View source for Will Wilkinson, a Profile in Ideological Blindness

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Will Wilkinson, a Profile in Ideological Blindness

Wilkinson, a libertarian blogger, posted several days ago a criticism of one bit of my 3AM Magazine interview, and a couple of readers asked me to comment.  

Wilkinson begins on a silly note.  After insulting me as a "bullying ideologue" (misusing, as all these cry-babies do, the label "bullying"), he then admits that I've "treated [him] disrespectfully on a few occasions for what I assume are political reasons."  I guess his assumption is as comforting as it is baseless; the simple fact is I don't respect his intelligence (and I'm not alone), and most of his criticisms are a case in point.  They themselves are mostly not interesting, but the ideological blinders on offer are, and it is to those I will turn my attention.

Let's dispense with the confused parts of Wilkinson's criticism quickly:  (1) he's beside himself that in listing Marx's "faults" I didn't mention "the labor theory of value" and "the tendency of Marxism when applied to produce totalitarian dictatorships that have caused upward of 100 millions deaths."  The latter has nothing to do with Marx, and everyone knows the former is defunct--one reason the interviewer presumably didn't ask about it is because he'd bothered to read the paper he was asking about, whereas Wilkinson apparently couldn't be bothered (I've even blogged about this, to make it easy for lazy readers like Wilkinson!); (2) he's equally confused about immiseration, as several commenters point out (the issue is relative, not absolute); everyone knows, including most importantly Marx, that capitalist societies produce large amounts of wealth, the problem starts when technological advances replace the need for human labor power, as they have been doing in all the advanced capitalist societies for more than a generation now, with predictable effects on wealth distribution (though as I noted in the interview, Marx was wildly off on the timing); (3) that Wilkinson thinks Cohen's reconstruction of historical materialism in terms of functional explanations "was doing Marx a favor" by showing historical materialism to  be "a credible form of social-scientifc explanation" shows he has no idea what explanatory paradigms are dominant in the social sciences, what the relation is between functional and causal explanations (class conflict being the causal mechanism, even on Cohen's account!), and the kinds of explanations Marxist historians have developed utilizing class conflict as the relevant explanatory mechanism.  (Hint:  read some Robert Brenner to start).  

I'll note in passing that Wilkinson concedes the correctness of Marx's theory of ideology, though, for reasons known only to him, thinks it "vacuous."

With that out of the way, we get to a more instructive point. Wilkinson invokes Mancur Olson's seminal The Logic of Collective Action, using Russell Hardin's gloss on it to show that "class conflict" can not, in fact, be explanatory, tens of thousands of pages of historical work to the contrary notwithstanding.  There are two points at issue here, one sound, and one not.  The sound point comes in this bit from Hardin that Wilkinson quotes:

Although many scholars still elaborate and defend Marx's vision, others now reject it as failing to recognize the contrary incentives that members of the working class face. (Oddly, Marx himself arguably saw the cross-cutting -- individual vs. group -- incentives of capitalists, the other major group in his account.) This problem had long been recognized in the thesis of the embourgeoisement of the working class: Once workers prosper enough to buy homes and to benefit in other ways from the current level of economic development, they may have so much to lose from revolutionary class action that they cease to be potential revolutionaries.

Marx understood class rather narrowly, as the ownership relationship one stands in to the forces of production, but capitalism since Marx is characterized by gradations of ownership relations to the forces of production, as Hardin's nice phrase the "embourgeoisement of the working class" suggests.  But that just brings us back to the centrality of immiseration to Marx's theory, which the "dis-embourgeoisement" of a large swath of the U.S. working class over the past generation could even serve to illustrate.  But Hardin's point stands:  to the extent the material circumstances of those who sell their labor power changes, their economic interests may change as well.

That first point, however, wouldn't establish that class conflict gets no purchase as an explanation for historical events.  To get that stronger conclusion we need the much stronger claim that "collective action" and the problem of free-riders always means explanation in terms of group interest is faulty.  Here's Hardin again, as quoted by Wilkinson:

[T]he theories that Olson's argument demolished were all grounded in a fallacy of composition. We commit this fallacy whenever we suppose the characteristics of a group or set are the characteristics of the members of the group or set or vice versa. In the theories that fail Olson's test the fact that it would be in the collective interest of some group to have a particular result, even counting the costs of providing the result, is turned into the assumption that it would be in the interest of each individual in the group to bear the individual costs of contributing to the group's collective provision. If the group has an interest in contributing to provision of its good, then individual members are (sometimes wrongly) assumed to have an interest in contributing.  

As Robert Paul Wolff observed more than twenty years ago (in a 1990 essay in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy), the entire history of the world is the history of collective actions, so one might think it a reductio of any theory that it makes it puzzling how these could occur as often and robustly as they do.  But that, of course, is what the modern theory of rational choice does:  it renders the history of human societies a puzzle.  To be sure, the theory has powerful domains of application, since it correctly describes the mindset of fully acculturated members of capitalist societies, like the United States:  anyone who doesn't think in terms of their immediate advantage, and calculate accordingly, is, of course, "irrational" in America, and will be discarded accordingly.  To be fair, Hardin, unlike Wilkinson, realizes that the assumptions about rational self-interested calculation that support the "fallacy" don't always hold, but that just means we're back to having to consider the evidence for the role of class conflict in actual historical contexts.  But no evidence is on offer in Wilkinson's presentation, indeed, his earlier remarks suggest he's not even aware of the tens of thousands of pages of historical evidence on this topic.  

I give credit, however, to Wilkinson for correctly seeing that there's a real dispute between the rational choice model of group behavior and the Marxian model--this does raise an interesting issue, but it can't be resolved by waving the rational choice wand. 

Wilkinson goes down hill from there, alas.  He apparently hasn't heard that Popper hadn't understood much Marx or Freud, and he apparently hasn't even heard that historical materialism is not only falsifiable, it has been falsified when applied to particular historical episodes.  But put that to one side.  In a remarkable display of ideological blindness, Wilkinson responds to my observation that the Marxian theory of ideology (which Wilkinson had earlier endorsed!) explains why "the national media [are not] full of debates between defenders of the right of the Koch brother to keep their billions and advocates for seizing the majority of their fortune to meet human needs" by claiming that we are "having a major public debate over whether the wealthiest among us are taxed too little or too much."  Wilkinson has a funny idea of "major":  one major party is opposed to all increases in taxes on the wealth, and the other major party occasionally suggests tax rates go back to Clinton-era levels.   Where is the public debate about really radical redistribution in order to meet human needs?  There isn't one in the United States, which is obvious to anyone without Wilkinson's ideological blinders. 

Now it appears Wilkinson thinks it is "obvious" that radical redistribution is counter-productive.  His evidence--familiar to Marx (if not Castro)--namely, that capitalist societies maximize technological progress and wealth production, is inapposite for the question I raised.  My question was why when cutting or eliminating medicare and social security--programs that meet basic human needs--is widely discussed in a wealthy country like the U.S., it isn't equally common for pundits and opinion leaders to endorse radical redistribution of plutocratic wealth as an alternative?  (One could propose radical redistribution within a capitalist framework, but Wilkinson is confused about that too it appears.)  Perhaps such a proposal would be fairly rejected, but it isn't even broached in the mass media, and that fact surely requires some explanation.  Marx's theory of ideology supplies one. 

UPDATE:  Two readers point out that--as if to prove the point about the ideological limitations on public debate in the plutocracy--Andrew Sullivan, libertarian blogger and journalist, has arrived on the scene to sum up the "issue" as follows:  "Why not rob the rich?"  One wonders:  does Mr. Sullivan think the rich were being "robbed" during the Eisenhower Administration, when tax rates were astronomically higher than they are now?   Another blog, "Balloon Juice," picked up the Sullivan piece, where one commenter offered a funny, albeit slightly vulgar, gloss on Wilkinson's nonsense:   "Shorter Will Willkinson:  Tax rates that were in place forty years ago could not have been in place ever, because the world would have blown up. Actual demonstrated facts are no match for pulling wild generalizations out of your ass."

ANOTHER:  A propos our topic du jour, this chart is striking.


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