Chapter 14
The Venezuela That Might Have Been
This
chapter will suggest, and seek to put on the agenda for further discussion, a
way to advance the construction of social democracy. It would have been especially effective in Venezuela in the
middle of the 1970s, when that country enjoyed a bonanza in oil revenue. Like Norway, Venezuela has had unusual
opportunities to build social democracy because of oil. No matter how much international competition
pushes wages down, rents derived from the extraction of a natural resource, in
this case oil, are still available to subsidize social improvements. Much depends on which improvements are
deemed to be worthy of being subsidized.
Budget becomes philosophy.
Based on the same ideas advanced in other chapters,
we will propose an answer to the question concerning what most deserves to be
subsidized. Borrowing a phrase from
Ernest Mandel, we will call our suggestion "subsidizing progressive
de-alienation." It could also be
regarded as an augmentation and improvement of the idea of "integrated
development."[1]
To make
"subsidizing progressive de-alienation" plausible we will again try
to facilitate a conceptual shift toward thinking of society in terms of
cultural structures. We will be
comparing de-alienation to other social change strategies on the basis of the
ways they address both production and circulation. De-alienation differs from most other social change strategies in
that it changes the control of the means of production and the norms that
govern circulation (the distribution of goods and services) simultaneously,
rather than one before the other. With
the process of de-alienation, ownership and the market change together. (Hence "integrated
development.") The conceptual
shift toward seeing conventional cultural norms as causes of historical events
will contribute to showing why such an integrated strategy for change is both
necessary and possible.
We have been insisting that there is
no way for social democracy to avoid dealing with the radical critiques of
capitalism made by Karl Marx and others.
Poverty, and therefore violence, are simply not going to go away until
the contradictions of commodity exchange as a way of life are successfully
resolved. One name, perhaps the best
name, for these fundamental contradictions is "alienation." "Subsidizing progressive
de-alienation" is therefore intended as a name for a practical way to deal
with and overcome the systemic obstacles to change that radical critiques
expose.
Since we
will be endorsing a practical approach to social change that follows logically
from a radical critique of capitalism, it is helpful to begin by reviewing
briefly some of the main practical conclusions that others have drawn from
radical social analysis. This review
does not bear directly on our constructive argument, which will take the form
of an outline of a version of a concept of alienation, from which practical
ideas concerning what to do to achieve de-alienation will follow. We review briefly other practical programs
derived from radical critiques of the basic structure of the global capitalist
system mainly because people who advocate them sometimes think that the view
they hold is obviously correct. By
pointing out that it is only one view among an array of possibilities, we hope
to encourage the consideration of alternatives, and, specifically, the sort of
alternative we are naming "subsidizing progressive de-alienation."
"Social democracy" is sometimes
excluded from the list of programs derived from radical social analysis, and
defined as a confession that democratic governments cannot transform
society. Social democracy is identified
with accepting the anti-revolutionary practical conclusion that the best a
"socialist" or "labor" government can do is to successfully
manage capitalism. At most, a social
democratic party in power cuts a better deal for workers than a frankly conservative
government would cut.[2] Such a surrender of socialist ideals is
often attributed (understandably but
mistakenly) to AD, Acción Democrática,
which is a member of the Socialist International and which has been the largest
party in Venezuela most of the time since the inception of that country’s
democratic period began after the fall of the Pérez Jimenez dictatorship in
1958.[3]
"Democratic socialism," in
contrast, is a phrase sometimes reserved to name the movements that still
aspire to achieve radical social transformation by democratic means. In Venezuela this term more or less
describes MAS, Movimiento al Socialismo,
the largest of Venezuela's small parties and the one that has had the most
influence among students and in the universities during the democratic period.[4]
The social democrats are commonly said to
have either forgotten entirely Marx's radical analysis which calls for a
de-alienated society, in which the purpose of producing goods and services
would be to meet human needs, or else to have given up any pretense of trying
to create such a society, relegating the memory of movements for social
transformation to the dusty shelves of historical nostalgia. Democratic socialists keep alive the ideal,
but they are commonly said to be a minority who have never had power and never
will.
We
are opting to use the phrase "social democracy" generically, not
distinguishing it from "democratic socialism," seeking to keep alive
the ideals that presided over the origins of both in the 19th century.[5] We will argue that even AD, and even COPEI (Comité de Organización Política Electoral
Independiente), Venezuela's Christian Democratic Party, are heirs to
intellectual traditions that contain the seeds of real change.[6]
Among
those who, unlike AD and COPEI, are less often accused of having simply
abandoned radical social analysis and accepted capitalism, one might list the
following:
Those for whom
radicalism implies violence.
It is supposed that if one believes that one social class has power over
the means of production, and another does not, then, given that "no social
class has ever given up power voluntarily" the only way to achieve the
fulfillment of the founding ideals of social democracy is by force. In Venezuela such ideas have sometimes been
associated with the concept that it is fruitless for the working class to form
anti-imperialist electoral alliances with a national bourgeoisie, in part
because according to the argument, no national bourgeoisie exists. Venezuela is thoroughly integrated into the
global capitalist system.[7]
Those for whom radicalism implies class-identification with
workers and/or the marginalized unemployed or underemployed. The measure of radicalism becomes the extent
of commitment to solidarity with the victims of the system. Sometimes too, such "radicals" are
those particularly unwilling to form alliances or to compromise.[8]
Those for whom
radicalism is mainly anti-imperialism.
It is supposed that at this stage in history, the CIA, the American
military machine, and the transnational businesses it protects, are the
concrete embodiments of global class rule.
The political goals of the impoverished masses become identified with
the goals of third world nationalism.
Opponents of
modernity. Radicals are identified, (often actually
more by their critics than by themselves) with admiration for pre-capitalist
and non-capitalist cultures. They are
supposed to desire complete, rather than partial, abolition of the
characteristic institutions of modern society.
Those for whom
radicalism is an academic stance.
Intellectuals may be concerned to demonstrate that class analysis has
more explanatory power than mainstream social science, or that critical
pedagogy is a superior way to help students make sense of the world.
The above
short list of practical conclusions drawn from radical social analysis omits
some radicals, describes others more than once, and describes nobody
perfectly. Whatever else might be said
about radical social analysis, we believe that it must be said that its
premises are true. It is certainly
true, for example, that there are obstacles preventing the elimination of
poverty that are systemic, or, to use another term, “structural.” It is also certainly true that in a world
where technology is capable of meeting everybody's basic needs, the achievement
of a world that works for everybody without ecological damage is frustrated by
the most basic conventional norms that govern life under capitalism. An economic system whose motivating dynamic
is the accumulation of capital is inherently unstable and unjust.
Although Karl Marx was among those who called
attention to the inherent instability and injustice of capitalism, some of his
further characterizations of the nature of its contradictions are inaccurate
and misleading. It is true that in a
world where every firm makes investments in the expectation of profit, every
firm operates on the expectation that its receivables will exceed its payables. Since one firm's receivable is necessarily
another firms' payable, however, it is impossible for all firms to have more
receivables than payables. The
instability inherent in the impossibility of satisfying the accounting
expectations that move economic activity is a reflection of a more general
problem. The constitutive rules of the
system are such that satisfying human needs, the quest for "value in
use," as Adam Smith called it, does not in itself mobilize resources to
get economic activity going. Actors are
free to act to meet the needs of others or not, and they may or may not choose
to do so.
Although these facts which Marx pointed out,
or at least alluded to, are true, his claim that production relations determine
distribution relations is only half true.
The other half of the truth is that distribution relations determine
production relations. Further, it is
not true, as Joan Robinson (1967) and others have shown, that Marx discovered
the secret of profit making by using the labor theory of value to demonstrate
that all profit comes from the exploitation of workers. Venezuela is a good example showing that
Robinson is right and Marx is wrong on this point. Virtually all of the nation's discretionary income comes from the
oil industry, which employs only two percent of the workforce. Far from being the exploited two percent,
from whom surplus value is appropriated to create the nation's wealth, the two
percent are privileged inhabitants of the pais
petrolero surrounded by many underprivileged inhabitants of the rest of the
country, sometimes called the pais
nacional. Most oil revenue is rent
derived from owning a natural resource, not surplus value derived from the
exploitation of the workers who extract the petroleum.
If
one regards the core of the problem as "alienation," and the core of
the solution as "de-alienation," then it is possible to see how
social democracy can solve the problems that structural obstacles make it hard
to solve--while agreeing with Karl Popper that the only legitimate use of
violence is to use it to defend democracy and the rule of law, i.e., to defend
nonviolence; while promoting a program of social peace, justice, and
sustainability that actually serves the long-term best interests of the rich,
even though the principal impetus for it can be expected to come from the poor,
who would be its principal beneficiaries; while identifying the world's
principal problems as systemic (as caused, as Emile Durkheim would say, by
institutions in which conventional roles persist while the persons who fill
them come and go)[9] without
blaming the problems on CIA agents, Americans, managers of corporations,
military officers, terrorists, or any other persons or groups of persons; and
while appreciating without exaggerating the positive contributions of religions
and other pre-modern and non-modern belief systems.
What
actually follows from a radical analysis is that society ought to be
changed. The most valid conclusion to
draw is an ethical one. Needs, by
definition, ought to be met. Therefore, poverty ought to be eradicated. The systemic and structural obstacles that
prevent the eradication of poverty (or, to be more precise, permit it only
under unusual circumstances such as those prevailing in Western Europe right
after World War II, or in unusual locations such as Singapore) should be
removed. Those obstacles are, as we
have sought to demonstrate in these chapters, conventional norms. Cultural norms are the stuff to be
transformed. In Aristotelian and
biblical terms, they are the hyle to
undergo metanoia.
Radical critiques of modern society
could be made, as Martin Heidegger and many others have made them, starting
with Greek philosophy; or like Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier, one could
start with medieval philosophy; or with one or another non-western philosophy. One could start with ecology or with
theology, or with Paulo Freire's (or another's) theory of education.[10] However, we do not believe that anybody has
done a better job of analyzing the shortcomings of the basic cultural
structures that govern modern society than Karl Marx. Our starting point will draw from and build upon his concept of
"alienation" (Entfremdung). Later in this chapter we will also draw upon
the ideas of a Venezuelan writer whose tradition is that of Christian humanism.
Marx
wrote:
The product appropriated by the capitalist is a use-value,
as yarn, for example, or boots. But,
although boots are, in one sense, the basis of all social progress, and our
capitalist is a decided “progressist,” yet he does not manufacture boots for
their own sake. Use-value is, by no
means, the thing qu'on aime pour lui-meme
in the production of commodities.
Use-values are only produced by capitalists, because, and in so far as,
they are the material substratum, the depositaries of exchange-value. Our capitalist has two decided objects in
view: in the first place, he wants to produce a use-value that has a value in
exchange, that is to say, an article destined to be sold, a commodity; and, secondly,
he desires to produce a commodity whose value shall be greater than the sum of
the values of the commodities used in production, that is, of the means of
production and the labour power, that he purchased with his good money in the
open market. His aim is to produce not
only a use-value, but value; not only value, but at the same time surplus value
(1990: 89).
Concerning this passage from Marx, we would like to make
four observations.
First, at
the risk of making it appear that our guiding aim is to determine exactly what
Marx meant, rather than, as is in fact the case, to use cultural resources
drawn from Marxist traditions to improve society, we would like to observe that
the passage quoted is not unusual or isolated.
It is representative of many similar and related passages found throughout
Marx's writings. It is from Capital, one of Marx's later works. It is from the first volume, edited by Marx
himself and not prepared for publication by Friedrich Engels or Karl
Kautsky. It cannot be dismissed as
expressing an opinion of the young Marx which the mature Marx outgrew. It was not written by the person
Althusserians call the pre-Marxist Marx, the Marx not yet sufficiently freed
from the illusions of bourgeois ideology to be a Marxist.[11]
Second, the passage quoted is about
alienation even though the word "alienation" does not appear in
it. As Bertell Ollman (1971) has shown,
the key social relations that Marx describes define and imply each other. The social reality Marx describes in the
passage quoted is the same social reality that appears, when regarded from
another perspective, or with a focus on another facet, as
"alienation."
Third, the quoted passage implies,
as several commentators have already noticed and many commentators have
deliberately and sometimes elaborately not noticed, that working to meet human
needs ought to be the chose qu'on aime
pour lui-meme, the goal. In Plato's
terms, people having boots to wear is the agathon,
the good, at which the techne, the
craft, of the boot-maker aims.
Use-value is the true, the ethically valid, aim of economic
activity. Gandhi was right: life ought
to be regarded as a series of opportunities to serve others; property ownership
ought to be stewardship. Thrasymachus,
Callicles, Gorgias, and all of Socrates' interlocutors who advocated
selfishness, the maximization of private pleasures, and practicing as much
injustice as one can get away with, were wrong. Of course, Adam Smith, who was himself a supporter of using
use-value as a measuring stick to evaluate economic institutions, was also
right when he pointed out that love for other people is often a weaker and less
reliable motive than self-interest.
Although working to meet the needs of others is what people should do,
it is frequently not what they do do.
Political economy therefore wisely advises policies that encourage the
natural tendency to truck or barter, through which each person gives up
something unwanted, or less wanted, in exchange for something wanted, or more
wanted. When a market works well, it
rewards people for acting as they should act, namely, for acting in ways that
make other people happy. But Smith's
policies are wise precisely because,
and in so far as, they deliver the
boots: dry boots to keep the children from catching cold and flu on rainy days,
warm boots to keep grandma's feet from freezing in the snowy Andes, work boots
for fisherfolk, elegant boots for parades and ceremonial dances.
Fourth,
Marx accurately represents the problem as that of a society organized in such a
way that making the things people need, so that they can use them, is not the
purpose of human effort. Instead, the
purpose of human effort in such a poorly organized society is the accumulation
of money. Producing and distributing
what is needed is not the chose qu'on
aime pour lui-meme, although it should be.
The connection between the basic
conventional norms, or constitutive rules, which frame and define capitalism,
as Marx elaborates upon them in Capital,
and the term "alienation," which Marx uses in Capital, but discusses more thoroughly in his earlier works,
notably the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844, can be clearly seen in this additional typical passage
which we quote from Capital:
The labour process, turned into the process by which the
capitalist consumes labour power, exhibits two characteristic phenomena. First, the labourer works under the control
of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs; the capitalist taking good care
that the work is done in a proper manner, and that the means of production are
used with intelligence, so that there is no unnecessary waste of raw material,
and no wear and tear of the implements beyond what is necessarily caused by the
work.
Secondly,
the product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the labourer, its
immediate producer. Suppose that a
capitalist pays for a day's labour power at its value; then the right to use
that labour power for that day belongs to him, just as much as the right to use
any other commodity, such as a horse that he has hired for that day. To the purchaser of a commodity belongs its
use, and the seller of labour power does no more, in reality, than part with
the use-value that he has sold. From
the instant that he steps into the workshop, the use-value of his labour-power,
which is labour, belongs to the capitalist.
By the purchase of labour power the capitalist incorporates labour, as a
living ferment, with the lifeless constituents of the product. From his point of view, the labour process
is nothing more than the consumption of the commodity purchased, i.e. of labour
power; but this consumption cannot be effected except by supplying the labour
power with the means of production. The
labour process is a process between things that the capitalist has purchased,
things that have become his property.
The product of this process belongs, therefore, to him, just as much as
the wine which is the product of a process of fermentation completed in his
cellar (1990: 89).
Quoting this passage affords us the
opportunity to explain further our use, at the beginning of this chapter, of
the phrase "conceptual shift."
The conceptual shift we are proposing is moving away from conceiving
modern society as natural and toward conceiving it as an ethical construction.
What
is at stake in the passage quoted above are the ethical principles that
construct the relationship between capitalist and worker, and between both of
them and the larger society. Pace
Althusser, pace Ollman, and pace many others, there is present here a clearly
identifiable concept of cause and effect.
What relates causes to effects is the conventional norm, here
specifically the norm that the worker works under the control of the
capitalist, and the norm that the product belongs to the capitalist. As is typical of Marx, he shows here how
relationships among persons become disguised as relationships among
things. As natural. Social-convention-as-cause becomes disguised
as thing-as-cause. The rules and norms
of capitalist institutions become disguised as the quasi-laws of a
quasi-natural science.[12]
This
passage also shows the inextricable mixture of what Marx calls the "sphere
of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities," with what he calls
the "sphere of production."
It was perhaps Marx himself who, enthusiastically believing that he had
explained the secret of profit-making by leaving the surface and going down to
the deeper level of production relationships, inadvertently allowed people to
mislead themselves into thinking that once the ownership of the means of
production had passed from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat everything would
be smooth sailing from then on out. The
passage just quoted shows, however, that a production process in which a
worker's time is bought as one might rent a horse is inextricably related to a
circulation process in which money is advanced to buy commodities for the
purpose of using them, in turn, to make more commodities, which will be sold
for more money. The passage suggests
--although it does not spell out in any detail--that any feasible project for
transforming such a system would have to simultaneously transform the norms
relating to ownership and the norms relating to markets.
The
passage also shows how "alienation" begins with
"separation." "Separation"
is one of the words sometimes used as a synonym for
"alienation." The worker
under capitalism, unlike a craft worker, no longer owns tools, but works under
the control of the capitalist. The
worker is separated from the raw material, from the tools, and from the
product, by the norms of commodity exchange which govern the relations of
production.
The use of
the term "progressive," to indicate that a de-alienating cultural
process proceeds gradually and requires patience, is made more plausible by the
passage just quoted, when one reflects that the passage is an analysis of the
common sense of people who live in capitalist societies. Marx reveals in the mirror of art what is
normally concealed. It is so taken for
granted that it is not seen. It is not
reasonable to expect that people will easily and rapidly change attitudes that
they are not even aware they have, and norms that are nowadays so much second
nature that people are not even aware that they follow them.
At another
point in Capital Marx wrote:
. . . in any given economic formation of society, where not
the exchange value but the use value of the product predominates, surplus
labour will be limited by a given set of wants which may be greater or less,
and that here no boundless thirst for surplus labour arises from the nature of
the production itself. Hence, in
antiquity overwork becomes horrible only when the object is to obtain exchange
value in its specific independent money form; in the production of gold and
silver. Compulsory working to death is
here the recognized form of overwork.
Only read Diodorus Siculus.
Still, these are exceptions in antiquity. But as soon as people, whose production still moves within the
lower forms of slave labour, corvee labour etc. are drawn into the whirlpool of
an international market, dominated by the capitalistic mode of production, the
sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the
civilized horrors of overwork are grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery,
serfdom, etc. Hence the negro labour in
the Southern States of the American Union preserved something of a patriarchal
character, so long as production was directed chiefly to immediate local
consumption. But in proportion, as the export
of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the overworking of the
negro and sometimes the using up of his life in seven years of labour became a
factor in a calculated and calculating system.
It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of
useful products (1990: 113-14).
The moral
we draw from this last passage is that there are degrees of alienation. An environment can range anywhere from
complete alienation to no alienation.
It can be wholly hostile to the needs, interests, and feelings of
people; it can be one where, in violation of Kant's categorical imperative,
humans are treated entirely as means.
As Marx elsewhere puts it, "It is now no longer the labourer that
employs the means of production, but the means of production that employs the
labourer" (1990: 150). At the
other extreme, there are friendly pro-social work environments, where there is
little or no alienation. Fast-forwarding
from Marx's contrast of relatively humane ancient with comparatively inhumane
early modern practices, one can imagine a business in a contemporary democracy
where the workers do an honest day's work for an honest day's pay and are
decently treated. The company provides
a good and useful service for its customers, is a responsible contributor to
the wider community, and is ecologically conscientious. The workers may have a good union, or feel
they do not need a union but could form one if they chose to, and they may have
paid vacations and health benefits.
This hypothetical non-alienated firm might have hands-on owners who earn
a reasonable profit putting their own sweat equity into the business, or its
shares might be held by pension funds or by foundations devoted to medical
research.
A litmus test for distinguishing alienation from non-alienation is the
absence or presence of consent. Time
and again Marx characterizes alienation as a situation where workers are
virtually enslaved, living lives they do not control or choose. Our story about the un-alienated small business
in a contemporary democracy, in contrast, is a story about people who have
choices in a society that offers choices; it is about workers who may, under
the circumstances, choose to be workers and to go home at 5 p.m. after an 8
hour day to relax, engage in do-it-yourself projects around the house, garden,
or work out at the gym; it is about workers who might not want to be capitalist
entrepreneurs who have to file five or six tax returns instead of one, worry 24
hours a day about meeting payroll and servicing commercial debt, and about
keeping up with competitors in a fast-changing market. It is about a society in which, as John
Rawls proposes, there is a commitment to an ideal of equality of opportunity in
which every role is in principle open to every citizen, and where the legal
framework within which people play their diverse roles is in principle
established by legislators freely elected by all of the people (Rawls 1971: 84,
87, 205-21).
Democracy is a step toward de-alienation
because it establishes the principle that the laws are made by and for the
people. The quasi-mechanical implacable
laws of economics are ameliorated in principle by the prospect of humanitarian
amendment. According to the strict
rules of capitalism, if you are in the unfortunate position of being a person
who has no goods or services to sell that anybody wants to buy, and if you have
no investments producing income for you, then you lose. You lose, you are on the street, and nobody
has a duty to give you a break. But according
to the principle that it is the people's representatives who make the laws,
when there are too many losers, it is time to change the rules of the game.
In the earlier 1844
Manuscripts, the only place where Marx devotes several paragraphs to
explicating the meaning of the word "alienation," Marx describes
"alienation" as "not being at home" (1959: 72). To be de-alienated is to be "at
home." The German word translated
as "alienation" is Entfremdung,
which comes from the adjective fremd
meaning "strange" or "foreign." The core of the idea of Entfremdung
is in the center of the word, fremd. Alienation is the process of becoming a
stranger, a rejected foreigner, unwelcome.
In its English and Spanish versions, both drawn from French, the core of
"alienation" and alienación
can be found in lien, which means
“attachment.” Alienation is the process
of losing attachments, losing connections, losing bonds. Besides “separation,"
"objectification," “fetishism” and “commodification” can be used as
equivalents to "alienation."[13] They express the idea of inhumanity, of the
displacement of the personal and the humane by the impersonal and the
thing-like.
Ollman
points out two other words, which Marx uses as practically equivalent to the
word fremd, which is at the core of Entfremdung: ausser (outside) and unabhangig
(independent) (1971: 288 ff). The
significance of the latter is that the product, and, on a larger scale, the
economy, assume powers independent of the humans who make them.
Thus to be
alienated is to confront inhuman objects alone. It is to be a stranger, to be in a foreign land, in hostile
territory. Per Albin Hansson must have
had such an idea in mind when he said that social democracy would make Sweden
"home" for its people. Marx
contrasts the savage, who is at home anywhere, with the "civilized"
worker, who must pay rent in order to have a place to call home, who can be
thrown out onto the street whenever the cash needed to pay the landlord is not
available. In several passages where
Marx wants to contrast capitalism with something else he gives examples of
peasant families or peasant villages where resources are shared and where it is
the business of all to meet the needs of each.[14] In briefest summary, as Ollman concludes in
his book on Marx's concept of alienation, alienation is disunity. De-alienation is unity (1971:135).[15]
As an example of extreme alienation imagine
a poor laborer in Venezuela who finds in one place a rice or cacao plantation,
fenced with barbed wire, where he or she is not welcome; in another place a
petrochemical complex, guarded by armed guards, where she is not welcome
either; in other places freeways and modern buildings which are not for him;
who among all the spaces on this earth is only legally allowed to locate her
body sometimes in a shabby rented room, sometimes on public streets, in either
case in danger of being attacked, sometimes by criminals, sometimes by the
police; a person who finds no place on earth a safe spot that is home; who
finds no family, no clan, no labor union, no political party or church, which
will take him in and welcome her as one of their own.
Our example of extreme alienation
brings out a point not much emphasized by Marx, namely that a person who is
unemployed and homeless can be just as alienated as a poorly paid worker who
functions as a cog in a machine calculated to maximize someone else's
profits. However, our example fails to
bring out a point that Marx (like Paulo Freire) does emphasize, namely that
under capitalism, the capitalist, ostensibly privileged, is also alienated.[16] Ollman writes, paraphrasing Marx, "The
capitalist's relation to the product of the proletariat's labor likewise places
him in a state of alienation. For him,
the object of another man's life activity is only something to sell, something
to make a profit with. He is as
indifferent to what it is actually used for and who will eventually use it as
he is to the process by which it came into being" (1971: 155).
We believe
that the version of the concept of "alienation" that we are
developing is immune to some of the main attacks made against such concepts.[17] One kind of attack is made by Marcuse. It is that "alienation" becomes a
questionable concept in advanced industrial societies where individuals
identify themselves by the existence which is imposed on them by mass
culture. They identify with their
Corvette automobile, or their designer clothes. The logic behind this criticism of the concept of alienation
seems to be this: According to Marx, (a) there is an essence of humanity, a
social species-being, Gattungwesen,
which everybody really is; (b) Under capitalism, people are alienated from
their true selves, and cease to be who they really are, really human; (c)
Alienated people are unhappy. But in
advanced industrial societies, people are alienated from what Marx would call
their true selves, inasmuch as they identify with consumer goods and mass
culture, with things more than with social relationships, but they are not
unhappy. Marx's concept of alienation
appears to become unusable when faced with the counter-example of happy
alienation. Marcuse goes on to say that
nevertheless, the life of a well-paid working class in a consumer society shows
a deeper form of alienation, not envisaged by Marx. It is a form of alienation which, unfortunately for the
revolution, the masses do not seem to be inclined to revolt against (1964:
21-55).[18]
From the
point of view proposed here, these arguments are neither here nor there. There may and may not be a social essence
to human nature. We are proposing ways
to use "alienation" and "de-alienation," mostly drawn from
Marx, as terms that do not refer to an essence of human nature, neither to say
that there is or is not such an essence.
A second
line of attack on the idea of "alienation" characterizes philosophies
of alienation as about subjectivity.
They depend on the illusion that the bourgeois sense of self as a
juridical subject reflects universal human nature. They make "self" and "subject" into
philosophical categories untainted by history (e.g., Thevenin 1977). We do not think this sort of objection
applies to "alienation" as we have discussed it either. We have here tried to avoid participating in
19th and 20th century European philosophical debates, and to ground
"alienation" in the practical reality that people are separated from
food, from housing, from friendly human companionship, and from cooperative
material assistance in meeting the needs of life.
The idea
that the ethical norms of everyday life have to change if the structure of
society is going to change is not a new idea.
It is not an idea confined to humanistic and Gramscian Marxists. Christian Democrats have thought of it
too. It is a frequent theme in the
social teachings of the church. In an
important sense, the core Christian idea of agape
is logically equivalent to the idea of alienation that we have constructed
mainly by following some of Marx's insights.
Agape means love for
everybody, welcoming, inclusion.
Alienation means hostility for everybody, rejection, exclusion. Being in favor of agape and being against alienation are, in set-theoretic language,
co-extensional. To include everybody
means the same thing as to exclude nobody.
Most of the founders of COPEI, the
Venezuelan Christian Democratic Party, were formed as activists and organizers
in study circles devoted to Catholic social doctrine, led by Manuel Aguirre, S.J. Padre Aguirre (1940) described Christian
social teaching as equidistant from freemarket liberalism and Marxist
socialism, and castigated equally the errors of each. Marx's views on "alienation," however, were not among
his targets, and indeed his own words were often similar to Marx's on this
point, for example when he wrote: "The Manchester School in its doctrine
of the labor contract degenerated to the point where it arrived at the concept
of homo economicus, considering labor
as an article of commerce, as a commodity; and the worker as a machine"
(1940: 32). He frequently quoted
typical Christian language calling for the solution of social problems through
the consistent application of the principle of agape, as, for example, these words from Quadragesimo anno: "The true union of all for the sake of the
common good will only be achieved when all parts of society feel intimately
that they are part of one great family and children of the same heavenly
Father; and further, are one body in Christ, being all members of one another,
so that if one member of society suffers, all of the others suffer
sympathetically [“compadecen”]"
(quoted in Aguirre 1940: 132).[19]
The
concept of alienation, Entfremdung,
built around the adjective fremd,
names a complex of unfortunate limitations of the characteristic basic cultural
structures of modern society. It echoes
similar critiques of modernity made by people who in other respects disagree
with Marxism--Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, romantic philosophers and
poets. Modernity is impersonal. People are treated like things. As Max Weber wrote, it is disenchanted.[20] Our emphasis, however, is on another
familiar critique of modernity: it does not work. It fails to deliver the goods.
We are proposing "de-alienation" as a strategy for building a
world that is more personal, more human, more charming and enchanting, and also
more functional.
There is
an irreducible romantic element in the idea of de-alienation. If humans are alienated, it is because they
are separated from some bonds and connections they might have had. Syntactically, they are bonds and
connections they did have at some earlier time before the process of
estrangement set in. Yesteryear is
bathed in a golden light in spite of evidence that yesteryear was, for the most
part, worse than the current year. The
Hobson's Choice between Gemeinschaft
(traditional community) with solidarity but without plumbing, and Gesellschaft (modern society) without
solidarity but with plumbing, is biased in favor of the former. The challenge and the goal of democratic
socialism, however, is to avoid this Hobson's Choice: to achieve solidarity
along with advanced technology,
freedom with community. The idea of "de-alienation" must
therefore be handled gingerly, to give it a content somewhat at odds with its
etymology, to make it name a future better than the past.
In our experience, many activists who are
working with the poor to overcome poverty are already working along the lines
that a de-alienation strategy would suggest.
What we are proposing is more support for much of the anti-poverty work
that is already underway. Examples of
the sorts of de-alienating activism already underway in many places around the
world can be drawn from several community development programs carried out in
the early 1980s in the Orinoco River Basin in southern Venezuela, in the towns
of Pariaguan, San Diego de Cabrutica, and Mapire.[21] The programs were subsidized by MARAVEN, one
of the four operating subsidiaries of the nationalized Venezuelan petroleum
industry.[22]
The fact
that MARAVEN put up the money to subsidize de-alienation is itself
de-alienating. It signals that the oil
wealth of the Venezuelan nation is not separated from its people. The oil is owned by the people. Oil wealth under the stewardship of its
managers is being used for the people's benefit. Similarly, the democratic context of MARAVEN's decisions signals
de-alienation. In Venezuela in the
1980s, in principle, the laws governing property rights and those creating
parastatal semi-autonomous entities like MARAVEN were laws created by and for
the people (Martz and Myers 1986: 250).[23] Property did not confront the propertyless
as an alien force, but rather provided a practical legal framework for living,
designed to serve the common good, enacted by representatives the people had
elected.
It is not
an objection to the de-alienating ideals stated in the preceding paragraph that
the motives of the MARAVEN executives were impure. (They wanted to gain public support for their presence in the
Orinoco Valley, and to avoid being confined to operating solely in western
Venezuela around Lake Maracaibo (Randall 1987: 144-47).)[24] Nor is it an objection that Venezuelan
democracy was and is imperfect. (Every
democracy has been and is.) These are
not objections because the only possible way to move in the direction of
de-alienation is to start by taking advantage of the motives and practices that
exist, which are, inevitably, mixed and flawed. As anthropologists have consistently found, in any culture there
is a difference between the ideal norms that are professed, and the actual
norms that are practiced, and yet the former are not irrelevant to the
latter. Articulating ideals and keeping
them alive in an impure and imperfect world is not describing the facts; it is
making an effort to encourage improvement.
It is a political commitment.
MARAVEN
money was used to hire a team of community development facilitators from the
Institute for Cultural Affairs (ICA), headquartered in Chicago, and a team of
social scientists from the University of Venezuela's Center for Development
Studies (CENDES). ICA, which already in
the 1980s had thirty years experience in participatory grassroots problem
solving in many countries around the world, is an offshoot of Saul Alinsky's
Industrial Areas Foundation. Its
approach to building the power of the people is considered less confrontational
than Alinsky's original version. The scholars from CENDES were mainly
associated with MAS, Movimiento al
Socialismo, and other parties that advocate democratic socialism (Martz and
Myers 1986: 278, 287, 289).
What the facilitators did was to
facilitate dialogue, which is another step toward de-alienation. From the times of Socrates and the compassionate
Buddha to the times of Lawrence Kohlberg and Paulo Freire, the simple practice
of coming together to engage in conversations about matters of common concern
has been recognized as a key to achieving a higher level of moral consciousness
and more intelligent concerted action.[25] Everybody in town (the total population of
San Diego de Cabrutica was only 2,000) was invited to share ideas on the
problems of the town and how to solve them.
Nobody was excluded. Sometimes
the conversations went on all night.[26]
Jürgen
Habermas has convincingly argued in Communication
and the Evolution of Society (1979) that the simple act of engaging in
conversation brings into play certain minimum norms of cooperation and
honesty. Surely the commitment to
cooperation and honesty is still greater when one voluntarily attends a meeting
with one's fellow citizens to discuss the problems of one's town or
neighborhood. If everyone is invited to
say what they think the problems are, then there is an implicit commitment to
the norm that people ought to care about the problems. The notion that the people are powerless to
do anything to solve their problems is implicitly denied. The notion that all resources are under the
control of hostile strangers, and will not be available to meet the needs of
the members of the community, is implicitly denied as well. Skilled community organizers have developed
methods for building on these almost inevitable consequences of people coming
together to discuss common problems.
They catalyze bringing out people's capacities to join in creating
solutions.
Even if
one's participation in small group discussions and larger plenary sessions
consists entirely of complaining, the possibility that one might volunteer to
do something to help the community solve the problems that everybody complains
about is always implicitly on the agenda.
Volunteering comes in many kinds and degrees. It may be a matter of earning merits as a member of a political
party or other organization, or of getting experience, or building a network of
contacts, any or all of which may eventually lead to paid work. Volunteering may carry privileged access to
sacks of flour and powdered milk that are sent to Venezuela by foreign aid donors. It may be involuntary volunteerism, as when
local customs require that twice a year everybody turn out to clean up the
public streets and parks. Volunteering
may be sweat equity put into building homes, which contributes to one's own
family getting a house to live in.[27] It may take the form of putting time into
organizing a local for-profit business, or cooperative, or municipal
service. It may take the form of
gleaning food left to rot in the fields because it makes no commercial sense to
pay people to harvest it (because it would not sell for a high enough price to
cover the costs) and storing it to feed hungry people in hard times.
Whatever
form it takes, volunteering often shifts the locus of control; the paymaster
controls the workers, but the volunteer coordinator can only persuade people to
do what they want to do and what makes sense to them. The efficiency of the delivery of public services increases, in
the sense that more work gets done for less money, at the same time that local
institutions acquire more cohesion and authority, and hence more power to
demand a larger share of national resources.
Thus, in many ways, people coming together can meet needs by mobilizing
resources that would not have been mobilized if people had remained isolated
from one another, waiting for someone to come to create a job for them by
making an investment.
The
physical accomplishments of MARAVEN-sponsored projects in the Orinoco Valley in
the 1980s included the installation of systems for collecting clean rainwater
from roofs, improving docks at ports on the Orinoco River, building roads,
several measures to promote local food self-sufficiency, and a series of
projects providing technical assistance for small farmers, including the
reintroduction of cotton cultivation in the area (Randall 1987: 164-66). An additional accomplishment flowed from
another consequence of de-alienating the people. When the people participate, there is greater transparency in the
use of public funds; more eyes watch those who handle them. One interesting fallout of projects
sponsored by the nationalized oil industry was public discovery of a scandal
that led to the arrest of the former head of a government-owned bank on charges
of using public funds to profit from land speculation.[28]
The social scientists from the
University of Venezuela used the Orinoco Valley experiences to elaborate, in
the unusual circumstances of Venezuela in the 1970s and 1980s, a
people-oriented theory of integrated development. They challenged the desarrollista
(developmentalist) theories that have been, on the whole, dominant in
Venezuela, and in the rest of the world (see Centro de Estudios del Desarrollo
1976).[29] The unusual circumstances were high oil
prices and an increased role for the Venezuelan state in the oil industry. In 1973, following the Arab-Israeli war, the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, of which Venezuela was a
founding member, increased the price of a barrel of oil from $1.76 to
$10.31. In 1976 the Venezuelan oil
industry was nationalized. Everybody
knew that the high oil prices would not last forever, and that some day the
wells would run dry. There was a
national consensus that it was necessary to sembrar
el petroleo (“sow the petroleum”).[30] Venezuelans considered that the windfall,
which nearly tripled the income of the Venezuelan government, ought to be used
to build a Venezuela that would be viable when the windfall ended.[31] It was in this context that CENDES
challenged the desarrollistas.
To little
avail. In spite of the efforts of its
best dissenting intellectuals, for the most part Venezuela in the 1970s and
1980s, under AD and COPEI governments, accepted the illusory theory that there
is a social process called "development," leading from the
"undeveloped" or "developing" nation-state to the
"developed" nation-state displayed by the social democracies of
Western Europe. We have already shown
the futility of this illusion, particularly in the four preceding chapters on
Sweden. Instead of people-oriented
integrated development, the oil bonanza mainly brought "heightened
competition among capitalists for access to state projects and funds and,
ultimately, for position within the entrepreneurial state" (Coronil 1997:
247).[32] The most influential technocrats were the
ones who subscribed to an orthodox developmentism. We have already shown the futility of such developmentalist and
technocratic illusions, particularly in the three proceeding chapters on
Indonesia. Quite predictably, when oil
prices fell, as everybody knew they would, the impoverished masses of Venezuela
found themselves as impoverished as ever.[33]
Today,
more than ever, in the endless slums around Caracas one sees children sniffing
glue, young men and women already accustomed to lives of crime and
prostitution, old men drinking, sick old women watching Mexican soap operas on
TV in shacks while patiently waiting for a son or daughter to bring them a
banana or a cup of weak tea. If one gazes
on such sights through the lenses now fashionable in contemporary academic
writing, one will see the resiliency and creativity of people who are able to
find ways to survive and to enjoy life under adverse circumstances. If one gazes upon the slums, instead,
through the eyes of the modernizing developmentalist theories that were in
vogue in the decades immediately after World War II, what one will see is a
problem called "lack of development" for which the solution is
"development." If, instead,
one makes the conceptual shift we are suggesting--to a philosophy of ethical
construction of social reality--one will see "alienation," for which
the solution is "de-alienation."[34]
Judging
from their fervent support for Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, the
slum-dwellers of Caracas do not agree either with current academic fashions in
the human sciences, or with desarrollismo,
or with a theory of progressive de-alienation or cultural action. They appear to want an old-fashioned
revolution in which the poor take power from the rich.
History is
repeating itself. As has happened in so
many countries, the business and political elite of Venezuela, advised by
technocrats, tried to use the resources available, in Venezuela's case the oil
windfall of the mid-1970s, to achieve a "development" that would end
poverty. They failed. When oil prices fell, the AD and COPEI
governments, which had been populist governments distributing a considerable
amount of largesse to the masses, stiffened.
They imposed the austerity measures that economic orthodoxy prescribed,
and which the IMF required.[35] In 1992, a left wing army officer,
paratrooper Hugo Chávez Frías, attempted a coup d’êtat and earned a two year
prison sentence for his pains. He
became the symbol of the demands of the masses for revolutionary change.[36]
Forming
his own party outside the traditional parties, Hugo Chávez ran for president
and was elected in December 1998. He
received 59 percent of the vote and was granted extraordinary powers.[37] The measures he took to favor the poor
spooked investors. The economy got
worse, and, consequently, so did unemployment, and, consequently, so did
crime. Business leaders called for
Chávez's resignation. It would be
contrary to the lessons of all known historical precedents to believe that the
business leaders do not have the covert support of sectors of the military and
of plotters in high places in Washington, D.C.
The press and the traditional parties, almost unanimously, have
denounced Chávez too, although some think he should be given a chance to mend
his ways before being forced to resign.
President Chávez, defiant and combative, has taken to making long
rambling speeches on Venezuelan television.
He compares himself to Chile's elected democratic socialist president
Salvador Allende. Chile's revolution
failed, Chávez says, because it was a revolution disarmed. Venezuela's revolution will succeed, because
it is a revolution armed. To drive his
point home he has the joint chiefs of staff solemnly declare in public that the
armed forces are solidly behind the elected President. To make his point even clearer, he sends
squadrons of air force jets thundering across the sky over Caracas.
He forgets
that Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina also had the solid support of the armed
forces, as did Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru.
But neither of them could withstand the corrosive power of the
constitutive rules of modern society.
Neither succeeded in mobilizing the resources of the nation to meet the
needs of its people. It is not possible
to foresee how this unfortunate confrontation will end, but it seems quite
likely that it will end in violence, loss of civil liberties, and a rightwing
government which will impose "economic rationality" by force.[38] If Venezuela had followed--if political
reality had allowed it to follow--the concepts of integrated development
elaborated at the Center for Development Studies of the University of Venezuela
in 1981, it would be facing brighter prospects in 2002.[39]
A
criticism can be made of de-alienation, from the point of view of better-known
strategies for social change, such as carrying out a revolution to seize
control of the means of production, or patiently building a welfare state by
extending government programs and citizen entitlements, on the grounds that
de-alienation is a relative newcomer, untried, with relatively little
historical experience behind it.
De-alienation can reply that it is precisely historical experience that
has shown the shortcomings of the main transformation strategies attempted so
far, and the need to make changes at the deeper level of basic cultural norms.
De-alienation
is a humanistic approach to social change.
It is roughly similar to the ideas of integrated development that
Venezuelan intellectuals have elaborated but have, so far, been unable to
implement on a large scale. It is
different from most older and better known challenges to capitalism. Most alternatives to straight capitalism
focus on either production or distribution.
The best
known challenge to capitalist economics focuses on production. Its classical statement is in Chapter 32 of
Marx's Capital, where Marx prophesies
that at some point in time "the expropriators will be
expropriated." The working class
will seize the means of production.
Experience with worker seizures of factories in Russia, Italy, and other
countries quickly taught that when workers seized and held a single isolated
factory, they could do nothing with it.
The practical version of seizure by the proletariat became identified as
nationalization of industry.
But if
alienation is the problem, then nationalizing industries is not in itself the
solution. A nationalized industry can
pursue profit maximization as the bottom line the same as a privately owned
one. As General Alfonzo Ravard, the
first President of the government-owned Venezuelan Petroleum Company, stated
during the nationalization process, the Venezuelan Petroleum Company, "has
been structured and operates as a commercial company . . . which seeks to obtain maximum economic benefit for its sole
shareholder, the Venezuelan State" (quoted in Martz and Myers 1986: 250).[40] Fortunately for the Orinoco Valley, at least
one of its operating subsidiaries, MARAVEN, took the position that nationalized
industries should serve the people's welfare by more direct means.
Similar
considerations apply if instead of nationalization, a nation fosters forms of
social ownership such as cooperatives, worker-owned enterprises, kibbutzim, ejidos, municipal corporations, and the like. Whatever the form of ownership, the
enterprise will be to a considerable extent constrained by markets to act
selfishly.[41]
The
existence of a large and varied public sector, and of social sectors composed
of cooperatives, nonprofit hospitals and schools, scientific research
foundations, artists' collectives, small family farms, and many diverse forms
of non-capitalist production, is desirable and important for many reasons. Yet it does not in itself deliver the
goods. Carrying it to its logical extreme
by eliminating private enterprises will not deliver the goods either, and will
make the situation worse instead of better.
If mobilizing resources to meet needs is the problem, then finding an
optimum mix of forms of ownership for productive enterprises is only a part of
the solution.
The second
best known challenge to straight capitalism is Western European social
democracy, of which Sweden is a good example.
Here the focus is on distribution.
The private sector is not nationalized, but it is regulated with a
series of complex carrots and sticks, whose final objective is to secure the
social use of the social product. West
European citizens enjoy a series of entitlements: free health care, free
education, free housing if they need it, guaranteed pensions. Nobody goes hungry. Large tranches of what Smith called
"value in use" are de-commodified, taken out of the market, and made
available as a matter of right to all citizens. Entitlements change distribution.
A standard
problem with entitlements is that they are similar to high wages. Indeed, they are sometimes called a
"social wage," or "fringe benefits" added to wages. Like high wages, they drive production to
other locations. A poor country
struggling to attract investments generally cannot afford to raise taxes to pay
for more entitlements. (Indeed, most
poor countries cannot even afford to enforce the tax laws, the environmental
regulations, and the other disincentives to profit-making, that are already on
the books.) Precisely because of the
struggle to attract investments, the current worldwide trend, neoliberalism, is
in the opposite direction: every day there are fewer free medical benefits and
more charges, more toll roads, more fees to use public parks, less good public
water and more need to buy bottled water from private firms, less good free
public education, more user fees to use public libraries, and so on. There is a reason for the pressures
worldwide that are behind this unfortunate trend. The reason is that social democracy did not succeed in making
changes in distribution compatible with providing adequate motivation for
production.
Subsidizing
de-alienation is neither of the above.
It changes the control of the means of production and the norms that
govern circulation (the distribution of goods and services) simultaneously,
rather than one before the other.
Ownership and the market change together. (Hence "integrated development.") It aspires to a level of reconstruction of
conventional ethical norms to which neither nationalization nor entitlement
aspires. It does not flatly deny that
Adam Smith was right when he attributed more power to self-interest than to
benevolence, but it does demonstrate--in practice and not just in theory--that
Adam Smith lacked imagination when he failed to consider all the ways in which
self-interest and benevolence can be blended.
It proposes to use rents to subsidize the dissolution of the structural
obstacles to social change.
Another
criticism of de-alienation flows from the idea of competition of capitals. It flows from Marx's own analysis of
competition of capitals, and is eagerly embraced by conservative economists
like Milton Friedman, who argue that corporations (public, private, or
parastatal) neither can nor should make grants for such things as community
development (Friedman 1962: 31-36). It
envisages a world of fierce competition, where corporations need every dime
they have to finance keeping up with new technologies and new marketing
techniques. Or else. Or else their competitors will drive them to
the wall. The typical firm cannot
afford to raise wages; it cannot afford to lower prices to consumers; it cannot
afford to make gifts to charity; it cannot afford environmental cleanup costs;
it is stifled by the taxes it already pays and cannot afford to pay more. The MARAVENs of this world, it can be
argued, are few and far between, and not sufficient to fund social
transformation.
There is
certainly a lot to be said for the argument that most firms are not free to be
socially responsible, even if they want to be.
But the argument is neither here nor there with respect to our proposal
for funding progressive de-alienation, since the proposal is not to fund from
the precarious earnings of entrepreneurs, but to fund from rents.
The economic idea of
"rents" has its classical source in the early nineteenth century
writings of David Ricardo. He defined
rent as the increased production from good land, as differentiated from
production derived from the worst land still good enough to be worth
cultivating (1965: 275). The same labor
goes into good land and bad land. Seeds
cost the same. The owner of the good
land is able to collect rent not because the farmer who farms it farms it
better, but because the land itself is better.
Generalizing: any resource--farmland, iron mines, timber, center city
real estate, petroleum deposits--yields rent.
The extra income it makes possible is due to it, not to the people using
it.
Thus the
rentier, the person or institution which lives from rents, is to a considerable
extent above the fray. Cutthroat
competition may be keeping entrepreneurs on their toes, and in constant danger
of being driven out of business, but the rentier, the owner of a resource, to a
considerable extent can continue to collect rent as entrepreneurs come and
go. Business entities can go through
bankruptcy, disappear, and be reorganized under another name; debts can be
forgiven and economic life can start over again, as in the ancient Hebrews'
years of jubilee, but still rents are collected. The rentiers can afford to be generous. The point is general. The
example above is about an oil-rich rentier named MARAVEN, a parastatal
semi-autonomous entity created by the Venezuelan state, which voluntarily
supported de-alienation. But rents can
be collected by many forms of entities: parastatal, governmental, private, or
other. Once rents are collected,
channeling them to subsidize social improvements can be voluntary or
involuntary. Much depends on which
improvements are deemed to be most worthy of being subsidized. A philosophy of de-alienation gives priority
to using subsidies to multiply the benefits of the self-help projects organized
by the poor themselves, and by the good citizen volunteers, poor or not, who want
to contribute to improving society.
Another
criticism of de-alienation is: de-alienation yes, but not yet. Karl Marx, the classic source of the idea of
alienation, is also the classic source of this argument against de-alienation. In his Critique
of the Gotha Program, he endorses agape,
the logical equivalent of de-alienation, as it is expressed in the biblical
maxim, from the Acts of the Apostles, "from each according to his ability,
to each according to his needs."
But not yet. Before de-alienation
there must come a long period in which first the bourgeoisie, and then the
proletarian state develop the productive powers of society. Marx is seconded on this point by John
Maynard Keynes, who recognizes that the vice of self-interest rules society now,
but declares that the world is not yet ready for virtue (Keynes 1926: 39-40,
50-54). Virtue must wait. When vice has done the work of making
society wealthy, then it will be time for virtue to do the work of sharing the
wealth with the poor.
A cruel joke. The so-called "development of the
wealth of society," in the absence of social democracy, in practice does
nothing for society. The
"wealth" is accumulated by private individuals, who mainly keep it in
Swiss banks, Miami real estate, and other safe places. It is a metaphysical prejudice of
economists, accustomed to think in numbers, to suppose that "wealth"
is a fungible entity, which, once it exists, can be divided and shared. In fact, accumulated automobiles, factories
for making deviled ham, dude ranches for the horsey set, and spa resorts that
feature facials with aromatherapy and full-body mud wraps, even if they are
located in Venezuela, can only with great difficulty be turned into rice,
beans, fresh vegetables, and flu vaccine to meet the needs of the poor. It is easier to plant a beanfield in the
first place than to first build a golf course, and then change it into a
beanfield years later. Perhaps in
Marx's time, when the leading industry was textile manufacturing, and when
science and engineering had hardly begun to develop the technological
capacities that today make it feasible to meet everybody's needs without
ecological damage, it might have seemed that more factories had to be built
before there would be enough cloth to go around. Today it is clear that to wait until enough wealth and productive
power is accumulated before direct action is taken to meet the needs of the
poor is not a necessary first phase. It
is a delay.
In favor of encouraging virtue now, and not later, pace Keynes, one can cite the experience of Venezuelan agriculture. By devoting enormous amounts of oil-money to agricultural improvements, Venezuela, in spite of its generally poor tropical soils, has managed to achieve increases in agricultural production just barely ahead of increases in population growth. But, frustratingly, Venezuela's dependence on food imports has grown, even though agricultural production has kept pace with population growth. The reason is that the prosperous classes have changed their eating habits, and now eat more meat. There is more grain, but it becomes feed-grain to feed animals for the rich to eat, leaving less grain for the poor to eat.[42] Alienated, accustomed to commodity exchange as a way of life, the rich consider it natural, and not to be a matter of cultural convention, that if they have enough bolivares to buy steak, it is their right and privilege to eat steak every day. If they did not feel separated from the poor, but felt a sense of unity with their poor brethren, they might reconsider. But it is not reasonable to expect that people will easily and rapidly change attitudes that they are not even aware they have. Change will require time and patience, which is a reason for starting sooner rather than later. Thus the practice of relying on vice to build the wealth of society, as Keynes