Wealth creation

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Adrian Rogers, a previously major figure in the Southern Baptist Convention, once said that ‘you cannot multiply wealth by dividing it’ as a way of critiquing socialism. However, such a statement is misguided for two reasons, one which concerns to process of wealth creation within capitalism, and another which concerns the utility of a monetary system within socialism. I’ll start with the second one first (since it is a more direct response to the statement).

The nature of socialism can be defined as the very absence of wealth rather than simply the redistribution of wealth. Since everyone is equal across the board, there is no wealth to be distributed or divided. In fact, the more idealised version of socialism rejects the usage of a monetary system. Everyone is entitled to a basic level of living: health care, education, a job, food, housing, etc. Within a developed practise of socialism, the necessity and commonality of these things would see the usage of money as a central mediating factor (i.e. income from a job and payment of services and goods) disappears. There is no need for money in these basic transactions. Instead, money is reduced to a less meaningful mediator (perhaps used for transactions with parties external to the socialist system and/or for purchasing unnecessary products). To speak of ‘wealth’ within socialism requires an inequality or the capitalist belief that wealth can be possessed. This is exactly how many reactions to the Occupy Wall Street movement fail to recognise their arguments: the respondent often speaks of giving money away to people instead of providing an avenue for the people to become gainfully employed. At its heart, then, Western capitalism misconstrues an integral part of socialism by viewing it as a variation of capitalism rather than as an alternative system. It cannot fathom the possibility of a way of life without a monetary intermediary despite the existence of such communities before the rise of capitalism (e.g. prior to the enclosure of the commons in the sixteenth century).

Since the ascendancy of capitalism and its monetary intermediary, its greatest proponents have a romanticised notion of the creation of wealth. In fact, one could argue that wealth did not exist prior to capitalism because wealth requires an inequality in the cost of production and the product’s selling price*. Prior to industrialisation (and modern capitalism), the person selling the product was often its producer. The sale ‘price’ was equivalent to the cost of production, which means that a person was ‘breaking even’ rather than gaining extra wealth. However, after the advent of industrialisation — which began a process of alienating the workers who produced products and the product itself — the capitalist owner could sell a product for more than what he paid to have the workers produce the product. This can be done either by charging the buyer more than the cost of the product, by paying less to have the product produced, or both. The first is often considered an integral part of the process of supply and demand. However, it does not last often because the second option viciously undercuts that process. As a result, the second is often the primary way of gaining wealth.

The way in which production costs are minimised can be by technological advancements, but competition always catches up. Instead, costs are reduced more permanently by simply paying less. In particular, the workers are paid less than ‘actual market value’ for their labour. In other words, the creation of wealth comes first and foremost by the exploitation of labour. The process of industrialisation increases this effect because a worker is no longer producing a shoe but rather a small part of a shoe. The worker is alienated (again) from her product. (Don’t believe me? Notice the brief mention in this article about Mike Daisey showing a Foxconn worker who helped build the iPad the finished product for the first time.) The result is that the worker no longer knows how to build a complete product and is unable to compete (ignoring intellectual property and copyright laws) with the owner. The only options a worker has is (1) to continue working and be underpaid, (2) quit and find another job which will do the same thing ultimately, or (3) protest.

When individual workers protest, the owner has the ability to terminate the employment and hire a replacement (which is easy to find when there is an army of unemployed workers desperate for any income and willing to sell themselves for even less). This is where unions enter in: by forming unions, workers have greater strength. When a unionised workforce strikes, the owner is unable to get more products to sell because the entire industrialised process is halted. The owner, like the workers, does not know how to produce the product; the owner may have the knowledge and schematics but is often unable to operate the machinery and tools needed to assemble the product. As a result, the owner is faced with two major options: (1) remove the entire union workforce and re-hire and re-train a new workforce (something that would cost a lot of money for training as well as a loss of income while the factory re-build) or (2) deal with the union and appease the workers. In a country or state which protects workers, the first option is often illegal (at least for a period of time which allows negotiation). By forcing owners to attempt to resolve labour disputes, these states and countries provide a basic employment security which allows workers to bargain effectively for their labour. In other words, the power of collective bargaining is a way for workers to demand a more equal distribution of profits to those who actually produce the products. However, many countries and states are moving away from these protections and are implementing at-will employment laws and (as Indiana is preparing to do) ‘right-to-work’ laws. The result is the resurgence of the exploitation of workers for the accumulation of profits which is often coded in terms of creatio ex nihilo whereby the capitalist owner (magically) adds value to a product which allows it to be sold for more than its worth. The reality, however, is less than magical because the wealth does not come from nothing despite the imagination that the whole of the product is worth more than the sum of its parts.

* NB: I am using ‘price’ loosely here for a product may have been exchanged for something other than currency (e.g. other products).

Course Management Systems

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As many have heard, Apple has unveiled its attempt to overtake Amazon’s dominance in the eBook market. Part of that includes their innovative approach to ‘revolutionise education’. However, with their horrible (and ingenious!) licensing agreement authors must agree to in order to produce ‘revolutionary’ books, it seems like a doomed experiment whose success relies on the laziness of authors.

However, I’m more interested in Healy’s response that ‘As for iTunes U, here Apple may be pushing into course-management territory currently dominated by systems like Blackboard and Sakai. This is an easy domain for Apple to take over if it wishes, as these systems range from the merely clunky to the aggressively shitty.’ Do other educators have similar opinions with the current range of course management systems like BlackBoard?

I’d really like to get people’s opinions of current offerings. What are the shortcomings of these applications? Are there any redeeming qualities? What principles would make a good system? Would something based on an existing application (like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, etc) be helpful? For instance, if one was developed to work like WordPress.com (easy creation of a site and using subdomains so that a university could easily make something like phil100.blackboard.myuni.edu or even phil100.spring2012.blackboard.myuni.edu), would that be better? In short, if a developer were to focus on usability feedback from students and staff, what would be useful?

A Tale of Two Reactions

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Now that we’ve gotten past the advent season, I did want to raise a few questions from my reading this time around. It seems to me that one of the ‘common’ readings within the birth narratives adds to them in order to validate a particular interpretation. In particular, the ‘common’ interpretation I want to explore is the one which reads the angelic announcements to Zechariah and Mary quite differently.

For this ‘common’ reading, Zechariah does not believe and is struck mute while Mary graciously and willingly accepts her future. Zechariah is an ‘old man’ by the time the angel appears to him (Luke 1:5-25), and has quite likely gotten past the years of unanswered prayers regarding a child. The angel appears and says that his wife will bear a child soon; and he is — like many people would be in his situation — sceptical. Zechariah’s response is straightforward: ‘How can I be sure of this? For I am an old man, and my wife is old as well’. Yet the angel’s response to this question treats Zechariah’s scepticism as utter disbelief and quite contrary to praise heaped on him in verse 6. Zechariah is quickly cursed to be mute until his child is born and Zechariah names him.

The ‘common’ interpretation reads Mary’s story (Luke 1:26-37) quite differently; however, I am not convinced that such is the case. Again, an angel appears. This time, rather than an old couple who are sceptical because of their many years of not having children, the person in question is reportedly a virgin. Unlike Zechariah, though, her questioning response (‘How will this be, since I have not had sexual relations with a man?’) is treated innocuously, and the angel answers her quite differently.

In each case, the two people respond with scepticism — both justified for their own reasons. However, in Zechariah’s case, the angel quickly responds harshly. What separates the two figures? Is it that Zechariah should ‘know better’ because he is old and the bitterness of being childless for years should be ignored? Or do we, perhaps, add to the story of Mary being told of her pregnancy to make her calmer than Zechariah? Both protest their revelations, but Mary is given a second chance that Zechariah does not have. What separates Mary from Zechariah?

Yes, one can say that Mary is chosen as the mother of God, is younger, etc. However, that seems to contradict the impartiality clause about God. Or perhaps, the angel had the freedom to be cruel to Zechariah but God caught on and banned that attitude in future angelic engagements. Whatever it is, the ‘common’ reading takes its cue from the angel’s responses rather than the actual story — surely the angel must know more than we readers! However, this asks the question as to why not explain that in the text. That is, if the angel’s reaction has some kind of insider knowledge that the text doesn’t make explicit, why didn’t Luke or later redactors make it explicit? Instead, we are left with implications that Zechariah is somehow spitting on the angel’s face while Mary calmly and graciously accepts what the angel says in addition to a text which does not quite bear that out. In any case, we have two quite similar reactions from humans and two quite different reactions from the angel, yet we are often committed to a reading which is based more on the reader’s interpretation of cues and implications rather than a somehow ‘objective’ story. In other words, the ‘common’ reading of these two stories excludes the possibility of an ‘objective’ reading. So much for the claim that the Bible contains objective, absolute propositional statements that ‘single, definite, and fixed’ (as is suggested in the ‘Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics’ which is taken by many as a bedrock for evangelical theology).

Credit Money

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This is a very short hypothesis I’ve been thinking about. Basically, money itself has no existence any more except as a measurement of debt and the means by which one is enslaved. While this may have been realised decades before now, it is fully obvious. With the automation of salaries (e.g. direct deposit) and goods payment (e.g. direct debit, monthly debit, etc), one lives without money. One must work to pay bills, but there is no longer any tangible exchange because everything is now virtual. We could remove money and capital from the entire project and nothing would change in the process — people would still work and they would still have the same things.

However, this is based on the argument that people would refuse to work if not forced. That is, without the weight of debt, people would do nothing. This would suggest, then, that there was never a time when people were not in debt. Even egalitarian agrarian communities must have been in some kind of financial debt for them to begin to collect and produce beyond the needs of their community in order to trade goods! The fallacy of such an argument should be obvious for we can trace historically when debt enters the social consciousness. Humans have lived and worked without the force of debt. Perhaps the only solid position in which debt has been necessary is in a post-slavery capitalist economy primarily because debt in cases like this serves to ensure a dichotomy between owners and workers which is almost indistinguishable from the dichotomy between owners and slaves. To work is to be a slave.

Such sentiment has become popular in theological parlance when speaking of the death and resurrection of Christ. Humanity is treated as being indebted to Christ and God (doubly so!) and, therefore, must repent and serve Christ out of the guilt of debt. This is the penal substitution theory. Humanity is mired in guilt of sin before God. Then, Christ pays God the debt of sin humanity owes. Therefore, humanity is indebted to Christ through repentance of the (already-paid) sin and subservience for the grace of such sacrifice. Christian missions and evangelism takes on this aspect of service and repentance. This is particularly noticeable in evangelical circles where one’s ‘witness’ centres on how one has changed into a better person because one has acknowledged the guilt-sin-debt.

For me, however, this sounds very twisted. It misses out on the story of liberation from sin-guilt-debt because it performs an act of double-think in which liberation is sin-guilt-debt so that one must become a willing slave in order to be truly free. However, I want to focus on a different interpretation of atonement. The dual nature of Christ is often used to displace the debt of guilt. On the cross, Christ takes on the sin of the world, but it is destroyed with the human nature of Christ to keep the God nature clean and pure. Rather than paying the debt humanity owes to God (and thus keep the system of debt), Christ erases that entire logic and thus allows humanity full access, communication, and equality with God. Christ is no longer the passive vessel of exchange that magically balances the accounting books of God while putting humanity into further debt but the active destroyer of sin-guilt-debt. Humanity is therefore freed from God and the debts of sin, able to walk away. Salvation and redemption is thus the starting over of the human-God relationship. In other words, the death and resurrection of Christ is a gamble by God that erases the logic of sin-guilt-debt in order to allow a free relationship in which one willingly partakes service not as a servant but as a partner in the act of redemption itself (perhaps best seen as in terms of an adopted child).

The language of debt and credit is erased so that the work of God continues in and through people. Perhaps, though, it may be better to term such activity something other than work for the Christian is not a slave to God. However, this also returns us to the human social economy of debt. Perhaps the way through capitalism is not in the erasure of money but rather the erasure of debt. The liberation of humanity from itself requires a re-thinking of human social relations which removes the possibility of slaves — both those captured or sold and those waged — so that people can ‘work’ without debt.

The ‘Third Way’ of the Middle Class

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For some time, I had been contemplating Adam Kotsko’s attitude towards ‘third way’ solutions (e.g. here). For the longest time, I have been a proponent of a ‘third way’ that would synthesise successfully the disparities between ‘left’ and ‘right’ into a more agreeable middle path between the two. However, I think that when this dialogue is turned towards the idea of a ‘middle class’, the failure of most ‘third way’ options (hey, I’m still woefully idealistic that one may succeed!) becomes apparent.

The emergence of the ‘middle class’ is a kind of ‘third way’ between the working and owning classes best described in Marxist accounts of capitalism. As a ‘third way’, the middle class was seen as the grey area between the two in which families could exist relatively peacefully while allowing differing political opinions. It didn’t matter if one was a Democrat or a Republican because the middle class was connected by something other than labour or capital.

Further ideological development of the middle class began to overlook and later erode class distinctions so that everyone could be ‘middle class’. As a socio-economic class, the ‘middle’ became uninterested in politics, economics, class struggles, etc. Political platforms turned away from politics and moved into the realm of social mores and appearances. Candidates were elected not on the basis of their political acumen or their ability to fight for the people they represented but on the basis of a few ‘key issues’ which dealt less and less with the politics of the world and more with the representation of certain ideological disposition. Political opinions could be reduced to simple binaries around social issues which threatened the nuclear ‘family’ of the ‘middle class’: abortion, death penalty, etc. Arguments were personalised in such a way that the old political discussions of, for example, taxes were transformed into how the ‘left’ Democrats wanted to increase taxes on the ‘middle class’ and the Republicans wanted to cut Medicare, Social Security, etc.

This can be seen in the current news dialogues concerning the temporary payroll tax cuts which are due to expire this year. The discussion has shifted towards tax cuts and tax increases on ‘middle class’ families. Its origin as a temporary measure has been lost and re-created into a war being waged against the family. The same can be said about the debate surrounding the Democrats’ proposed surtax on families with income over one million dollars — even they are now ‘middle class’!

What happened between the relatively strong left/labour movements in the US after the Great Depression and now? I suggest that it was an ideological battle in which members of the working class who were benefiting from the labour movement began to see themselves as the ‘third way’ of the ‘middle class’. While they acknowledged their ‘roots’ in the working class, their children saw that less and less. Instead, the ‘middle class’ children saw the ‘middle class’ as something hard-won from the working class and, consequently, needed protection from the working class as well. They moved to newer neighbourhoods and developed a culture which saw the working class as a lower class which was unable (due to laziness, poor decisions, etc) to rise up into the ‘middle’. In other words, the ‘middle class’ began to treat the remainder of the working class in the same manner that the owning class has always done. Now, the working class was fighting against itself. The ‘middle class’ was marketed by savvy politicians into thinking that their taxes were being spent unwisely and that the ‘lower class’ was abusing the social welfare for which the ‘middle class’ paid through taxes. The result was the ‘middle class’ seeing itself as self-secure, independent, and hard working in contrast to the lazy ‘lower class’ which stole their money. The ‘middle class’ began to agree with the owning class that they should keep their tax money and the ‘lower class’ just needs to work harder. They forgot that they themselves were working class and were able to ‘become “middle class”‘ solely because of the measures put into place just a generation before.

And this is where the failure has occurred. Everyone wanted to be considered ‘middle class’  and the solidarity has been so strong that tax increases on less than 1% of the population is encoded as a tax increase on everyone. The ‘middle class’ has become (if it ever wasn’t) an illusion. There is no middle class. Yet, its creation and existence has destroyed the self-image of the working class as a sort of Stockholm syndrome in which they now empathise and support the owning class even while the safety nets and security measures which keep the working class alive and sane are being dismantled. The only class solidarity which has persisted is that of the owning class who had seen the creation of the ‘middle class’ for what it is: a fake ‘third way’ which can abuse the working class into hating themselves.