The ACA and Social Obligations

In an attempt to return to blogging -- some thoughts here in the wake of last week’s Supreme Court ruling on health care (Though by now perhaps the subject is dated.  But I’m trying still to work out my own views on the ACA.  It’s possible that by the end of this post I will.)

In some ways, the whole affair is difficult still to comprehend.  The only possible word to describe it all is: irony.  Here we have a Democratic administration adopting a health insurance plan originally devised and conceived of by conservative think-tanks, and proposed by the Republican party in the early 90s, then in opposition to so-called “Hillarycare,” nearly struck down by the conservatives on the Supreme Court, and saved by the (purportedly) liberal justices.  In its wake, self-identified liberals and progressives are cheering, while conservatives are fuming.  At the same time, some left-wing critics of the law are considerably less-than-pleased at their sometime progressive allies. What are we to make of all this?

One possible explanation is that it’s all about tribalism.  People just want to root for their team.   (Among other bloggers “Vast Left Conspiracy” points this out about progressive support for Obama generally.)  And I think that’s a huge part of it. 

Would tribalism also explain the Supreme Court vote (Roberts aside)?  Let’s imagine for the moment that, consistent with its conservative origins and Republican support, the law had been passed by a Republican president and Congress.  Would Scalia have voted to uphold it?  Would Ginsburg have voted to strike it down?  Would it depend on who had brought the challenge?

I would like to think not.  But that’s only what I would like to think!  We saw the extraordinary partisanship of the Court on display in Bush v. Gore.  (I was in law school at the time.  I remember when the Court issued a preliminary injunction barring the re-count, with the conservatives issuing the ruling.  It was in direct contradiction to their supposed conservative principles of being sparing, at the least, with injunctive relief absent irreversible injury, which they typically defined narrowly.)

Still, I don’t think partisanship/tribalism exclusively accounts for this bizarre political/legal spectacle.  To understand this further, let’s unpack the law a bit.  The plan, as adopted by Republicans in the early 90s, was intended to do two things.  First, preserve, and strengthen, the insurance industry.  Second, achieve (close to) universal coverage, through a form of socialization.

The second goal might seem odd, coming out of conservative think-tanks, and I doubt very much that conservatives themselves ever expressed the matter that way. But this is precisely what the individual mandate does.  If we require insurance companies to, say, not discriminate on the basis of pre-existing conditions, or even if we insist that no one be turned away from the emergency room regardless of ability to pay, then, somehow, medical care has to subsidized  – and for that to happen, healthy people, not only the sick, must be in the pool. This has always been understood by advocates of a “single-payer” approach.  The “individual mandate” approach was a way to replicate the economics of single-payer while still preserving the insurance industry.  It was therefore “conservative” in that it attempted to solve the coverage problem without creating a state-administered pool.  But it was still “liberal” in the sense that encouraged a subsidized pool – albeit a pool that was administrated by for-profit insurance companies.

And this, I think, was the real nature of the objection of the “conservatives” on the court.  It was not about (what Ginsburg brilliantly termed) “the Broccoli Horrible.” It was about the horrible specter of social rather than individual financing for medical care.

In one illuminating exchange during oral argument between Solicitor General Verilli and Justice Scalia, Verilli tries to explain what is  unique about the health care market: the goal of universal health care is, he says, “a result of the social norms to which we've obligated ourselves” Scalia replies: “Well, don't obligate yourself to that.”

 America still wants to have it both ways.  Our (ideological) love of the market and fear of the state has helped keep the insurance industry alive (but see polling on “Medicare for all” – most American want it).   But we won’t take the logic of the market, as applied to the health care, to its ultimate conclusion.  In spite of our ruthlessly individualistic selves, even Americans still do not want people turned away from the emergency room – even we will not let people die on the street.    If we can own the fact that, yes, even we have achieved that degree of civilization, then we will ultimately have to embrace at least some form of socialized payments for delivery of health care.  

But evidently, for the conservatives on the court, any degree of subsidized medical care is simply too much.   In Scalia’s vision, people pay for their own insurance or they don’t.  If they don’t, and they get sick – tough luck.  Let them die.

I think it is this terribly draconian vision of the right that prompts many progressives to support the law.  Which is entirely understandable.   After all, the  law, among other things, bars insurance companies from discriminating against those with pre-existing conditions, and bars them from dropping people when they get sick.  These are non-trivial achievements.

 At the same time, I think progressives are mistaken to ignore the law's conservative history, and the left critique thereof -- namely, if we're going to "socially obligate" ourselves to expanded health care coverage, this is the worst way to do it.  Leaving for-profit private insurances as de facto administrators of the financing pool leaves in place the very incentives and resources to undermine any attempt to regulate the industry.  They will always look for a way to cover the healthy and deny the sick.  The notion that the insurance industry will become any better at recognizing and paying claims is sheer fantasy.  The left’s desire for single-payer is thus not a matter of mere ideological rigidity (a frequent charge)– it is that, so long as we retain a trace of civilization about making sure no one goes without care regardless of ability to pay, the profit motive will have to be taken out of the system. (Here's a decent NYTimes piece on why the profit motive is so disastrous for the provision of health care).  Moreover, this scheme entrenches the insurance industry yet further.  By making them the very center and lynchpin of the ACA, their political power grows, and the prospects for single-payer becomes even dimmer.

So is this a victory? Frankly, I still don’t know.   If the a previously-deemed conservative idea is now deemed not sufficiently individualistic, this only shows just how reactionary the conservative movement in America has become.  And if all we can we do is hold back the most reactionary forces in America, that seems to me not terribly great cause for celebration.    

And yet, I nonetheless take some solace in seeing the Scalias of America rebuked.   We can, in fact, lawfully “socially obligate ourselves” to ensuring that everyone receive the medical care they need, regardless of ability to pay.  We can, in fact, come to a collective decision that the necessities of material existence should be provided for all – and nothing in the Constitution requires otherwise. 

 (There still remains the Constitutional and political question on the question of the government forcing us too buy something.  I admit that that could be quite dangerous.  It perhaps elevates state-sponsored capitalism to a whole new level.   But I think Roberts was right -- the plan simply means that people who don't buy insurance get taxed at a higher rate.  The government does this all the time anyway -- it gives tax credits for certain purchases, e.g., solar panels, as observed by Justice Sotomayer in oral argument.  If Congress had structured it as an overall tax increase with a tax credit for those who purchase insurance, it would, as an economic matter, be the exact same thing, and there would be no question whatsoever as to its Constitutionality.  It's simply that the Democrats were trying to have their cake and eat it too.  They didn't want to be accused of raising taxes.  A good piece on that is here. Perhaps a fuller legal/Constitutional analysis will appear in another post)

The Manufactured "Debt Crisis" and the American Ideology of Debt.

[Preliminary note: for the few people who read this blog, the economic analysis will be self-evident. But it still really has to be said. Again and again and again.]

Contrary to what the elite class says, there is no debt crisis. It's a manufactured issue. Its sole purpose is to provide ideological cover for an assault on the New Deal and the Great Society. And, thanks in no small part to Mr. Obama, it appears to be working.

Evidence that there is no debt crisis includes the following: interest rates on bonds are still astonishingly low. In fact, for five year bonds, the real interest rate (adjusted for inflation) is negative. That means that (at least for now -- unless the US actually defaults) the financial markets still regard the US treasury as the safest place to put their money.

To make the matter clearer (for those not familiar with economics): were the bond markets (those who lend money to the government) worried about the level of US debt, they would be demanding a higher interest rate, to compensate them for the risk. But, as noted above, interest rates are exceptionally low.

Are we clear about this? Look, let's think this through. Everyone seems to have some vague notion that "debt is bad," but no one can say exactly why. All they know is that if there own household was in debt, that would be bad. (Although it would only be "bad" in some circumstances. In many cases, it's a good thing. If all debt were bad, no family would, say, take out a mortgage for a home, and no business would ever invest. So, even if the analogy to a household or a business were valid, which it isn't, the notion that debt is necessarily a bad thing would still be specious.)

So, under what circumstances would debt become "bad" for the US government (or any government)? Answer: if the financial markets decided to stop buying debt. If that were to happen, then, yes, we'd be in trouble. But there's simply no evidence of that happening. Again, the most powerful evidence would be high interest rates. But they aren't. By a long shot.

So if the very players (the bond markets) who should be concerned about the level of debt aren't concerned, why is all of Washington acting as if there is a crisis? Why does America seem to be so certain that we shouldn't raise the "debt ceiling"? (The very existence of which, as a legal device, is absurd -- Congress already appropriated funds; having to pass another law saying that the US will then go ahead to spend those funds is idiotic.)

My sense is that the issue of debt is far less an "economic" issue in this country, as it is a quasi-religious, moral issue. It seems a function, partly, of our puritanical heritage. A person who is a spendthrift, takes on debt, and lives beyond his means, is often regarded as having a certain defect of character. Spending is regarded as vice. Saving, on the other hand, is regarded as virtuous. (The religious nature of our reaction to spending was captured brilliantly by an episode of South Park, which I discussed in a post last year)

There is a massive cultural contradiction in our national psyche here. Capitalism will not function without spending. It just won't. The entire system is predicated on the profit motive. And businesses cannot make a profit if they don't sell. And if they're not profitable, they have no reason to hire. So, without spending, you can say good-by to any hopes of lowering the unemployment rate. Everyone knows this. Everyone. Regardless of party or ideology. The most dramatic example I know of this is: after 9/11, President Bush told us all that it was part of our duty as Americans to keep shopping. (I remember when that happened. Part of me thought "why are we talking about shopping at a time when thousands of people were killed? Isn't that, um, unseemly?" But I also knew the answer. A collapse in spending could mean business failures and increases in unemployment)

So while, on one level, we all know how critical spending is for the functioning of capitalism, we also, sometimes in the same breath, express a kind of moral revulsion at anyone's failure to save.

I wrote on this at great length on this cultural contradiction in another post (the first blog post on here that I wrote, last summer.) So I won't delve into the matter much further here. I will make one point of clarification though, which is that I am not claiming that these sorts of quasi-religious and moral objections to the debt are the driving factors behind the political economy of debt reduction. That, it seems to me, is largely a function of class war. That is, in the final analysis, the driving force behind "debt reduction" is the attempt to eviscerate the successes of the New Deal and the Great Society. However, even if the quasi-religious American anti-debt fervor doesn't account for why elites are so obsessed with the debt ceiling, I do think it accounts for why the issue of the debt ceiling plays so well for the American public. So, for example, much of the real motivation behind the attempt to cut spending is that elites want, for example, to loot Social Security and Medicare. But the reason they can get away with it, or at least have a chance of selling it to the public is because of (what I am calling) the American ideology of debt.

Per this ideology, debt is a simply "bad" (all economic analysis aside) in a moral or quasi-religious sense -- or, more specifically, a person in debt has no self-control, or self-discipline. Therefore, anyone in debt needs to be taught a lesson. They need to take their medicine, or "eat their peas" as Mr. Obama said. (The message there is obvious -- we may not like these spending cuts, but they are good for us. But he's wrong. They are not.)

This remarkably punitive -- almost sadistic attitude (in the sense that I think we, in our national psyche, sometimes get pleasure, or at least a kind of gratification, in seeing this particular kind of punishment) -- in my opinion, is remarkably good at facilitating the class war launched by the elites upon the rest of us.

And the rest of us, for psychological reasons entailing a kind of perverse gratification in believing that this kind of deprivation is necessary way of building our moral character, will be all-too-willing to allow the elites to continue to screw us over.

This is the tragedy of the particular intersection of moralistic American culture and cynical economic policy. And it is why (at least at the moment) I am not terribly optimistic about the prospects of the American public resisting this assault.

But I'm still hopeful that that will change. (Call it, if you like, the audacity of hope.)

Addendum: As usual, I've found myself anticipating possible objections to the above. So perhaps I should clarify. I'm not saying there isn't anything virtuous about saving. More specifically, I think that the notion of saving as a virtue performs a real and valuable function, insofar as it is difficult for human beings to delay gratification. So it makes sense that we would have developed a moral or religious code that rewards saving. This kind of moral code functions as a kind of survival strategy, as it were, for the species. The problem is the irrational or even counter-productive uses to which we put this otherwise useful moral code. There are, in my opinion, many of these, including, as I noted above, when the desire for discipline morphs into a sort of brutality (which is something I think has happened in America). But, from the standpoint of understanding capitalism, the most of notable of distortions of this moral code is the failure to understand the paradox of thrift in capitalist economies -- i.e., that too much savings can create a commodity glut, which in turns creates unemployment and low capacity utilization (or, in Marxian language, surplus population and surplus capital.) Indeed, I would go so far as to say the fact that, for capitalism, savings can be a problem or a threat is just one of the many reasons the system is an irrational one. (I discussed similar reasons in posts from last year, including this one.)

Engels on the Election

"The tenacity of the Yankees, who are even rehashing the Greenback humbug, is a result of their theoretical backwardness and their Anglo-Saxon contempt for all theory. They are punished for this by a superstitious belief in every philosophical and economic absurdity, by religious sectarianism, and by idiotic economic experiments, out of which, however, certain bourgeois cliques profit." F. Engels to Sorge, 1892

(thanks to Armagan Gezici for posting this gem)

(the full letter by Engels can be found here)

Rand Paul, Inchoate Marxist

Rand Paul, on Election Night, Nov 2, 2010:

We all either work for rich people or sell stuff to rich people. So just punishing rich people is as bad for the economy as punishing anyone.

cf. Karl Marx, from "Wage-Labor and Capital":

The labour power of the wage-worker can only be exchanged for capital by increasing capital, by strengthening the power whose slave it is. Hence, increase of capital is increase of the proletariat, that is, of the working class.

The interests of the capitalist and those of the worker are, therefore, one and the same, assert the bourgeois and their economists. Indeed! The worker perishes if capital does not employ him.....

As long as the wage-worker is a wage-worker his lot depends upon capital. That is the much-vaunted community of interests between worker and capitalist.

(Has the point not been made? Still? How bad is the hostage mentality in America today? "Treat our masters well, lest we be treated worse!" And the thought still cannot be formed -- abolish that relationship?!? The thought still cannot even be conceived of, let alone expressed?!?

Let's make it clearer still: "As long as the wage-worker is a wage-worker his lot depends upon capital." The self-evident conclusion: abolish the institution of wage-labor. There can be no true democracy so long as the many remain dependent upon the few. For what is democracy if not the equal distribution of authority?)

Late Fourties Capitalist Propaganda (Or: On Labor and Weenies)

In more than one post so far, I've expressed my, let's say, frustration (to say the least) with which the manner in which the institution of wage-labor (more commonly known as the "job") is taken as an unquestioned given.

This is of course when ideology is most effective -- i.e., when it cannot even be seen. That is, when particular historical forms are assumed to be constant, ahistorical, unchanging, etc. Or, further still, when such assumptions are not even articulated; they operate at an unconscious level.

This video, entitled "What is Capitalism?," I think well-illustrates the point. Its from 1948. (I think I first learned of this video from the subject of this blog.) It is, let's be clear, capitalist propaganda. An expression like that might seem shopworn to some ears, but it clearly fits the bill. That is, it is constructed to sell capitalism, or persuade people of its virtues, while at the same time obscuring some its most essential features. I decided to use this video when I taught a class in the History of Economic Thought.

If you watch the video, you'll see that it consists of a (mock) portrait of a terribly earnest and engaged discussion among high school students about the definition of "capitalism." They use, as an example, a visit to Mr. Brown's grocery store to buy "weenies" for the class weenie roast. After arguing vigorously (and letting us see their visit to his store) they come up with the following list of defining features of "capitalism":
(1) Private Property
(2) Profit motive
(3) Competition
(4) Freedom of contract
(5) Government-enacted laws granting rights (including certain Constitutional rights) to items #1 and #4

And, they conclude, that (1)-(5) adds up to (6) "Free Enterprise" (which, of course, is a much more attractive sounding term than "capitalism.") (Incidentally, #5 is a rather sophisticated observation-- at least relative to what most economists generally discuss. Certainly they failed to recall it when administering so-called "shock therapy" to the former Soviet Union.)

After playing this video in my class, I listed these features on the blackboard. I asked my students: Is there anything else you'd add? Or does this seem like an extensive, and exhaustive, list?

Now, on the one hand, this was one of those "guess what the teacher is thinking moments," which, as a student, I often hate. At the same time, I did want to get them thinking about what might be missing.

Finally I asked them -- who works in Mr. Brown's store? Where are his employees?

In fact, in this hypothetical, Mr. Brown, is a sole proprietor: he is self-employed, runs his own store, and has no employees. Now, while this is not entirely unheard of (there are, of course, self-employed people) it cannot in any meaningful sense describe capitalism. Most people earn their living by having a job and working for an employer. Most people are not self-employed.

This fact should be patently obvious to everyone. Yet none of my students thought of it. I recall saying to them that this might simply be because most of them had not entered the labor force yet. But I also hazarded a guess out loud (and admitted that this was just a guess) that even if you showed this video to someone who had been working at a regular job for many years, they'd miss it. And that's simply because this video is exceptionally effective. The place that people spend the majority of their waking lives -- the workplace -- and the attendant institution of the "job" (or wage-labor) is entirely eclipsed. All other features of capitalism (those that, at least to many, seem to be emblematic of "freedom" and "individuality" -- e.g., freedom of contract, the right to own one's own property, etc.) are highlighted. But the essentially hierarchical and undemocratic conditions of the workplace -- which everyone knows from their everyday, lived experience, are nonetheless completely obscured. Again, it strikes me as remarkably effective propaganda when a video can make people forget something that they experience in their everyday waking life.

(There is, as it happens, one interesting moment where an employee is actually pictured. He is a car mechanic. He says: "Freedom of contract? Don't know about that. We've got the union and seniority! I make a living -- I should worry." And goes back, worry-free, to working on the car. Get it? Not terribly subtle. Unions = bad.)

I should note that this treatment of wage-labor as being merely incidental to (rather than essential to) capitalism is entirely in keeping with treatments in standard economic textbooks. And not merely because it is continuously assumed (erroneously) that a market must necessarily entail a labor market. But also because "labor" is treated as a commodity just like any other. Capitalism entails the buying and selling of commodities, all of which are subject to the forces of supply and demand. Why single one out? Why single out "labor"? Under the logic of standard neoclassical economics, we would have just as much right to single out "weenies" as we would "labor." (I could draw a labor supply curve no less easily than a weenie supply curve. As a formal matter, they are exactly the same.)

But the treatment of labor as no different than any other commodity is absurd -- and everybody who works for a living knows this. Karl Polanyi has a chapter in The Great Transformation in which he calls labor a "fictitious commodity" -- but one need not read Polanyi to get the point.[1] One merely has to experience selling one's self (one's "labor-power" or capacity to labor) on a daily basis. It is a strange discipline indeed (that of "economics") that would formally equate the submission of one's creative capacity to another's authority with the buying and selling of weenies.

But such is the state of the discipline known as "economics." And it is, in my opinion, one of the absolutely key reasons that this discipline must be re-constructed. I'm hoping, at some point, we get around to that.


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Note 1: It may nonetheless be worth quoting Polanyi here. Noting that a commodity is, by definition, something produced for sale, labor, he observes, does not fit the definition: "Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life..."

It is, of course, an absurd contention that the act of caring for and raising human beings so that they have as a full a complement of "human activities" as possible is (in contemporary society) with the intention of producing a commodity for sale. Other motivations are typically imputed -- the desire to, say, have, love and care for one's children being just one. I'd even go so far to say that the postulation of any other reason -- like producing a commodity for sale -- is a description that most people would find offensive. But it is a description that fits in very comfortably in the language of economics. Indeed, the matter is yet worse than that. Labor, as economics deems it, is not merely a "commodity" -- it is a "factor of production" or a "resource." Human beings, insofar as we are workers, are mere resources. We are to be used for the benefit of "the economy." (And here I thought the purpose of "the economy" was to serve people, not vice-versa.) People as such (with full agency and subjectivity) disappear insofar as they are workers. In fact, the only time human agency appears, in economic discourse, is insofar as we act in our role as consumers. There, according to economics, we are acting to satisfy our needs. But insofar as we are workers, we are mere "resources" to be used. I still remain astounded at how language which would otherwise be morally offensive can pass as innocent, purportedly value-free "science."

An illustration: recently, the Fed issued a statement saying they anticipated a "...gradual return to higher levels of resource utilization." This is their way of saying they expect unemployment to decrease. Now, tell me -- when people complain about joblessness, is that the nature of the complaint? Do people carry protest signs saying, "hey, I'm a non-utilized resource -- Use Me!" (Maybe we should. Maybe that would get their attention.)

"More"

I often wonder whether there is more commonality across the ideological spectrum than might otherwise seem the case.

For example, conservatives sometimes articulate a critique of the dissolution of social norms and bonds. But, then again, so do liberals or radicals. That is, both the "left" and the "right" seem to find some despair in modern culture, and yearn for "community" at least in some sense. The "traditional values" rhetoric articulated by conservatives is, to be sure, often nothing more than a cloak for sexism, xenophobia and homophobia. But I am not convinced it is entirely that. When conservatives rail against, for example "Hollywood," and the perceived attendant degeneration of culture, they are, it strikes me, concerned (at least in part) about the dissolution of human bonds -- and, though they would not put it this way, the commodifcation of culture, and perhaps of humanity itself.

And, of course, this is an impulse that guides many on the left. The increasing commodification of culture seems to dissolve all that is recognizably human. "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned." (Marx's rather famous description of the sheer brute and transparent conditions of commodification and exploitation under capitalism, as written in The Communist Manifesto.)

Am I being too Pollyanish about finding a bridge between left and right? Perhaps. But occasionally I see works of art that suggest that there may, in fact, exist such a commonality.

One of those works of art is a short video called "More." For a silent, stop-action, claymation, six-minute film, it covers an impressive number of topics. These include: (1) happiness as a commodity to be bought and sold, as opposed to being found in human relations; (2) how the spark of innocence -- or perhaps, of one's soul -- that exists in childhood, can become extinguished in adulthood, and (3) the socio-economic structure that facilitates (1) and (2) -- such structure, specifically, being the relationship between worker and boss under capitalist relations of production.

The clip I linked to above is a relatively recent upload on YouTube. I wish I could find the earlier uploads. There were far more hits, and far more comments. What I recall from those comments was that: most people took away points (1) and (2). But fewer, as I recall, took away point (3), even though it is explicit (to the point of caricature). To me, this is a shame; for it seems impossible to speak of reclaiming our humanity without simultaneously speaking of the dehumanizing forms of socio-economic institutional relations.

Regardless, I nonetheless regard this short video as testament to the fact that there are certain common values that animate both the right and the left -- i.e., all of us.

It also says something additional about the institution of wage-labor that I barely alluded to in my earlier posts. In my earlier posts, I spoke of the ways in which wage-labor necessitated irrational social consequences -- specifically, the imperative for growth -- or "More" (the title of this video) -- irrespective of whether people actually desire "more." Here, however, lies another critique, namely, that the institution of wage-labor is dehumanizing. In Marx's language, we trade our essence for our existence (the classic statement of alienated labor, as articulated in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts)

In any event, after you watch it, tell me please -- do you think this video reflects values that animate political movements from both the left and the right? Or, again, am I trying too hard to find a bridge?

The Orwellian Language of "Job Creation" (Or: "Free Market" does not equal "Capitalism")

At the outset of almost every intro economics textbook, we are told that there, at bottom, two ways of organizing economic structures -- the "free market" and "command and control."

Economics typically likes to conceive of itself as a science in the strictly modern sense of the term. Normative claims are not to be conflated with positive claims. The evaluative is to be strictly separated from the descriptive.

As soon as it announces these laudable goals, it immediately, in that very instant, transgresses them. There are innumerable examples of this. The description in the first paragraph is just one. Do these two descriptions of economic systems sound value-neutral to you? Would you rather be free -- or commanded and controlled? The deck is stacked from the very outset.

But how else to describe them? Well, let's look at "command and control." One less loaded way of describing such a system might be to be call it a "planned" economy. Command and control implies an authoritarian structure. But what if the plan were arrived at through democratic means? Is democracy itself not a value? And can economic decisions arrived at via democratic means be, at all plausibly, described as a series of commands?

Now let's look at the "free market." This is typically taken to be synonymous with "capitalism." Of course, the first term has the word "free" in it -- so it's rather obviously more appealing. But is this equation of "free market" with "capitalism" a fair one?

The term "free" in free market refers to freedom from government regulation. The inability of economists to see power relations in any place other than state-citizen relations is a fantastic blind spot, at best. Economic relations are themselves power relations. And freedom and power are two sides of the coin. In any relationship (economic or otherwise), the more power you have, the less freedom I have. Can anyone who has worked in a capitalist economy say that they have not had this kind of experience? Is not the case that most people who work have a boss? Do we call the boss the "boss" for entirely arbitrary reasons?

But let me leave that aside for here (the meaning of "freedom"), since this is supposed to be a mere blog post. Let me focus simply on the term market. A market, if it is to mean anything, refers to mutual consensual economic transactions. Buying and selling.

If it is to be said that a market ("free" or otherwise) is to be equated with capitalism, then we have completely eviscerated the meaning of capitalism. The buying and selling of commodities is a phenomenon that we can find going exceptionally far back in human history. It even occurs (with merchant capitalists) alongside feudalism.

So what is it that marks "capitalism"? What new institution arises as recently as three centuries ago (at most)?

It is the institution of wage-labor. The analysis will be familiar to anyone familiar with a Marxist reading of history, but, ideological predispositions aside, it should be straightforward. What we start to see at that point in history is that labor-power itself becomes commodified. (I use Marx's term "labor-power" rather than "labor" because I believe it to be a better description of the process, and also analytically more fruitful. But I cannot go into the details of that analysis here.) Previous class systems entailed class exploitation, and the appropriation of surplus product by one class to another (e.g. the appropriation of surplus product by the Lord from the Serf), but it did not take the form the buying and selling of labor-power as a commodity.

What were the historically necessary conditions for the creation of labor-power as a commodity? Again, the story is familiar. Working requires tools and workspace (i.e., the "means of production.") If, by custom or tradition, one has certain rights to some access to the means of production (even if not formally recognized), then there is no necessity to sell labor-power. One need not do so, because one has the tools with which to employ one's own labor-power without selling it. But if no such access to the means of production is available (whether via custom, tradition, or formal recognition), then one has no choice but to sell one's labor-power to those who do own the means of production.

And this is the only description of capitalism that captures its essential features. It is the only description that distinguishes it from the selling of any commodity (which long predated the commodification of labor-power). And it is also the only description that accounts for the irrationalities and waste to be found in the system as a whole.

The above description is admittedly long, and likely laborious, at least for those reading this who are already quite familiar with the argument. But others are not. As such, this background history is exceptionally important.

Why? Because unless we make this history transparent to ourselves, it becomes impossible to imagine that work can be organized in any manner other than wage-labor.

Therefore, under conditions such as today, we find ourselves able to say nothing other than "give us more opportunities for wage-labor!" -- or, in more common parlance: "create jobs!"

But what does it mean to say that a capitalist enterprise creates jobs? It means nothing more than this: a class which has exclusive access to and ownership of the means of production permits other people onto their property (the workplace) -- hence my claim that the language of job creation is Orwellian. To "create a job" is simply to allow someone with no claim to the means of production to be permitted access to such means, so that they may enable the capitalist to produce a commodity. Nothing has actually been "created."

Put otherwise: to create jobs is not to create work. The need to work or labor is ahistorical. It is only the separation of the worker from the means of production that creates the illusion that something has been "created" when the owners of the means of production (the capitalists) allow the worker onto his property to produce commodities for sale. Absent that historical act of separation, we would not be under the delusion that something has been "created" for us.

But there is nothing necessary about this separation. It is unquestionably a historical fact; but it is not a necessity, neither economically or logically.

And we have already seen (at least from at least one post) the absurd consequences of this separation -- i.e., the necessity for GDP growth, even if that's not whats desired. We can thus avoid the irrational imperative for endless growth and endless consumption if we can change the way work is organized.

What conclusion should we arrive at? Cut through, rupture, disrupt and disperse, the entire language of "job creation." Stop begging the capitalist class to let the working class on to their property. The means of production must be held in common by those who work with such means (i.e., class itself must be abolished). To allow everyone the possibility of meaningful, rewarding work (financially, psychologically, and, dare I say, spiritually), everyone must have access to the tools with which to work.

This must be the demand. This must be the goal. How we get there is a matter of considerable debate. Perhaps I will return to the "how" in another post. But that we must is unavoidable, both as a matter of ethics, of rationality, and of bedrock principles for our continuation as a "species-being."