naked capitalism

Michael Cain says:

Asimov almost certainly assumed a reasonably high level of technology, which is energy-intense. While people talk about building globe-spanning power grids to distribute massive amounts of renewable electricity, such are IMO unlikely to ever be built. My own back-of-the-envelope guess on population limit is about 1.2B, most likely in largely self-sufficient regions with 80-100M people each, and quite a lot of very empty space between them.

If you want to start some lovely arguments, suggest to people that the US Great Plains and its continuing depopulation is an example of such an empty space, and will eventually lead to an East US and a West US that want to go in different directions.

DownSouth says:

The Monthly Review article is absolutely superb.

The problem I have with these Marxist critiques is not that they are wrong, but that they are incomplete. Take the following, for instance:

As industry grew in the North, a continuous stream of labor was attracted and actively recruited from abroad. Each new wave of immigrants entering the reserve army of labor—the Irish in the 1850s, the Chinese in the western states in the 1870s, the Italians and Eastern Europeans of the early 1900s, and the “undocumented” Latin Americans of the last half century—served simultaneously to put the fear of unemployment in existing workers and to distort consciousness and solidarity with the poison of racism.

Marxist critiques put too optimistic a face on human nature. They imagine an ancient past where insular tribes lived in idyllic conditions of peace and egalitarianism. This of course is a horrible distortion. Ancient tribes had a hierarchy, and they warred and battled with each other constantly for territory. Physical (e.g. skin color) as well as symbolic (e.g. religion) markers were used to distinguish one tribe from another.

This distortion leaves Marxists ill prepared to explain the moral paradox that labor always finds itself in. I agree with David Sloan Wilson when he writes in Darwin’s Cathedral that “evolutionary biology in general and multilevel selection theory in particular account for the facts better than any other intellectual and scientific framework.” As he goes on to explain:

Within-group selection by itself creates a world without morality in which individuals merely use each other to maximize their relative fitness [this is the world Adam Smith championed in The Wealth of Nations]. Group selection creates a moral world within groups but doesn’t touch the world of between-group interactions, which remains exactly as instrumental as within-group interactions in the absence of group selection. Moral conduct among groups can evolve in principle, but only by extending the hierarchy to include groups of groups… Even so, we should expect far more naked exploitation among groups than within groups.

Multilevel selection theory also fits hand-in-glove with social identity theory, which began as an effort to understand how the human mind can be capable of atrocities such as the Holocaust. Both theories force us to confront the uncomfortable truth that us/them thinking is a part of normal human psychology. Most of us, perhaps even all of us, are capable or restricting our moral conduct to a subset of the human race and of behaving instrumentally toward outsiders. This generalization applies to all human groups and should never be used as a tool of aggression against members of a give religion such as Judaism.

The Marxist critiques are also vulnerable to the notion that workers are innately, immutably more moral than the capitalists. While this may have some compensatory and rhetorical value, it has no basis in fact. Perhaps it was Nietzsche who first took aim at this idea. George A. Morgan explains Nietzsche’s concept of “Slave Morality” in What Nietzsche Means:

The slave begins by resenting oppression and envying the good fortune of his masters. These emotions, redoubled and poisoned by impotence, vent themselves in a distorted conception of the masters, whose qualities, thus conceived, are then called “evil.” “Good” is likewise compensatory: it glorifies what slaves have and masters have not—-humility, obedience, patience, forgiveness. What arouses fear is thus called good by the masters, evil by the slaves; and as the masters feel contempt for what is “worthless,” so there is a tinge of contempt in the slaves’ idea of a “good” man—-harmless, good-natured, a little stupid. Further characteristics which contrast with Master Morality are: hedonism, prudence, utilitarianism; the doctrine of “the dignity of labor” and the sinfulness of being idle; a passive conception of happiness as rest or peace; vituperation of enemies. Also the slave is dishonest, with himself and others; “his soul squints.” What he parades as a demand for “justice” is really his own will to power; and when a slave class has attained power, it changes to the principles of Master Morality.

DownSouth says:

► Attempter said: “I don’t recall ever reading a Marxist critique which sounded like that…”

• Ancient sculptural figures from West Mexican tombs attracted curiosity during the cultural renaissance taking place in Mexico City after the revolution of 1910-20. Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and other painters with a profound interest in the archaeological past began collecting works of art from many early indigenous cultures, among which the earthenware figures of people, animals, and plants from Nayarit, Jalisco, and Colima were especially appreciated… [T]he figures are never inert mannequins, but are invested with a strong sense of motion, immediacy, and emotion.

But in the mid-1960s, this tranquil image of ancient West Mexico was disturbed by events in Los Angeles, at the University of California, where anthropology faculty such as Clement Meighan and H.B. Nicholson and graduate students such as Peter Furst and Stanley Long were actually excavating West Mexican sites pertaining to the “shaft-tomb cultures” and their hoards of ceramic figures.
–Richard F. Townsend, <i<Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past

• The communist dogma is more specific. Men are corrupted by a particular social institution: the institution of property. The abolition of this institution guarantees the return of mankind to the state of original innocency which existed before the institution of property arose, a state which Engels describes as one of idyllic harmony with “no soldiers, no gendarmes, no policemen, prefects or judges, no prisons, laws or lawsuits.”
–Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

► Attempter said: “The quote about Nietzsche is accurate, except for this howler:

….when a slave class has attained power, it changes to the principles of Master Morality.

For a refutation, just look anywhere at today’s capitalist rulling class.”

• The position of most Anglo workers, if one judges from the statements and actions of organized labor, was completely unsympathetic to Mexicans. Not only were more Mexicans coming every year, reported one worried labor official to the AFL Executive Council in 1919, but they also were now moving out of agriculture and accepting employment in “different lines of efforts” to the detriment of labor standards and the best interests of the country. In Texas, the state chapter of the AFL refused to recognize the existence of a wage-earning class in agriculture, and its various affiliates made it clear that they would not work alongside Mexicans and that they opposed the hiring of unskilled Mexican workers. Texas oil workers, many of them ex-cowboys and ex-tenants, were likewise quite upset about the “immigrant increase” in the industry. At the convention of the International Oil Workers in 1920, the oil unions passed a resolution asking for “an investigation of the situation, the sending back to Mexico of immigrants illegally in the United States, and the return to agricultural work of those remaining.” In some oil fields, the tense situation exploded into riots against Mexicans. In 1921, oil workers in the Ranger and Island Oil fields in Mexia (North Central Texas) clubbed and threatened Mexican workers and their families with death unless they left within twelve hours. Governor Neff imposed martial law in Mexia and sent eighty state troopers to end the brutalities. The Rangers arrived too late, however, to save sever women and children from dying of exposure. This was no isolated incident; similar episodes occurred in mines and manufacturing plants through the 1940s.

It was perhaps fitting that a compromise solution to this stalemate should come from Texas in the form of a proposal to “restrain” the movement of its Mexican workers to state boundaries. This proposal, embodied in the Emigrant Labor Agency Laws of 1929, received the endorsement of both the AFL and the chambers of commerce of the state. Such significant consensus was not difficult to understand; the labor agency laws represented the first step to deal with the mutual interests of Anglo workers and growers. Organized labor in the state was ready to concede agriculture to Mexicans—-an already accomplished fact by this time—-if it could work out some arrangement that would protect the status of nonfarm workers.
–David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986