incorrect as applied to the present United States, as is implied in the paragraph. These inequalities are unjust because they violate the two principles of justice. That is, it is obvious that:

1. Resource inequality undermines political equality.

2. Inequalities are not attached to social positions and offices open to all.

3. It is false that the worst off could not do better on a different distribution.

Mazie instructs us to focus our efforts on arguing over the finer points of Rawls rather than engaging in "intellectually bankrupt rhetoric", whatever that is supposed to mean. I'm happy to take him up on that aspect of the challenge, at least (cross-posted here).

Bizarrely, he claims that occupiers are focused on hatred of the rich, rather than frustrated at policies and institutions. Mazie, I see your "Eat the Rich" sign and raise you a "Down with Self-Settled Asset Trusts".

Mazie suggests some ways that we can move toward a more just society, and I am wholeheartedly inclined to agree: "structural changes in campaign financing, the banking system, and the tax code".

Mazie concludes by observing that a political movement is more likely to be successful if it does not focus on bettering the worst off, so we should plump for Rawls' more 'inclusive' formulation of the difference principle.

There are separable questions here:

1. What justice demands.

2. How we can achieve a more just society.

I take it that the point of the exercise is to see that the basic structure of our society is highly unjust already. That's something that is detrimental to all of us. It rightly unsettles most Americans that we are not free and equal citizens: this is a much vaunted and cherished political ideal.

I take it his point was that we must find some common ground on which to motivate coordination of the 99%. He thinks that requires moving to the inclusive formulation, but I don't see how that follows. If we take Rawls' argument seriously, we should all be motivated to make the necessary changes to the basic structure to ensure that we really do live in a society worth pledging allegiance to, with "liberty and justice for all."

What Role for Ideology Producers?

2011-10-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

For a few semesters running in grad school, I guest-taught a lecture on Marxism in one of the school's intro to political thought courses. Every time, I would point out that the students should not, of course, listen to me - as an intellectual, I am an ideology-producer, and my role in the ecology of the capitalist system is to fill their heads with pseudo-ideas that purport to legitimate the system.

Of course, they didn't ever listen to me.

So, as a philosopher considering what I might contribute to a blog about the OWS movement, my first thought was to worry about falling into that trap. There is a tendency, as a professional producer of ideology, to want to take a stand on what OWS should be "about" - two of the more recent examples that I've read are N.J. Jun's interesting suggestion in this blog and Lakoff's argument for how OWS should "frame itself" over at Common Dreams (I won't be giving away spoilers, I hope, by saying that if you are familiar with Lakoff's general line, you can probably predict the whole article without having to read it). Of course, other public intellectuals have weighed in on how OWS should present itself, what it means, and/or what it should demand as well. Not to mention the legions who are pooh-poohing it (please forgive me for not linking to them, my internet is slow - I'm in Ghana at the moment - and it's very boring).

The obvious thing would be to throw my hat into the ring - philosophers are notorious what-it-all-should-mean-ers, and I am sure that people on the ground in various Occupy Here protests should care about my opinion more than Tom Friedman's. But I'm more interested in what it means that people are trying to say what it means.

The strong current among the ideology producers seems to be to see OWS as a sort of left-wing version of the Tea Party. And - ideology producers, mind you - by seeing it that way make others see it that way, and make it truth. I'll be honest - I could imagine worse outcomes than that. The Tea Party, near as I can tell, started with genuine grassroots discontent (you don't have to agree, you can call it racist, but that doesn't mean it's not genuine), got co-opted by both establishment and upstart right-wing groups, and now largely fuels harder-right GOP candidates and activities. But at the same time, it's had an actual effect on the Republican party. If in 2012 we're talking about "OWS candidates" and Tom Friedman is complaining about the leftist extremism in the Democratic party that is poisoning the national debate, that would be sort of neat, in its own right. Wouldn't it be cool to hear USian politicians talking about the poor instead of the middle class?

Answer: yes, it would be cool.

But it's not clear to me that this is the only, or even the best path. The grinding logic of game theory more or less rules out a viable new party in our system, so it would maybe drag the Democrats a bit leftward, but leave the game more or less untouched.

Let me do the other annoying philosopher thing and make a distinction. The tendency seems to be to try to see OWS as a faction - one organized pressure group among others, with a particular agenda. Let's distinguish that from a phenomenon - a happening that changes how things are done within the system (the term sucks, please propose better ones in the comments).

If the "we are the 99%" slogan is ever to be more than a slogan, OWS can't be a faction. There's very little that 99% of USians agree on. We may be largely in the same boat, and we may all agree that it's taking on water, but we simply do not agree on how to fix the leaks. The 99% share neither a set of demands nor a common moral perspective. And a common predicament is enough for Kristof's "primal scream" (in itself implying that people who are part of OWS are inarticulate, you know) but not enough for organized and directed action toward building a solution - on its own.

Could it be a phenomenon? Maybe. But that's harder. In particular, ideology producers can't lead that. First, I think practice will have to come before the ideology - if we really want to change how the game is played, rather than adjust the positions of the players, the important bit will be OWS getting people out into the streets, getting more people practice with tactics of direct democracy, etc.

Second, I think if an ideology comes out of OWS, that will be a sign of factionhood rather than phenomenonality (new words, whee!). Call it a list of demands or a moral perspective, we shouldn't see the telos as agreement on anything, if we don't want a faction.

I don't have much immediate hope that OWS will be a tremendous shift in US, let alone global, politics (a big part of that skepticism is that I think many USians underestimate how safe our current politics is and how dangerous more radical alternatives would be - police brutality is one thing, but I don't think the 99% are ready to be Libya). But it could be part of more subtle but important changes if it gets people talking to each other, solving problems through direct democratic means, more consciously examining the relationship between their personal lives and political concerns (if you're worried about money in politics, remember that someone put each dollar in that corporate pocket - in the US, usually not at the barrel of a gun), etc.

And we ideology-producers can have a role to play in that, if we can bite our tongues about what the movement should be about and instead talk more about alternative ways to legitimate collective decisions. If voting and complaining on the internet and waiting for some pundit or philosophy blogger to articulate an ideology they find attractive are the only alternatives many people see, we could help illuminate how something like OWS could be not just a briefly-spotlighted event but an example of the stuff that people can do every day.

Given my practice-first point, this is primarily something to be directed at people not out in the streets. The people in the streets will learn about this stuff as they experience the joys and frustrations of trying to get consensus, sit through general assembly meetings, and so forth.

Then we can fight about whether open borders are a good idea in a way that might actually go somewhere interesting.

But anyway, I'm, like 3000 miles from the nearest OWS affiliate protest I know of, so take my advice by telling me I'm full of shit.

The Real Deal

2011-10-18T18:46:00.000-07:00

Ten days ago I stood on the periphery of a Yom Kippur service with at least a thousand Jewish folks across from Liberty Park, singing the words of the Torah, repeating the stories of persecution, and tying this history of oppression to the current class oppression perpetrated by Wall Street on the 99%. We were gathered in the very site of the major banks of America, including that one. The rabbis who led us in remembrance reminded us of the false oaths Jews had to make to avoid being murdered by the Inquisition, and of the false oaths the U.S. financial leaders have made to uphold the interests of their customers. These customers have been asked to sign documents without reading, have been committed without full disclosures to ballooning mortgages, and too many have been stripped of their livelihoods and homes. Since we had to use the ‘people’s microphone,’ a thousand voices echoed these condemnations of our current system and raised their voices in prayer as suits with smirks walked by, the NYPD maintained a menacing perimeter, and the revolutionary general assembly met across the street.

Occupy Wall Street is the real deal. It is what liberal and progressive and radical philosophers have been asking for—have been writing for years in the hopes of inciting—and yet as it begins, too many are criticizing. ‘The message is cloudy, the tactics are inflammatory, the process gets bogged down in ultra-democracy.’ Certainly there is room for debate on all these topics, yet what is happening here is an actual movement. When an idea catches fire, and the sermon reaches beyond the choir, beyond even the church doors, no one can predict what form it will eventually take. Just a few years ago the idea of gay marriage caught fire, so much so that straight-laced, and straight, small town city clerks risked going to jail to break the heterosexist laws of their office. Supportive crowds handed out flowers to tearful gay couples on city hall steps across the country, and yet here again, the academic left offered little more than critique. It was the wrong demand, the wrong tactic, the wrong goal.

Leftists, theorists, academics such as myself, cannot dictate the terms of a movement when a real one materializes. We cannot decide in advance what the right tactics are, or even what the correct line is, or what will inflame the imagination. The correct tactics and the correct line will be the ones that are effective in mobilizing new political participants, that work to raise the level of organization and consciousness, and that effectively reveals the true nature of the state and of the society we live in. The criteria of success do not rest on achievement of some specific demand, but on the engagement of imagination, enlargement of political participation, and creation of new coalitions. On these grounds, Occupy Wall Street is already a clear success. As Zillah Eisenstein and Chandra Talpade Mohanty wrote in their piece in The Feminist Wire, what has changed is this population’s sense of selfhood in relation to political institutions and the state.

It is the exciting, and alarming, open-endedness of this new occupation tactic that has inspired so much participation and interest. This is not the usual protest march so many of us have gone to, with agreed upon demands, a beginning and end, and an opportunity for civil disobedience, if you plan ahead. The drama of having folks—mostly young—set up sleeping bags in a public park for an unspecified duration, where there is a principled agreement on diversity of tactics, and where an open meeting makes decisions in ‘horizontal’ fashion twice a day, brings the ideas of radical democracy to a new manifestation—living and breathing, making mistakes as well as making incredible things happen, right before our eyes. Few signs are mass-produced here; rather, there is hand lettering on cardboard with a delightful variety of slogans that are pointed, funny and profane. “Jesus was a Marxist.” “Giving head to the man won’t help you get ahead.” “One day everything will be different.” “Be the people.” It’s the dramatic open-endedness of this that has sparked similar events in cities around the country and the world, and it’s the decentralization that has mobilized people to feel that their participation could actually make a difference, so that its worth the trouble to get out of the house for once. We in the U.S. like to think we are so very superior to the communist countries that regularly mobilized show demonstrations that looked very little like real democracy. Yet our democratic practices have been similarly straight-jacketed, choreographed, with limited results known well in advance. Occupy Wall Street has broken open the possibilities.

This past weekend I stood on the front lines at Times Square, trying to gauge the policemen’s expressions for the likelihood of being charged with their horses. Around 7:30 pm the cops started to cordon us in, pushing in the barricades, refusing to let the trapped crowds move out. They had skillfully found a way to segregate protesters from the tourists and the theatre-goers, separating us in a way that would be useful for arrest, or violence. The crowd alternated between angry chants of “This is what a police state looks like” to defusing sing song chants like “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands.” An Iraq veteran shouted a stern lecture to the cops to stop advancing on unarmed people, that this was not the democratic country he fought to protect. The cops stayed put, and aggressively took pictures of those taking pictures of them. They shouted “Step back!” and we shouted “You step back!” Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow maintained her position right at the front, a small boned woman with a nervous look but complete determination. Then a white shirted officer came out—the symbol of higher rank—and called the cops to step back. It was Officer Esposito, #2 below Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who made an on the spot decision to allow democracy to continue unheeded, for the moment. The crowd began to chant his name in gratitude. Who says there’s no such thing as free will?

Linda Martín Alcoff
Department of Philosophy
Hunter College/CUNY Graduate Center

Theme song for the #Occupy movement?

2011-10-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

Here's a video of Bruce Cockburn's classic, scathing, protest song Call It Democracy. This song appeared on the 1986 album World of Wonders. One of the most socially conscious albums of the 1980's. Cockburn (pronounced "Co-burn") is a Canadian singer-songwriter-guitarist, and a member of the Order of Canada well known as a political activist and socially conscious artist. WoW is perhaps his greatest record, well worth a listen. This song was written as a P.F.O. letter to the IMF, but I think it sums how many of us feel about the International Banking Cabal in general with equal aplomb.

Lyrics below the jump...

Padded with power here they come
International loan sharks backed by the guns
Of market hungry military profiteers
Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
With the blood of the poor

Who rob life of its quality
Who render rage a necessity
By turning countries into labour camps
Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom

Sinister cynical instrument
Who makes the gun into a sacrament --
The only response to the deification
Of tyranny by so-called "developed" nations'
Idolatry of ideology

North South East West
Kill the best and buy the rest
It's just spend a buck to make a buck
You don't really give a flying fuck
About the people in misery

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

See the paid-off local bottom feeders
Passing themselves off as leaders
Kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows
Open for business like a cheap bordello

And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy

See the loaded eyes of the children too
Trying to make the best of it the way kids do
One day you're going to rise from your habitual feast
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast
They call the revolution

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

Monday Symposium

2011-10-17T20:55:00.000-07:00

It’s Monday morning dear readers and time for the first in what I hope will be an ongoing series of online symposia centered on the Occupy Wall Street movement.

In ancient Greece, our philosophical ancestors used symposia (drinking parties) as occasions for lively debate, often centered on a single philosophical issue.

Our symposia will be strictly BYOB, and perhaps coffee will work better than alcohol, but each symposium will center on a single question raised by the ongoing protest movement in the United States and abroad. I’ll ask a question, to set the discussion, then we’ll use the comments section for debate. This week’s question:

Q: Can the Occupy Wall Street movement succeed by working to change the system from within or should the overthrow of the existing two-party political system be one of its primary aims?

(If you have a question that would make for an interesting future symposium, email us.)

An Integral Philosophical Perspective on Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-17T19:46:00.000-07:00

My other blog’s readers are familiar with the tradition of integral philosophy in general and integral politics in particular, but I don't assume any specialized background other than the basic principles of political theory. Incorporating insights from perennial philosophy, the constructive thread of postmodern thought, and developmental psychology (Piaget, Maslow, Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, Ken Wilber, etc.) integral politics understands that human consciousness evolves. From this perspective, the Occupy Wall Street movement is situated amid the conflict between modern and postmodern approaches to political economy.

Wall Street epitomizes modernity’s concern with optimizing the autonomy of individuals, freedom from the restraints of bureaucratic control, and a culture of wealth accumulation and global domination. Wall Street is a powerful symbol, and the Occupy Wall Street movement chooses the symbol as a locus of demonstration because of its capacity for dramatizing a radical rejection of some of modernity’s core values.

Thus, the Occupy Wall Street movement epitomizes the postmodern consciousness with its solidarity for the oppressed and marginalized, its internalized guilt over the West’s legacy of imperialism, and a rebellion against materialism and selfishness. That the movement begins with a ritualized expression of outrage rather than a well-articulated list of demands is understandable; long have postmodern politics been impotent in American political discourse, relegated to the periphery in a two-party system with an iron clad grip on power.

Distinct in its vision of politics, the integral worldview understands that postmodernity follows modernity as part of a deep and complex spiral of development. The evolutionary view it shares with thinkers such as Fichte and Hegel and spiritual thinkers such as Tielhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo, though in the 21st century the most serious integral thinkers have shed the baggage of simple metaphysics in favor of a view that is arguably both “post-metaphysical“ and “post-postmodern.”

Integral recognizes that postmodern political economics emerges from modern economics and is basically an elite, higher level of political consciousness. Postmodern politics is more evolved, more capable of embodying a spirit of justice and compassion, and more capable of taking appropriately worldcentric perspectives on important global problems. Both integral and postmodern political philosophies sense deeply that the days of ethnocentric social organization and independent nation-states is inadequate for coping with the complexities of today's world.

Writing on Integral World, Joe Corbett, Ph.D., sketches an integral approach to critical theory:

Including justice as more distributive fairness and inclusion within the discourse of Integral Theory and its practice is something the postmodern (green) level of analysis has already provided. However, postmodernism is mostly about promoting the diversity of social relations generally, and is absent of any explicitly higher level of unity that a class analysis and critique of money and power gives us. Postmodern and post-structuralist analyses critique relations of domination, to be sure, but mostly from a multicultural perspective, and they provide no vision for a higher synthesis. In fact, they are premised on resisting any restoration of synthesis, much less a 'higher' synthesis, within the historical dialectic, as that would, by postmodern reckoning, be ‘totalitarian.’

In this way, Corbett suggests that postmodernity's focus on justice is incorporated into the integral worldview, which alone can provide a “vision for a higher synthesis” which to the postmodern mind is rejected as “totalitarian.” The higher synthesis of which he speaks is made possible because of a sophisticated and nearly comprehensive map of human nature given by AQAL, the most prominent integral map.

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From the AQAL view, Occupy Wall Street can be described as arising out of values and behaviors in terms of particular coordinates: e.g., green altitude (a.k.a. postmodern) cultural values seen from a Lower-Left Hand quadrant angle. AQAL stands for All Quadrants and All Levels, meaning that the movement is optimally viewed from perspectives which include subjective and objective, individual and collective angles at all stages of the developmental spectrum.

The jargon and subtleties of integral philosophy are not so important as the big picture: integral tells us that Occupy Wall Street's view of reality is important but partial, and if that partiality is not checked by a more expansive vision of human nature it can easily become ineffectual or even dangerous.

What is needed is not merely anger at Wall Street or demands for specific policy changes, but an expansive vision which tells us how remedying social injustices is connected to changing individual hearts and minds and the culture and social organization of a world economy.

Steve McIntosh, one of the leading figures in articulating an integral politics situated within a call for global governance, writes:

In solidarity with postmodernism, integral consciousness sees that in the long run, the ethnocentric politics of group selfishness are dead, that the future belongs to those who recognize that all lasting political progress is grounded in morality, and that everybody counts. The integral worldview thus recognizes that civic improvement ultimately depends on the further development of the ethic of fairness within human society and government—integral consciousness can see that the increasing morality of interpersonal relations is the foundation of all real political evolution.

Since its rise as a political force in the sixties, postmodernism has been influential in the politics of the developed world (achieving considerably more success in Europe than in the U.S.), but there are still many important ways in which its agenda is currently trumped by modernism. Yet from an integral perspective, this is evolutionarily appropriate. Postmodernism may stand for the future of worldcentric political mores, but its policies are not yet mature enough to take charge of the developed world. Integral consciousness can thus make political progress by helping to moderate and restrain postmodernism’s radicalism so that its important contributions can be better integrated into the politics of the developed world. Integral politics must therefore concentrate on the two areas where I believe postmodernism needs the most development: moderation of its often staunch anti-modern bias, and education regarding the “fragile ecology of markets.”

In other words, just as you would expect from any philosophy with a basically dialectical understanding of history, when the integral philosophy supersedes or overcomes postmodernism, it reemerges with a renewed appreciation for modernity, the previous wave in the spiral.

Thus, an integral politics appreciates the contribution of Wall Street to increasing wealth, improving opportunities for education, and lifting the standard of living of people throughout the world. Integral politics knows you can’t just burn down the banks. Integral is not anti-business.

◊◊◊
Integral thought—which has influenced politicians of the Democratic center such as Bill Clinton (a fan of Ken Wilber's writings) and Al Gore (another Wilber enthusiast)—is not a natural fit for extremism of the right or left. It tends to resonate more with Third Way politics, and some integralists laud Barack Obama's leadership style as pretty integral in spirit.

What’s more, integralists such as myself are loathe to join in Occupy Wall Street group activism which would require consensus for making all decisions (we see that as an ideological commitment which absolutizes the value of including diverse views to the point of sacrificing other important values such as efficiency and valuing of expertise).

Still, I find myself in sound solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, even as I am concerned that the movement’s participants may not have a large enough view of what their goals and effects. Why?

America has always suffered from wealth disparities, but in recent years the enormous gaps between haves and have-nots has grown horrifying. That such differences have not been achieved on merit and that they also exacerbate racial divisions adds to the gruesomeness.

Moreover, societal inequality foments tensions which are disruptive of social cohesion and could ultimately harm all sectors of society. A society in which the top one percent of the population dominates wealth and exercise exorbitant influence over the political system is called, to my way of thinking, a “dominator holarchy.” That’s a bad thing.

No one has done more in such a short period of time to highlight this pressing social injustice than the Occupy Wall Street activists and others who have begun to emulate their activism throughout the world.

They are not alone—even Warren Buffett has had a valuable role in arguing for increased taxes on millionaires and billionaires. If the movement matures in more integral directions, it could have a lasting and revolutionary impact on American politics. And leave the know-nothing Tea Party behind in the dust.

Many on the left wing view the conflict with Wall Street through the prism of politics as war: “us” vs. “them.” However, a more integral approach calls us to bear in mind that there is a greater unity behind the differences, and we are all called to a higher purpose which is justice for all.

Integral morality advises non-violence but does not repudiate civil disobedience, even if it means choosing a higher law over the law of the land. That peaceful protesters seeking social justice are jailed while hedge fund managers receive multi-billion dollar bailouts and multi-million dollar bonuses outrages the conscience.

Finally, integral morality does not arise from resentment, feelings of jealousy, or animosity of any kind. It asks us to look at our individual shadows and acknowledge when our own antagonism towards the rich borders on its own sort of greed and will to power. Integral politics is based on love.

In future blog posts, I may explore in more detail the specific contributions of integral philosophy to the dialogue around redistributive justice in America and worldwide.

(Joe Perez blogs @ Awake, Alive & Aware)

George Carlin on the Plutocracy

2011-10-17T08:34:00.000-07:00

In this video, the late great comedian George Carlin lambastes the plutocracy and laments the death of the American Dream in his hilarious and brutally honest style… RIP George.

Harcourt on “Political Disobedience” & Gutting on Corporations

2011-10-16T12:04:00.000-07:00

Gary Gutting, Notre Dame professor of philosophy, has an interesting piece on the dangers of corporations over at the New York Times philosophy blog, The Stone. Gutting argues that while corporations are not inherently evil, they clearly do not have any fundamental reason to act in a way that coincides with human interests and values.

Bernard Harcourt, professor of law at the University of Chicago, also has an interesting piece over at the The Stone. Harcourt argues that the Movement's refusal to state an ideological agenda, or designate leaders/spokesperson is an instance of what he calls “Political Disobedience,” a deliberate, reflective refusal to participate, or think, in terms of inherited political ideologies.

What do our readers think of their arguments?

The 99%, the 53%, & Distributive Justice*

2011-10-15T17:56:00.000-07:00

The battle cry of the movement that’s occupied Wall Street and spread around the country and the world in recent weeks is “We Are The 99%.”

The appeal to intuitive principles of economic justice implicit in highlighting the grotesque imbalance between the wealth, power and privileges of a tiny minority of the population and those of the other 99% seems clear enough. Given the large amounts of human suffering caused by the distribution of wealth and power in America and other contemporary capitalist societies, the prima facie injustice is certainly clear enough. Utilitarians, Rawlsians, Marxists (of both Hegelian and G.A. Cohen-style “analytic” stripes) and so on can all quite easily make the case that this distribution is massively unjust.

What, then, about the perspective of this fellow?

His use of the phrase “the 53%” is a reference to the bizarre right-wing myth that only 53% of the population pays taxes. (Apparently the payroll taxes still paid by those working people too broke to afford to pay federal income taxes don’t…um…count, for some reason?) That bit of silliness aside, though, what should we say about him?

Max Udargo makes some reasonable points here about ways that the fellow in the picture might plausibly change his mind later. (What if he gets sick?, etc.) Imagine, though, that he sticks to his convictions through thick and thin. No matter how bad things get, he won’t “blame Wall Street.”

Who he does blame isn’t clear. Given the emphasis on his own hard work and dedication, it’s unlikely that he’s taking Herman Cain’s advice and blaming himself for his own negligence in not having the good sense to be born into a rich family. Nor, given the enthusiastic reference to “God” at the bottom of the sign, does it seem likely that he’s blaming the deity for that particular bit of natural evil.

Perhaps the question of “blame” doesn’t arise for him. He could tell two sorts of stories according to which “blame” would be a non-issue.

First, it could be that no one is to blame because he’s perfectly content with his lot.

He was happy to work 60-70 hours a week while the rich kids had all the time they needed to study.

He doesn’t need as many as four consecutive days off in four years since he can have all the fun he’d ever want in three.

He doesn’t mind his lack of health insurance. If he gets cancer, he’s happy to stay home from the hospital and hope for the best. Or he’ll accept that the God who he invokes as blessing American capitalism in the last line of his sign wouldn’t give him cancer without a good reason, and he thinks it would be inappropriate for him to interfere with God’s will. Perhaps he thinks that doctors won’t be necessary—he’ll just grit his teeth and hum the Marines’ Hymn over and over again until his cancer chickens out and goes into remission.

(From the halls of Montezuma....)

Of course, even if so, all of this would be morally irrelevant, and certainly wouldn’t justify his charge that everybody else is just whinin’.

By analogy, the fact that many Saudi women would voluntarily wear veils hardly justifies the rest of them being legally forced to. The fact that many slaves in ancient Rome were content with their lot—some accepting their servitude, for example, as the will of various Gods—doesn’t add up to a terribly convincing moral objection to other slaves joining Spartacus in revolt.

Hardly anyone chooses to live in poverty. The tens of millions of Americans who, like our friend the Marine, can’t afford health insurance, aren’t choosing to forgo it. (Maybe the sign-holder would refuse socialized medicine on principle—it would be interesting to find out if he takes advantage of the services of the Veteran’s Administration—but, pretty clearly, most would not.) If circumstances of those even at the bottom rung of current casino-capitalist realities aren’t even close to as bad, in many obvious ways, as those of Saudi women or Roman slaves, it remains the case that they have legitimate grievances, and despite the sociologically-illiterate babble of the Herman Cains of the world, it’s impossible to seriously argue that the difference between their circumstances and those of the Wall Street profiteers are entirely, or even mostly, under their control.

Of course, somewhat more charitably, we could assume that the 53-percenter in the picture doesn’t think in terms of blame, not because he thinks that if he doesn’t mind his economic circumstances, it somehow follows that no one else has a legitimate complaint about those conditions, but because he regards the situation as morally just.

And, to be fair to him, “morally just” is quite compatible with “unfortunate and depressing.” By analogy, if your wife or boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or whatever leaves you, and you loved them very much, it might make perfect sense for you to be (a) utterly devastated by that turn of events, without (b) going crazy and forming the belief that your partner should have been forced to stay with you, or that they didn’t have a moral right to decide to end the relationship. Perhaps the Marine in the picture thinks his economic situation is like that—the natural result of consensual economic activity everyone involved had every right to engage in.

Robert Nozick thought that this would be sufficient to justify any economic outcome. In Anarchy, State and Utopia, he argued that even the most extreme end-state inequalities could be morally justified if they’d come about the right way. He had many interesting, challenging arguments for this view. Others have poked interesting holes in them—like G.A. Cohen’s point that Nozick’s most famous thought experiment shows only that historical considerations are relevant to the justice or injustice of end-states, while Nozick insisted on treating them as if they were decisive—but there’s a much simpler and more important reason why Nozickian considerations are not, and could not, even be relevant to the justice of the complaints of the 99%, rising up in all corners of the country, and now the world, to demand justice from the Wall Street profiteers.

To see why, consider Nozick’s two conditions for a given distribution of resources being just:

First of all, we have to start with just acts of original acquisition, so that at the beginning of the story, everyone clearly has a right to their possessions. (For example, we imagine starting by people claiming bits of unowned land, clearing them off to start farms, and so on.) Then, as long as all changes in distribution since then result from what Nozick calls “capitalistic acts between consenting adults” (i.e. transfers in which force and fraud are not used), whatever final distribution we end up with, even one far worse than the one we have, even one that involved 1% of the population living in opulence and the other 99% living in the conditions memorably described by Louie CK in the clip below—living just long enough to be hungry, then starving to death immediately thereafter—it would be just, because of its immaculate origins.

The argument between Nozick and people like Cohen about whether this hypothetical, immaculately-conceived version of capitalism would be morally just, is a fascinating philosophical debate, and it’s the sort of complex question about which intelligent people can reasonably disagree. It could not, however, possibly be less relevant to the current real-life struggle between the actual 99% and the actual Wall Street aristocracy, for the simple reason that, whatever one thinks of hypothetical, immaculately-conceived capitalism, that’s not what happened here.

Anyone who’s ever cracked a history book and at least skimmed through it for fifteen or twenty minutes knows that the just-original-acquisitions-followed-by-consensual-transfers story could hardly be further from the real origins of our system. American capitalism was built on the back of slaves taken to the New World in chains. The fields where those slaves were forced to work were, far from having been claimed from some sort of state of nature, part of lands taken by force and genocidal violence from the native population of the continent. When we turn from America to the rest of the world—capitalism, after all, having always been a globally-interconnected system—we see capitalism emerging from feudalism, aristocrats becoming industrialists. Turning to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we see a trail of corpses in Europe and America, as trade union organizers, radical agitators and others who threatened those industrialists’ profits were often murdered by thugs or locked up on trumped-up charges or using blatantly oppressive laws. As a 19th-century German guy who, like Robert Nozick, was a Philosophy major in college, but who, unlike Nozick, was as interested in empirical data about economic history as he was in philosophy, put it in one memorable passage, capitalism came into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

Turning to 2011, we see conditions exactly that brutal still in force in many of the third world countries whose sweat shops are integral to the high profit margins of the American 1%. (See the death squads employed by Coca Cola in Colombia as a case in point. You have to ignore an awful lot of recent history, in Latin America and elsewhere, to will yourself to believe the case to be entirely out-of-character for American corporate behavior in those regions.) And, here in America, the 1% successfully lobbied for the reversal of regulations that had prevented financial institutions from becoming “too big to fail", committed a thousand varieties of mathematically inventive fraud as they rode high on exploiting the housing bubble, and, when it all came crashing down around them, far from comporting themselves as Nozickian rugged individualists, they successfully directed their bribed political representatives to bail them out using tax money collected from the rest of us. Since getting back on their feet, they’ve cautiously hoarded their wealth while things have gotten worse and worse for everyone else.

Whether one focuses on origins or outcomes, the injustice of this situation—and the legitimacy of the 99%’s complaint—is overwhelming and undeniable.

And the guy clutching that sign proudly proclaiming his refusal to blame, or to whine, as if this refusal on his part was just supremely virtuous?

He’s like someone who refuses to help his neighbors put out a fire coursing through the neighborhood, even knowing perfectly well that, if left unchecked it will consume his house as well, because he thinks working together is a kind of communism.

There are a lot of things you could say about that attitude.

“Virtuous” is not one of them.

*(Batman pic via Chris Sims)

Some Epistemological Remarks Concerning the 99% Movement & Nozick’s Challenge

2011-10-15T12:33:00.000-07:00

Reader and philosopher Joel Dittmer sent us the following interesting essay on the epistemology of Occupation.

I’m sympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street Movement—or what I will call the 99% Movement—as I can relate to some of their—or “our”—concerns. But much of my sympathy is due not to claims the movement has made, but instead (i) the fact that there are a number of people in the movement who are showing their own stories about hardships, despite their efforts in overcoming their obstacles and (ii) the fact that I have friends whose stories are similar to those part of the movement. In this short piece, I’m going to identify some epistemological problems that I believe would work well to really show that the movement is both representative of 99% of us and brings up concerns that violate basic, and shared conceptions of justice.

I’d like to reintroduce a distinction Robert Nozick makes, roughly put, between end-result principles and historical principles. (Consult his famous Anarchy, State, and Utopia; note that he also speaks of patterned principles, and that he doesn’t explicitly talk about “policies”. Any divergence in terminology will be okay enough to illustrate the distinction Nozick has in mind.) Utilitarian style principles and egalitarian style principles are end-result, in that the justice of some policy or some distribution of goods, services, and resources will be determined by whether or not the results of the policy or the resulting distribution maximizes utility (utilitarianism) or satisfactorily meets conditions of equality (egalitarianism). Great disparities in wealth can be deemed unjust according to some forms of egalitarianism, which is once again an end-result theory of justice. Nozick challenges us to consider how a policy or a distribution is unjust if it abides by certain historical principles—principles which emphasize certain conditions that have to be met in the process of deciding on and implementing policies, as well as the process by which any distribution results. In the case of assessing policies in democratic societies, the justice of the policy will not be (at least directly) assessed according to the results gotten, but instead by how well the process of policy making and implementation meets certain conditions necessary for genuine democracy. So, for example, if some set of policies resulted in a distribution of goods and services such that 99% of the population was barely above the line of poverty, whereas the other 1% each possessed millions of dollars, this would not necessarily be unjust, just so long as the policy was decided upon and implemented in a genuinely democratic way. This kind of assessment of the justice of policies is, once again, from the perspective of those who hold that historical principles are the appropriately fundamental principles of justice, not end-result principles.

Let me now motivate why Nozick’s challenge is relevant, I think. Some of the 99% movement have publicized their own stories, usually ones of being in considerable debt, either through educational loans or through mortgage loans. Often the stories are ones in which employment is not feasibly available, as they have tried for (in some cases) years to gain employment all without success. These stories are sad, and they, to me, indicate that something isn’t quite right about the plethora of national and state policies. Nevertheless, there are those who doubt the injustice of these results. Some of the stories do seem idiosyncratic, yet still sad. For example (I’m making this hypothetical), suppose the case of someone who is 24 years old and holds a B.F.A., but with $110, 000 school debt. She is also underemployed. She works 30 hours/week at $10/hr with no benefits. This is unfortunate and sad, and perhaps even something indicative of injustice. Nevertheless, there will be some who question how this person got into her plight. Explanations may lead to bad personal decision-making and not necessarily to corporate conspiracy for the sole purpose of profit-maximization. We could of course retort by quoting a claim by the “collective statement of the protestors in Zuccotti Park”, which reads “They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.”

This retort is problematic, though, for a few reasons. First, the action/practice of “holding hostage” must be specified. The second problem concerns whether education is a human right, and more specifically, what the precise content of that right is, if it exists in the first place. It seems that in our society, each of us have a right to the education necessary to be informed, active participants of democracy. But it is not obvious that any given person has a right to study fine arts, if the only way to finance that endeavor is by forcing someone else to pay $110,000 for it. This then motivates the fairness of making a loan to the person pursuing the endeavor. Of course, there is a further worry of financing a loan to someone whose prospects of paying it off are slim (thereby incurring more debt to that person). The third, and most important, problem with the retort is that it doesn’t directly address what I’ve called Nozick’s challenge. Unless “holding hostage” is spelled out in a truthful way that is morally problematic (e.g., students are forced to purchase loans upon being forced or manipulated into attending college), it will be left open about whether the student’s resulting debt is unjust, just so long as we are concerned about historical principles, not end-result principles. If those of the 99% could flesh out their stories in such a way that certain violations occurred in their incurring of their debt, then this would be very helpful, if not much more persuasive, to those doubting the injustice of their plight.

There are, though, claims made by the “collective statement of the protestors of Zuccotti Park” which I think start from Nozick’s challenge. For example, we have: “They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.” Just so long as freedom of the press is a condition that must be met in order for policies to be shaped and implemented in a democratic way, it appears that we have here a claim that a historical principle of justice has been violated. And then from this point, all that has to be established are some empirical claims. That is, in what ways have corporations used the military and police force to prevent free press? The mere claim proves nothing until there are verifiable reports which confirm this kind of violation of justice. I’m not skeptical of being able to establish such facts; I’m merely pointing out the significance of doing so.

Let me now contrast two other claims made by the protestors of Zuccotti Park, or who are alternatively called “the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square.” This first claim is this: “They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.” Perhaps this is true. But a lot is required to confirm this claim. And additionally, it will require an explanation of how corporations doing as such is a violation of historical principles. The second claim to consider is, I believe, true. I also believe that information can be collected rather easily to establish its truth. What I’m worried about, though, is that despite it being true, and despite me believing it to amount to an injustice, it will be difficult to explain how it is a violation of a historical principle of justice. The second claim is this: “They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.” Once again, I think this is true, and that such actions/practices are unjust. But it is hard to see what historical principle is violated. If certain kind of leveraging outsourcing abides by national policies and international policies, and no one is coerced into agreeing to these policies, and no one is coerced into partaking in the practices allowed by such outsourcing, then it becomes difficult, at least to me, what historical principle is violated. Now, if such policies are enacted by legislators who give overweighted concern for profit-maximizing executive of corporations than to stakeholders who are also supposed to be represented in the democratic process, then indeed we have some indication that a historical principle has been violated—namely, we have violations of democratic standards.

I’m going to end this essay by making explicit some of the epistemological observations, and which should then emphasize the primacy of debating and illustrating the issues in terms of historical, as opposed to end-result, principles. First, hearing stories of those with lots of school debt but with very limited job opportunities may at first compel some to think that something is wrong with the workings of our economic and political system. But according to some, the burden of proof is placed back on those sharing their stories. Historical considerations creep back up—How did you get into so much debt? What have you done in terms of trying to get a job? Etc. If the stories could be fleshed out in such a way that it becomes clear to the skeptic that historical principles have been violated, then the burden has been shifted into a sphere of how one’s injustice is to be rectified and compensated for. Second, our intuitions might not be reliable when broad, bold (and yet perhaps true) claims are made—e.g., the one that says that “They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.” We might at first think that this is true, but then as we reflect on it, we might realize that evidence has to be given which establishes this claim. Additionally, it is not obvious that such actions/practices are morally impermissible (or unjust) until more is said about how this is, in fact, true. Epistemically, the best approach is to provide lots of details and lots of context. These details will be of the historical sort, and then can be used to persuade those who aren’t initially persuaded (or who become dissuaded) about the end-results (such as significant debt). Finally, I hope that this piece has been helpful in refining the efforts of those of us who continue in this movement. And although the initial efforts of the movement have been perhaps necessarily bold and perhaps even courageous, this does not mean that the movement shouldn’t be responsive to the idea of making a detailed, epistemically friendly disclosure of the facts exposing systematic (historical) injustices.

Joel Dittmer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Missouri University of Science & Technology.

Chris Hedges on the Occupation

2011-10-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

This interview with correspondent and author Chris Hedges was posted this morning. Hedges makes several welcome points about the Occupation and the plutocracy that currently dominates the global economic scene. This is a must-view for those in the movement or those seeking understand the movement. Enjoy!

Welcome to Occupy Philosophy

2011-10-12T16:35:00.000-07:00

I’ve started this website as a way for professional philosophers (people working as either faculty or graduate students in academic philosophy departments) to express their solidarity with and/or concerns about the ongoing Occupy Wall Street Movement. The 99% includes philosophers and philosophy graduate students as well. Hopefully as a community, philosophers can help to generate interest in and refine and expand upon the views of this rapidly emerging movement in global politics. My vision is for this to become a place where the movement can find useful criticism as well as intellectual support as it seeks to define its own goals. If you'd like to be involved, particularly as a joint administrator or author, please email me. 99percentphilosopher@gmail.com