by Alan Briskin | Collaboration, Conscious Capitalism
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Sixteen
The Dark Prophet
Part I: Communism’s Shadow
Time Range: 1867-1883, 2012
For Marx, violence was the only real solution. In the Manifesto, read out loud in his accent and lisp to revolutionaries at the Red Lion Pub, he declared that the specter of communism haunted those who would hold on to power. “The Communists,” he stated, “openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social relations. Let the ruling classes tremble …”
This was Marx, like the clownish homicidal character of the Joker in Batman movies, having his moment of grandiosity. Not only was economic reform not enough; all social relations must be overthrown, and solely by the force of violence could we know it was done. Here are the pathological roots, still in theoretical formulation, that gave sustenance to those who would fashion tyrannical forms of collectivist organization, figures such as Stalin and Mao. They would declare themselves the embodiment of the collective and speak on its behalf. They would fashion a classless society because they said so, and disagreement would not be tolerated. It is one of the great ironies of capitalism that some of its leading proponents advise the same course, warning against discussion of class and economic distribution as if it were sinister or subversive.
Marx made no real pretense that he understood or even cared about what the future would look like from a humanistic perspective. Instead, his style of argument and forceful ways of generating polarization became a bedrock orientation for future organizers. Playing off of frustration and despair, Communism held out the promise that the oppressed suffered but their suffering would be redeemed by revolution. The attraction of communism was not so much a shared image of a better world for all as a belief that your fate would be linked with the side that would inevitably come to power. The wait was painful and exhausting. In one letter to Engels, Marx wrote:
My wife is ill. Little Jenny is ill. Lenchen has a sort of nervous fever and I can’t call in the doctor because I have no money to pay him. For about eight or ten days we have all been living on bread and potatoes and it is now doubtful whether we shall be able to get even that. … How am I to get out of this devilish mess? (Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers)
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
Nearly all of Marx’s interactions had a tone of confrontation, as if his personal frustrations could find release in the deconstruction of another’s ideas. He could be alternately eloquent, precise, inflammatory, and insulting with no constraint calling others “louts” and “bedbugs.” In one emblematic dispute with a potential ally, Pierre Proudhon, he seemed to set the bar for intolerance and accusations of betrayal. Proudhon had written a book titled What Is Property? and had accepted Marx’s invitation for collaboration with a letter asking that their collaboration be marked by “a learned and far-sighted tolerance; but simply because we are at the head of a new movement, let us not set ourselves up as leaders of a new intolerance. … On that condition, I shall be delighted to take part in your association — but otherwise, no!” (Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers)
Marx’s response was succinct and clear. He wrote a devastating critique of Proudhon’s new book, The Philosophy of Poverty, with the title “The Poverty of Philosophy.”
Marx argued that ideas didn’t matter, or more accurately, that ideas were simply products of the economic structure that spawned them and were never truly independent. What mattered were the materialist realities of what was produced and how it was produced, the terms by which products were exchanged, and the pivotal question of who benefited from ownership. Capitalists achieved dominance by controlling these variables while making unfathomable profits from the surplus labor of their workers. The logic extended not only to the production of widgets and wardrobes but also to food, fuel, medicine, housing, and health care.
What is fascinating about Marx and his legacy is how this materialist viewpoint, central to his critique of capital, remained so detached from moral ideas regarding oppression and suffering yet so completely propelled by them. Why else would it matter that one group vies for dominance over others if not for the morality underpinning human dignity, cooperation, and social justice?
The answer lies in the approach. Marx’s obsession with the mechanics of capitalism involved a regard for science as a debunking of falsehoods perpetuated by those in power. Marx composed his first major critique of the economy less than ten years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species and identified his work with discovering society’s “laws of motion” akin to Newton’s classical laws of motion for physical objects.
The arrogance associated with Marx arises from his self-imposed challenge to find the correct, objective, scientific understanding of history. With a quest like that, there could be no concession for the sake of compromise or soft influences such empathy, cooperation, and compassion. Cold hard logic must be the rule and it must be capable of predicting the future in no less certain terms than Newton’s equations about the orbits of the planets around the sun.
For Marx, it was scientifically incorrect to propose a static, unchanging order for social relations or a promise that capitalism would be the engine of never-ending progress toward the good. No, the tensions, conflicts, and contradictions of society were what propelled the motion of social relations forward, and capitalism was a temporary digression, holding the seeds of its own destruction. This was Marx’s dark prophecy. Let’s examine its major features.
At the core of the tensions Marx foresaw was the inability of businesses to permanently maintain their profits. Each time they achieved a rewarding valuation for their products or services, a countervailing force would increase their costs or force them to lower their prices. The threat may come from workers organizing for higher wages or from competitors competing on the price or quality of the commodity. However it came, it would set in motion an anxiety for returning to profitability and a fear of annihilation. Three direct consequences would follow from such a dilemma: the pursuit of growth, the ceaseless quest for labor saving technology, and business cycles of boom and bust.
Growth was virtually the only means to deal with shrinking profits, and it would engineer the need for excessive consumption of energy and other natural resources as dictated by the needs of the marketplace. Although Marx is not known for addressing ecological concerns, he predicted that the absence of any mitigating influence on capitalist laws of motion would result in undermining the “original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.” Businesses would treat the air, the rivers, the seas, and the soil as gifts provided them by nature, just as they would treat workers as part of a mathematical equation for profits.
The quest for labor-saving technology would be driven not by human need but by the requirements of growth. First and foremost, it would be directed by the need to minimize the costs of employing human labor and reduce the persistent wailing of workers for higher wages. Technology was simply the price for keeping up with or outrunning competitors, not a means to grow profits or lessen life’s hardships. The result would be an obsession with labor-saving technology that was independent of community or need. Marx believed that not only would technology not lighten the “toil” of human beings; it would be singularly preoccupied with reducing the cost of commodities by reducing the cost of human labor or eliminating human labor entirely. Labor-saving technology, for all its value, would be a defensive gesture, forcing us to speed up and multitask. Businesses, for their part, would need to constantly adapt to the new technological shifts or perish.
Finally, Marx predicted the boom and bust of business cycles that were associated with the growth of giant enterprises, the buying up of weaker competitors, and a shift to financially riskier investments. Each of these trends would foster greater instability on a national and international scale. “Concentration increases …,” Marx wrote. “The mass of small dispersed capitals is thereby driven along the adventurous road of speculation, credit frauds, stock swindles, and crises.” (Daniel Chirot, A Turning Point or Business as Usual )
In the wake of riots in Europe and too-big-to-fail scenarios that preceded the 2008 financial collapse, this may seem somewhat obvious, but in the late 19th century, when Marx wrote, small enterprises dominated. Phones, televisions, and airplanes had not been invented. For someone who complained about not even being able to keep up with current events in his own time because he couldn’t afford a newspaper, Marx’s premonitions were remarkable, if not miraculous. He foresaw the growth of mammoth organizations based on industrial production, swelled by purchases of smaller companies, driven forward by labor saving technology, and increasingly investing in financial instruments with greater and greater risk.
To put this in real-world perspective, General Electric, founded nearly a decade after he died, built itself up through the production of industrial machinery; became known for its technological innovation; went on a spree of buying smaller companies; and by 2008, just prior to the financial crisis, earned 62% of its total profit from its financial services division.
Next Week: The Dark Prophet: Part II
It is easy to dismiss Marx as a revolutionist or even as a theorist of socialism, but much harder to ignore his warnings about capitalism. He had discovered the Achilles’ heel of economic arrangements that celebrated their ability to create prosperity, generate innovation, and provide a bounty of goods and services as well as jobs. Capitalism proclaimed itself the final act in the history of economic evolution. Marx refuted the claim. His diatribes, as painful and polarizing as they were, force us to become conscious of capitalism’s other consequences.
by Alan Briskin | Collaboration, Collective Folly, Collective Wisdom, Community, Conscious Capitalism, Health, Leadership
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Fifteen
Moving from Factions to the Whole: Paying Attention in New Ways
Part III: Social Perspectives>
Time Range: 1811, Current Times
FLASH POINT
“If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object; but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check.”
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Duane, 1811
Social Perspective: How Inequality Gets Under Our Skin
What societal pattern might connect a heightened sense of mistrust, poor health, violence, diminished life expectancy, and low job status? If you guessed social and economic inequality, then we are beginning to think collectively together. But why? Why should this be the case? We would need to explore the multiple interlocking factors that determine and influence the frequency and distribution of this kind of pattern. We would need epidemiologists willing to use their training to identify the root causes of illness and other health-related events in social and economic circumstances, unrelated to any particular economic theory or ideology.
Remarkably, this is exactly what epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett set out to do in their book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. With mind-numbing charts, diagrams, and statistical comparisons, these two professors documented why, by virtually every measure of well-being, the distribution of wealth far outweighs the importance of overall wealth in a community, region, or nation. Boiled down to its core, the results of these studies demonstrate how social and economic factions fracture the whole and make it worse off for everyone.
How so?
Social
and economic inequality creates exaggerated differences in social
standing, and social standing — our place in groups — has a dramatic
influence on our health, intelligence, well-being, and positive images
of the future. Here are three dramatic examples from animal and human
studies drawn from Wilkinson and Pickett’s work:
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
- At Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina, 20 macaque monkeys were initially housed in individual cages and then placed in groups of 4. Observers noted social hierarchies that developed, with special attention to the evolution of dominant and subordinate characteristics. They performed scans of the monkeys’ brains before and after the monkeys entered their social groups. Next, they allowed the monkeys to administer cocaine to themselves by pressing a lever. The results were unmistakable. The dominant monkeys, who showed evidence of increased dopamine activity in their brains after becoming dominant, took far less cocaine than the subordinate group. A plausible hypothesis was that the subordinate monkeys were in effect “medicating themselves against the impact of their low social status.” Conversely, the dominant monkeys were producing natural forms of stimulation and required fewer external boosts.
- In 2004, World Bank economists reported on a remarkable experiment. Three hundred twenty-one high-caste and 321 low-caste male children from rural areas of India were asked to solve various puzzles involving mazes. They did this without any knowledge of the other children’s caste, and the results were similar, with the lower-caste boys doing slightly better. Then the experiment was repeated, but this time with the announcement of each child’s name, village, and father’s name and caste. The results were dramatically reversed, with the lower-caste children’s performance dropping significantly. The epidemiologists noted the profound effect on performance and behavior in education based on “the way we feel we are seen and judged by others.”
- The Whitehall studies in England followed civil servants to assess the impact of job status on health issues. The initial study, which followed only men over a ten-year period, attempted to investigate the causes of heart disease and other chronic health problems by looking at job-related responsibilities. The initial hypothesis was that heart disease would be correlated with the stress of the highest-status jobs. The exact opposite was shown. Men at the lowest pay grades had death rates three times higher than their higher-grade administrators. A second study, Whitehall II, which included men and women, showed lower-status jobs related to higher rates not only of heart disease but also of some cancers, chronic lung disease, gastrointestinal disease, depression, suicide, sickness, work absence, and back pain. The study revealed that not only were the lower-status civil servants more likely to be obese, smoke, and have higher blood pressure, but these obvious health risks accounted for only one-third of the subjects’ increased risk of death. Poverty and unemployment were not factors, as these were all working people. The epidemiologists concluded that job stress and “people’s sense of control over their work seem to make the most difference.”
Wilkinson and Pickett highlighted the multiple ways in which heightened degrees of inequality lead to social disaster. The social disaster cannot be changed through techniques of mass psychology or medication or even education, which tends to replicate the existing social status of parents. What mitigates the effects of inequality is greater equality and greater signs of respect.
Greater economic equality might mean a goal of shrinking the economic disparity between the richest 20% and the poorest 20% of a nation to a ratio closer to 4:1, as it is in Japan and Scandinavian countries like Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and less like 8:1 or 9:1, as it is in Singapore, the United States, and Portugal.
Respect might indicate behaviors that demonstrate an understanding that how we are seen by others is a major factor in physical and mental health, including anxiety levels, drug use, depression, the use of violence, and the experience of pain. Signs of respect are indicated by the presence of greetings, curiosity, honest feedback, and positive regard for others, and the absence of condescension, aloofness, and constant negativity. Dignity is a universal human need, and regard for the dignity of others is a foundational element of healthy social groups.
With this kind of social perspective on the nature of factions, we turn on its head the conventional ideal of who we should seek to emulate and why. In an article titled “The Pay Gap Is Vexing, but Don’t Blame the Rich: A Defense of the 1%,” Fortune magazine editor Nina Easton makes the more typical argument. She writes that while blaming the rich is convenient, it misses the point that this group of people demonstrates a level of talent, advanced degrees, and two-income, two-parent families that should be the envy of everyone.
To her credit, she points out that the nearly 1.4 million households in the United States that make up the 1% are quite a diverse lot, some with household incomes that, while substantial, are nothing near those of the billion-dollar-a-year hedge fund executives who have become the symbol of this faction. She concludes, however, on a point that is simultaneously misleading and dangerous: “It’s entertaining to wail about fat cats and the greedy rich. But if we’re serious about addressing widening inequality, we should figure out what the 1% is doing right — and apply some of those ideas to closing the gap.” (Nina Easton, Fortune, April 30, 2012.)
The remark is misleading because regardless of the diversity of this group, what makes them special is their household income, not their talents or degrees. We can’t all be in occupations that provide us with incomes offering more than the other 99% of the population. Further, based on the data provided by Wilkinson and Pickett, we would expect to see the group with the highest income demonstrate higher levels of education and lower rates of divorce. We would expect to see greater time and devotion to the success of their offspring. This is how class is replicated.
It is also to be expected that the higher-status group will be fascinated with why they are more successful than others, believing it must be their character, intelligence, or work ethic rather than the arbitrary nature of economic distribution or rights associated with privilege. The danger of this form of analysis is that it reduces the argument over economic distribution to one of simple human envy.
A dangerous social narrative is created that castigates anyone who dares to criticize economic arrangements and pivots the discussion back to the psychology of the individual. “Oh, you’re just upset because you don’t have a million dollars and a second home on an island.” This recourse back to the individual is supported by two deeply rooted assumptions: (1) there is no system better than the one we have, and (2) we cannot change human nature.
These may be comforting narratives for the status quo, but they ultimately fall into conflict with leadership theories on transformation. A transforming leader is one who willingly confronts uncomfortable issues with a belief that positive change can occur if people work together. Greed and self-interest may be obvious realities of human beings, but they need not be the basis for constructing our social world.
Factions destroy the ability to work consciously toward a union capable of holding disparate elements. In the end, it is not about the 99% against the 1%; it is about saving the dream of prosperity from collapsing into all-out warfare. Prosperity for all, in all the different ways that might be manifested, is a goal worth working toward. The majority of the 1% simply benefited from the arrangements granted them, and like any group of privileged human beings, they are not inclined to simply give them up. So be it. There are many among the 1.4 million wealthy households who would embrace a system that truly included them rather than putting them up on a pedestal or violently threatening to take them down.
Let there be no doubt that there is common cause for creating a world that works for all — on a relative if not absolute basis. So much creativity is yet to be released by working across sectors of business, government, and community initiatives. If there is to be sacrifice, it must be for everyone. The privileged should be the last group that seeks to be spared. Beyond sacrifice, however, there is much to be gained by truly unleashing the talents and passions of groups working on behalf of healing this planet that we inhabit together. This is the image of the future that we should hold dear.
This ability to hold an image of a positive future for all is deeply embedded in the collective psyche of this nation and this world. The Founders of the United States were for the most part privileged white men who negotiated a common cause at the expense of others, most specifically African slaves, whose freedom they denied. Yet among them were extraordinary figures like Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. None of them were pure; all of them were tainted by the prejudices, animosities, and conflicts of their time. Yet, they shared an almost mystical understanding of union and common cause. This is the meaning left behind by Jefferson’s words to William Duane:
“If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object …”
Never forget the true purpose of the journey. Do not be deluded by the long, winding, indirect path that must be followed. We can only reach the goal in mass.
“… but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check.”
Be ever alert to individuals and factions promising a more direct route or advantages to only a portion of the collective. Stay united, even in your differences, or you will be subject to those who will return us to tyranny and unadulterated privilege.
Sitting off in a corner on a barstool is a disgruntled gentleman. He’s not one of the 1% or conservative guardians of privilege. No, it’s our old friend Karl Marx, and he’s not a bit happy.
NEXT WEEK: The Dark Prophet
Growth was virtually the only means to deal with shrinking profits, and it would engineer the need for excessive consumption of energy and other natural resources as dictated by the needs of the marketplace. Although Marx is not known for addressing ecological concerns, he predicted that the absence of any mitigating influence on capitalist laws of motion would result in undermining the “original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.”
