“I’m spiritual, not religious. And my lattes are fair trade!”*

“The only thing bigger than my SUV is my megachurch.”

“This is a subtle, tasteful way to tell you that I’M RICH!“

“Look at me! I’m not racist! Please notice me.”*

Any bumper sticker at all

“Feed me attention.”

*Note: this bumper sticker is superfluous, as the Prius says the same thing.

My chief objection is that, Walker’s writings to the contrary, viewing marriage as an institution that is fundamentally non-gendered is…well, laughable. As one conservative bloger writes, “‘I now pronounce you party and party’ – that sure captures what marriage has traditionally been.” The notion of marriage as something between a man and a woman has been part of its fundamental identity.

The way Walker defines it (see his comments under the Due Process section, p. 111) sounds like little more than a business arrangement (a day care center, maybe?) The fact is, same-sex marriage is something fundamentally different from the traditional conception of marriage recognized as an unenumerated right. As such, refusing to acknowledge it does not violate Due Process.*

The Equal Protection clause at first seems to have a bit more weight behind it. However, this is wrong, too. Opposite-sex marriage is being offered equally to those of any sexual orientation. That most homosexuals/bisexuals/whatever don’t want to use this option offered to everyone, and that they (and, for the most part, only they) want another option that isn’t offered at all, is irrelevant. The definition of marriage wasn’t formed over the centuries specifically to exclude homosexuals; it just naturally grew out of the purposes of marriage (namely, formation and continuation of families, and consolidation of property among them.) Neither group (heterosexuals or homosexuals) is being given unequal protection under the law due to Prop 8.

With both the Due Process and the Equal Protection claims invalid, I – and many others – find Walker’s decision to be out of line with the Constitution. Is it judical activism? Possibly. Judges always make some attempt at Constitutional justification for their rulings, even when it’s clearly done for a desired social/political policy outcome (Stevens in Citizen’s United, e.g.)

In this particular case, I do suspect judicial activism (though I’m much less sure than in Stevens’s case, for example.) I do like the policy that Walker is shooting for; I just dislike the way he goes about it. The classic republican ideal, that the nation be ruled by “a government of laws and not of men,” should be respected; judicial activism gives government officials a level of arbitrary power undesirable in a rights-respecting republic. In this particular case, it’s function may be to respect rights; however, I don’t think it’s possible to keep its use contained to only such good ends (indeed, I’d say the furthest-reaching instances of such activism have been the justification of every single piece of social-democratic legislation under the Commerce Clause – clearly both incorrect and antithetical to freedom.)

There is actually one part of the Constitution that I do suspect could require states to recognize – at least some – same-sex marriages – namely, the Full Faith and Credit clause (Article IV, Section 1.) This section requires that states recognize other states’ public records and proceedings. On the face of it, this would definitely seem to require Texas (for example)to recognize a marriage between two men made in Massachusetts. It’s possible that there are some reasons why this clause might not apply to gay marriage, but I don’t see them.

*Due Process isn’t even the right way to go about ensuring that rights are respected. The Privileges or Immunities clause (also in the 14th) is. Judges have been using this one too long, both for rights that are covered by the P or I, and those that aren’t. Some exceptions do exist – see Thomas’s concurrence in McDonald v. Chicago.

_________________

What Can You Do With Political Theory?

“On Grad School”

One thing you can do with political theory is electing to go to graduate school.  As someone who has just completed his Masters and plans to begin doctoral studies in a year, I can only say that the experience thus far has been intoxicating and exhilarating.  It is intoxicating because my studying political theory ends up investing everything that I see and experience with an intellectual density that makes it impossible to treat my studies as something that I can pick up or put down at will.  The option of not thinking through the optics of political theory is simply not available to me.  And it is precisely because of this that it is also exhilarating.  Rather than finding it taxing, graduate studies in political theory encourages me to take pleasure in finding new ways of seeing and thinking about politics, justice, authority, power, freedom, and the litany of other core questions that form the heart of political theory.

One thing you can do with political theory if you go to graduate school is teach.  For my gap year between my Masters and doctoral studies, I will be teaching as an adjunct instructor at MTSU, teaching introduction to political science/theory courses.  I see it as an opportunity to share to many others an enthusiasm for thinking politics and justice anew, to afford them the chance to work through and clarify their own political commitments, and—in the end—hopefully to infect them with a lasting ability to think deeply, with sophistication and nuance, about why it is that they are committed to the things that they are.  And, from my vantage point, the option of teaching political theory is an unexpected bonus.  It lets me invest all of the personal transformations that I gained while studying as a graduate student into a pedagogical philosophy that will hopefully have effects that go far beyond the classroom.  Teachers often strive to transform the imaginations of their students, so that the world, which somehow seemed the inexorable result of historical necessity or natural development, all of a sudden appears as an open game with an outcome that can never be promised in advance.  Studying political theory as a graduate student can prepare us to teach our students to struggle and make common cause with others for what before, strictly speaking, they could not have imagined.

But I call teaching a bonus because even if I’m unable to land a stable career as a teacher, graduate study in political theory is an incredible end in itself.  The voracious appetite for better, more critical, more nuanced ways of thinking and living is invaluable no matter what vocation I elect to lead in the final instance.

If you haven’t heard, a U.S. District Court recently overturned California’s Proposition 8 (a ballot initiative that defined marriage in California as being between a man and a woman.) I, for one, think it was a terrible law. Like various left-wing economic programs, the law was an unjust violation of individual rights based on flawed notions of majoritarianism. As a libertarian, I’m quite glad to see it go.

However, I’m not totally sure that this was the correct way to go about it. In other words, while I dislike the law, I’m not sure it was unconstitutional. I’ve decided to read Judge Walker’s opinion (what I’ve selected – I think fairly – as the important part, anyway.) From what I’ve read so far, he reaches the conclusion that:

1. Marriage is a fundamental right, covered by the Ninth Amendment (and applied to the states by Section 1 of the 14th.)

2. (Long story short) Marriage has moved beyond being a gendered institution, due to changes in society; however, the fundamental nature of marriage (two parties freely consenting to form a household, support each other & their dependents) has remained unchanged.

3. Thus, gay couples are not asking for a new right, but a fundamental one protected by the Constitution.

4. Same-sex unions are qualitatively inferior to marriages; thus, offering them to gay couples does not satisfy those couples’ right to marriage.

5. The state lacks a compelling interest in violating this fundamental right.

For #1, I have no idea. Walker doesn’t cite primary documents, instead simply referring to precedent (which is completely legitimate for him to do.) The precedent he cited that I might check out is Griswold v. Connecticut: because it was important in furthering the argument for a constitutional right to privacy. But mainly because it’s the one I was most familiar with.

I don’t necessarily agree with four (I disagree, in fact) and in general I’m unconvinced by the idea of a “compelling interest” somehow being sufficient to circumvent rights, so I don’t need #5 to convince me. These, however, aren’t key. What strikes me as flawed is #2 (and therefore, #3.)

This is where the heart of the disagreement in the case lay (the defendants agreed on #1 and #3.) According to Walker, the essence of marriage has nothing to do with gender. He briefly cites a history of revisions that eliminate the influence of gender roles in marriage (namely, changing California marriage law so that the wife’s property was not subsumed by the husband.) He connects this to other things (allowing interracial marriage) to show that while the practice of what is allowed as marriage has changed, the fundamental concept has not (in fact, making these changes allows the concept – in particular, its element of choice – to be more fully realized.)

It’s on that point that I’m tempted to disagree. I’m going to give my reasons why in a second post (in which I’ll also discuss Walker’s argument that Prop. 8 violates the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.)

My main issue with Zizek’s argument as presented here (he may go into more detail elsewhere, I have no idea) is that he says he values liberalism’s ideals, but that (paraphrasing) “society must do more.”  The problem is that when you start doing more, liberalism’s ideals take a hit.

And how exactly do you go about reinventing society to make poverty impossible?  As a future development economist (possibly), believe me, I’m all ears.

The animation is awesome, though.

More importantly, I want to give the most amorphous hint of why it is that I align myself with the socialist project, why it matters from whose vantage point one is theorizing either capitalism or socialism, and to reveal even a glimpse of how rich and nuanced socialist democratic theory actually is.

I want to begin by laying out a few necessary provisions, with the hope that it becomes clear as we move forward that what I am putting forward is not the kind of defense that I would offer in a graduate seminar.  Standard academic protocol requires that I offer a defense/critique by accepting the terms of the debate, if only provisionally and in the final instance for the sake of changing these terms.  In this case, the terms of the debate are set by the vocabulary and concepts of Euro-Atlantic economic theories that tend to lend themselves as more or less universalizable categories of analysis.[1]

But, incidentally, I actually don’t think this is the kind of defense I want to offer here, that is, a diagnosis/critique of capitalism, and then offer a positivistic conceptual project to fill in the gap left by the critique.  There are hundreds or thousands of books, just in the last decade, that do this just fine.  I actually want to offer a more rhetorical defense of socialism, of why someone would elect to align themselves with a contemporary socialist project in light of the defeats of the Left in the last two centuries, and what socialists actually think capitalism is.

A methodological remark:  It is absolutely necessary to delineate between a capitalist’s self-understanding of capitalism and socialism, and a socialist’s understanding of his or her own project and of capitalism.  For most of us raised in capitalist societies, we’re taught that capitalism is essentially an economic phenomenon, a synchronic conceptual paradigm that gives to us both descriptive and normative traction on dealing with configurations and distributions of labor, commodities, goods, services, etc. etc.  (Note:  Some economists will, of course, intervene here:  our theories are absolutely not synchronic, because we always take into consideration large time spans, changes in variable dependency over time, etc. etc.  That is not a diachronic analysis.  If you can reduce all spans of time into your system’s functions, conceptually, it is all the same time.  The simultaneity of all events is created in economic analysis when the correspondence between different “time points” can be mapped into a single model or economic dynamic.  This is why, for example, even though Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a philosophical history of all of time, it all happens at the same time, and that time is all compressed into the single rubric of eternity.)

A Brief Gloss of What a Socialist (me) Thinks Capitalism Actually Is:

So, capitalists (as far as I know) tend to construe both their own paradigm as well as socialism as competing economic paradigms (or moral paradigms essentially reducible to an economic paradigm).  The metrics used to measure which of the two is a better paradigm invariably is internally generated from the capitalist paradigm itself, and then applied to socialism in order to show that socialism isn’t up to snuff to capitalism’s benchmarks.  These include:  efficiency, value, price, the vocabulary of private property, etc. etc. It’s essentially a tautological exercise, where the outcome of the comparison is essentially determined in advance by the (capitalist/economic) terms of the comparison.

Many socialists, in comparison, understand both capitalism and socialism to be competing historical/sociological paradigms.  That is, while they do obviously involve economics, socialism and capitalism ultimately describe relations between subjects, their historicity, and the world.  They are not (only) economic paradigms that normatively script the distribution of goods and services.  Rather, they normatively script out each of our relations to the historical moment in which we live.

So, whereas Capitalism understands itself to be an optimized paradigm of determining the distribution of goods and services, Socialism understands Capitalism as a historical totality that maintains and reproduces itself through a series of abstractions and denial of human agency and freedom.  The point I want to drive home is that the two do not view each other on the same terms.  They are more akin to different optics:  they each reveal and construct different ways of seeing human relations.  To elaborate what a socialist might see capitalism as:

Totality:  a synchronic, closed system where every element in the system can be articulated against another element by a function.  And so, in a totality, there is no such thing as contingency, and thus no human agency (whose primary quality is bringing into the world contingency).  Note for many political economists (Schumpeter, I’m looking at you):  the moment that you can subsume contingency into an economic model or dynamic, it’s not contingency.  That’s exactly what it means to subsume something into a totality: to deny its contingency in relation to the whole.  Boring logical point, but it needed to be said.

Capitalism as a Historical Totality:  Capitalism is a historical dynamic, first and foremost.  To quote Claude Lefort, capitalism as theorized by Marx contains “an opposition…between the notions of continuity and discontinuity in history.”

…the idea of an ineluctable movement governed by the growth of productive forces, moving from one mode of production to another, on the one hand, and the idea of a radical break between all precapitalist modes of production and modern capitalism, on the other; or in other words, an opposition between the idea of a dissolution of all restricted social relations and the idea of a force of conservation, of mechanisms of repetition which, even in capitalism, seemed to ensure the permanence of a structure (Lefort, “The Image of the Body in Totalitarianism,” 294-295).

It has a genealogy.  It maintains itself and reproduces itself through a series of abstractions (abstracting both time and space).  Geographic space, human activity, and time itself become abstract constructs so that they can all become commensurable with one another.  That is, one can in fact define the relationship between space, time, labor, and human life more generally by way of abstracting them and mediating them with the key category of:  value.  The abstraction of all things under capitalism lets one adequate qualitatively different things with the metric of value, and this is most obviously manifest in the commodity-form of money.

To sum a huge amount of theoretical elaboration, the point here is that capitalism maintains itself by making all things commensurable with one another, and so denies the qualitative specificity of human life in favor of adequating everything together under the abstracting paradigm of value and money.  This is also how Capitalism maintains itself as a totality:  everything can be subsumed under its paradigm because everything now expresses the abstract dimension of value, which makes everything definable in terms of another element in the totality.  This makes the whole thing regularizable.

A Defense of Socialism for the Sake of Freedom:

No serious socialist decries Capitalism as a purely bad thing, since that treats it as a homogenous block without internally contradictory features while also failing to grasp its difficult historical emergence.  But, for many reasons (which are too many for me to enumerate), socialists of all different stripes also find it problematic.  My particular focus is on the problem of human freedom and historical contingency (this is why I’ve framed this post as it is).

How a capitalist often understands freedom:  as liberum arbitrium, or the ability to choose between two pregiven options.  This is obviously only one way of understanding freedom, and it is particularly specific to capitalism and is our inheritance from Christian theology (Paul and Augustine).  As far as I’m concerned, that is not freedom.  I align myself with people like Levinas and Arendt:  freedom as the faculty of beginning, of the capacity to enter the public realm in concert with other people to bring into the world what could not have been foreseen, what could not have been foretold, an “infinite improbability.”  Freedom is never a feature of one person; that doesn’t make any sense to me.  I am “free” only insofar as I am free with my companions to bring something radically contingent into the world.  Both Levinas and Arendt ground freedom/responsibility in natality and our ability to make promises:  because we are born from a Mother, because we are born as an irreducibly unique individual who can never be reduced to a general theme of the world, we have the capacity to begin anew, to give birth to something and to keep it in the world by making promises with others, and to endure the essentially unpredictable future by keeping those promises with other people.  (For Arendt, the promise is of political freedom; for Levinas, the promise is of responsibility and trust between essentially different people.)

As far as I’m concerned, in capitalism, that kind of freedom is barely possible.  This is also why the socialist project has, since the 1960s, become aligned with the radical democracy project.  Socialism has little to do with centralizing anything; rather, it is the democratization of state power, the creation of public spaces where dissensus and (peaceful) revolution can occur.  It has to do with changing the relations between humans so that it is not (in the final instance) always mediated by the exchange of commodities or the abstract categories of value which, but to ask if there is another way of mediating human relations which engenders, and not subsumes, radical contingency.

There is obviously a problem:  our understanding of capitalism is of a historical dynamic.  This means that what we’re seeking isn’t to renew the world from a tabula rasa.  Rather, we have to figure out how to internally create the possibilities of a post-Capitalist society within capitalism.  And, at a high resolution (the historical vantage point of analysis), capitalism is fully deterministic.  Many Marxists (but not me) do not believe in human agency; they think that as long as Capitalism is around, all human agency is illusory, an ideological rationalization of our human condition in this historical moment.  Believing in agency is a failure of proper critical thought.

But I actually agree with Arendt and Weber:  humans have the capacity to make miracles everyday, even against the obduracy of historical over-determinations.  It’s obviously not easy, but the socialist political project is to figure out how, given the totalizing jurisdiction of capitalism today, we can cultivate a politics that can poke holes into the capitalist totality and introduce spaces for human freedom and responsibility.

In my own personal research, I do this by studying/critiquing contemporary forms of sovereignty.

“If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.”  (Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?”)

Sovereignty used to be theorized as the kind of power exercised by a King:  the explicit control and regulation of the body politic by maintaining a monopoly on legitimate exercises of force and violence.  But, as we now also know, that kind of sovereignty is a bit anachronistic in many parts of the world.  Sovereignty now also takes the form of denying the essential contingency of the future by normatively scripting it in advance.  It takes the form of establishing historically specific norms of human life, and then naturalizing those norms as if they are parts of an inexorable human condition.  Sovereignty also seeks the binding of people and gathering all of history into a single Archimedean gaze; this is where capitalism becomes totalitarianism.

This more expansive vision of sovereignty works by naturalizing ways of seeing the world (naturalizing racial categories, naturalizing gender binaries, naturalizing a vision of what a human is:  an interest-bearing subject who optimizes his own self-interests).  So, the ultimate aim of a socialist project is, as Marx put it, “a ruthless criticism of everything existing” in order to denaturalize what we think the world has to be, for the sake of what we want the world to be (Arendt, Levinas, Marx).

I tend to think of the socialist project as essentially a project of collective promise-making:  of engendering human freedom in the world, of altering the specificity of human relations so that they are not ensnared in the abstracting and reductive tendencies to Capitalism, to reveal human relations as irreducible sources of pleasure and life.  Socialists generally are not so naive as to think that Capitalism can be swept away with a single gesture; but, I (as a self-identified socialist) also think that it absolutely incumbent on us, as political agents, to do the impossible, which is to say to alter the texture of the political realm (through teaching, through dialogue, through critique) in a way that makes it possible for a post-Capitalist society to emerge someday.

But I think I can at least begin framing it by way of (what else) very long quotations, the first by Hannah Arendt and the second by Max Weber.

Yet just as we, despite all theories and isms, still believe that to say “Freedom is the raison d’etre of politics” is no more than a truism, so do we, in spite of our apparently exclusive concern with life, still hold as a matter of course that courage is one of the cardinal political virtues… Courage is a big word, and I do not mean the daring of adventure which gladly risks life for the sake of being as thoroughly and intensely alive as one can be only in the face of danger and death.  Courage… does not gratify our individual sense of vitality but is demanded of us by the very nature of the public realm.  For this world of ours, because it existed before us and is meant to outlast our lives in it, simply cannot afford to give primary concern to individual lives and the interests connected with them… It requires courage even to leave the protective security of our four walls and enter the public realm, not because of particular dangers which may lie in wait for us, but because we have already arrived in a realm where the concern for life has lost its validity.  Courage liberates men from their worry about life for the freedom of the world.  Courage is indispensable because in politics not life but the world is at stake.

All political business is, and always has been, transacted within an elaborate framework of ties and bonds for the future–such as laws and constitutions, treaties and alliances–all of which derive in the last instance from the faculty to promise and to keep promises in the face of the essential uncertainties of the future.

Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?”

And on history:

Politics means a slow, powerful drilling through hard boards, with a mixture of passion and a sense of proportion.  It is absolutely true, and our entire historical experience confirms it, that what is possible could never have been achieved unless people had tried again and again to achieve the impossible in this world… And even those who are neither a leader or a hero must arm themselves with that staunchness of heart that refuses to be daunted by the collapse of all their hopes, for otherwise they will not even be capable of achieving what is possible today.  The only man who has a “vocation” for politics is one who is certain that his spirit will not be broken… [and] when faced with all that obduracy, can still say “Nevertheless!” despite everything.

Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”

———–

I am twenty years old. By American standards, I lean to the left. I am well-meaning (who isn’t?) and idealistic. I want a world where any constraints on freedom are carefully considered, and chosen to maximize not only freedom but individual power. And then I look around at the world as it is. I see ordinary people getting needlessly hurt, time and time again, by the powers that govern this world. I see even more people waking up every day knowing that they’re trapped.

But hey, it’s just the economic collapse or the environmental disaster. It’s just the market, in its infinite wisdom, performing the calculus of benefits and costs and deciding that preventing and/or stopping each of these things is the lesser of two evils. The greater, of course, being too much red ink on the balance sheets. And if there is too much red ink, people start losing their jobs. There’s no way to win.

And being twenty, not quite having internalized the impossibility of saving the world, I sometimes look at all this and, for a second, fantasize about metaphorically tearing it down and starting over, building a society that works for everyone and not just the lucky few.

Let’s set aside the fact that I’ve just reproduced the line of thinking that got us into Iraq. What are we dismantling, exactly? What is the cornerstone of capitalism, the one idea without which it would not exist?

Fair payment for goods and services rendered.

Can we get rid of that?

Do we want to?

Wind that idea up and send it walking, and you get a world much like our own. Turns out, the market’s definition of “fair payment” is skewed. It doesn’t allow for certain important things like basic human rights. It’s not hard to see why. When typical consumer Prima is at her kitchen table looking at the bills that were due last week, how concerned do you think she is about the welfare of Secunda, who rang up her things at Wal-Mart, or Tertia, who made Prima’s shirt in a factory in the Third World somewhere? How much can she afford to worry about the environmental impact of the gas she just bought? “Attention must be paid,” but where’s she supposed to find the time?

Prima is not a bad person. She doesn’t set out to screw anyone over. But when everyone is Prima–and let’s face it, we all are to some degree–we get BP and the Mineral Management Service. We get every corporate PR department and lying media outlet ever. We get Wall Street and Congress and Madison Avenue. And then we shake our heads at the unfairness of The System and wonder where it came from.

At this point, it’s tempting to, in the name of “fairness,” hand everything over to the government. But governments are made of people, with the same imperfect information, cognitive bias, and overriding self-interest as the populations they’re meant to serve. Even if the historical record didn’t reflect badly on communism, I would only have to look at the geniuses currently making up the U.S. government to know that I don’t trust the government to produce outcomes that are efficient or fair on its own.  But take all the information reflected in free market outcomes, use the government to add in the information that the market forgets to take into account, and maybe you’ve got something.

Fair payment for goods and services rendered. This is not something to tear down, it is something to fight for. It means competition and transparency. It means decent wages; it means corporations pay if and when they hurt people, not to mention the planet, in the pursuit of greater profits. It means a government just powerful enough to step in whenever some person or company isn’t playing by this golden rule, which in turn means we have to keep an eye on both business and government because concentrated power can never be trusted. It means slowly fixing what we’ve got, one piece at a time.

There’s always going to be a System. Let’s take this one and make it ours.

Best quote of the evening: “I believe some American mothers make their children eat broccoli while threatening them with socialized medicine.”

I seem to be using the word “best” a lot.

The most important point here, of course, is that I got his autograph.  A podcast of the talk is available here if you’re interested.

I’m sure you’ll be unsurprised to know that I agree with most of what Dr. Sen said.  (I think he may be overly optimistic regarding the quality of the aforementioned public discussion, but I’ll reserve judgment until I’ve actually read his book.)  I especially appreciated his practical approach.  I would say it’s because he’s actually an economist, but economists are not immune from abstruse theorizing.  (And given that I spent several hours last night building a model of altruism under uncertainty and then testing it by generating populations of 1000 imaginary people using parameters that I basically made up, maybe I should not be talking.)

In my next post, I’ll talk a bit about the class I’m taking, The Global Politics of Protest and Change.  (Preview: I’m the most right-wing person in the class.)  But I’m severely behind on my reading, so that will have to come later.

EDIT: Upon request, here is a picture of the aforementioned autograph.