"The dichotomies of violence and ideology, of coercion and consent, of dominance and hegemony, of RSAs and ISAs litter the traditions of Marxist theory. They all reproduce the fundamental intuition of social contract theory, of modern economics, and of Weberian sociology “that power comes it two fundamental and irreducible forms,” the power to act forcibly on the body and the power to alter thoughts and act on ideas".

"Mau’s book is driven by the conviction that economic power is irreducible to this “violence/ideology couplet,” and that its distinctiveness can only be grasped once we recognize that economic power “addresses the subject only indirectly, by acting on its environment” — in particular, by reshaping “the material conditions of social reproduction.” This is a valuable insight, and Mau’s careful attention to its elaboration and to thinking about its ramifications makes his book one of the most fruitful additions to Marxist theory in recent years. Economic power is indirect, mediated power. It shapes our choices by shaping the material and social environment in which we make choices.

Cass Sunstein — “Obama’s superego” — together with his University of Chicago colleague Richard Thaler, coined the phrase “choice architecture” to intervene in this domain of indirect power as a space of deliberate government. However, as Mau rightly argues, the choice architecture of capitalist society — despite the dreams of “libertarian paternalists” like Sunstein and Thaler — is mostly produced inadvertently. Capital is not a cabal of capitalists or government officials. Nor is it a supra-individual Hegelian subject acting of its own accord. Rather, it is “an emergent property of social relations,” a “fixation” of our own social activity. We make it — but we seem incapable of unmaking it. This is the power of capital — the ability of this emergent choice architecture to reproduce itself, even in the face of organized efforts to derail or transform it''.

WILLIAM CLARE ROBERTS

on Søren Mau 

'An individual’s access to their own material conditions of existence is always mediated by social relations, which is another way of saying that it is always a political issue, and for this reason, freedom can never merely consist in the absence of the power of the community over the individual, but must also consist in the possibility on the part of individuals to participate in the political processes that shape their relationships to their conditions of existence'. 

Søren Mau

excerpt

 

AN INTERVIEW WITH

ALEX HEMINGWAY

Worker-owned firms have less wage inequality, greater job security, higher job satisfaction, stronger community ties, and greater resilience during economic downturns. The model needs to spread.

ALEX HEMINGWAY

"At its most basic, we’re talking about firms that are owned and controlled by the people who work there, rather than by a narrower set of capital owners. That can take different forms and structures. The traditional form is a worker cooperative, which is a form of collective ownership. There can be a lot of variation in how those are run.

It could be operated in a relatively flat, nonhierarchical way, or it could have a more traditional hierarchy with managers that are — and this is an important distinction — elected and recallable by the rest of the workers. So workers have more control, and they share in the value of what they produce. In this model, usually worker cooperatives are started from scratch, but they are sometimes created by the conversion of existing businesses.

The other model I’d want to highlight, which is quite an interesting one, is called an employee-ownership trust. This is a quite powerful model that allows a trust to acquire a firm on behalf of its employees. And importantly, this happens without workers paying anything out of pocket. Instead, the outgoing business owners agree to take deferred payments that come out of the firm’s profits over several years. After that, the profits begin flowing to the workers.

This is a more indirect form of worker ownership where employees will sit on the board of the trust structure. The trust is more at arm’s length from the day-to-day operations of the company, which could in theory continue operating in much the same way if that’s what the trustees decided. In practice though, you do tend to see mechanisms of day-to-day participation for workers emerge on the operational level, and that’s important to realizing the benefits of democratic employee ownership.

DAVID MOSCROP

Why aren’t these models more common in Canada?

ALEX HEMINGWAY

There are barriers to creating democratic employee-owned firms, and they come in a few categories. It’s really helpful to have clear legal structures that enable the creation of these types of firms, so we’re actually just now in Canada in the process of passing federal legislation that will create an employee-ownership trust structure in this country. So that’ll give a new option for creating employee-owned firms. And that comes with the capital-gains tax break for owners who want to sell to their employees.

Another, broader, set of barriers to employee ownership is accessing capital. Now obviously workers don’t have a lot of capital at their disposal, almost by definition. If they’re looking to start a worker cooperative together, they will often find that banks and other lenders are less familiar with democratic employee-ownership models in Canada because we don’t have many of them. And that can lead to challenges in accessing loan financing. We need policy interventions to deal with that.

There are also collective action problems that arise when you’re trying to create a worker cooperative from scratch. Starting any business is challenging, and it normally requires a lot of legwork by a relatively small set of individuals at the outset. So employee-owned firms don’t offer a ready way to compensate for that start-up work and the risk inherent in it.

Entrepreneurs have an incentive to structure their businesses as a conventional investor-owned business. One way around that collective action challenge is to convert existing businesses to employee ownership rather than starting them from scratch. But another is to have institutions that can help support and incubate new democratic employee-owned firms. And that’s what we see in jurisdictions where these models have been particularly successful. You have sectoral organizations, you have business services companies that are already set up to assist employee-owned firms and worker cooperatives, and that makes getting them off the ground a lot easier. And you also have public capital being put to work — patient capital — to enable the start-up of these types of firms from a financial perspective.

Worker Ownership Is Good for Everyone

DAVID MOSCROP

Once a business is stood up as a worker-owned and -controlled enterprise, there seemed to be two categories of goods that emerge. One is economic goods for both the worker and society at large, and the second is the inherent value of democratic control over your workplace. What do these goods look like in practice?

ALEX HEMINGWAY

What we see is that employee-owned firms lead to less inequality in terms of wages, greater job security within those firms, and higher pay for the workers since they’re sharing in the profits.

If you look at the polling in the United States, three-quarters of people say they prefer to work in an employee-owned firm — and that preference crosses party lines.

We also see employee-owned firms having more resilience during economic downturns. It tends to be the case that workers get together and try to avoid layoffs. In those situations, they might decide that everyone’s going to temporarily reduce their hours and pay to weather the storm. So there’s that resilience factor. Also, when you have employee-owned firms that are more anchored in the community, the owners are by definition part of that community and more committed to the broader community interests.

We see more job satisfaction, not surprisingly, in employee-owned firms; it turns out that being alienated from your labor in the Marxian sense isn’t such a good thing for job satisfaction. Workers like having some control over their daily lives rather than being at the whims of a boss who’s not accountable. And they’d rather be paid full value for their work. So, not surprisingly, if you look at the polling in the United States, three-quarters of people say they prefer to work in an employee-owned firm — and that preference crosses party lines.

Economic research also shows that employee firms are equally or more productive than conventional firms once you’ve got them stood up. And again, that makes sense when you think about the motivation for workers to contribute to a firm that’s truly their own''.

Jacobin

 

“The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.”

Marshall Sahlins

 

 

 

“Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means “making-with.” Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing. In the words of the Inupiat computer “world game,” earthlings are never alone. That is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company” .

Donna Haraway

Segall

''You point out, with Schelling, that consciousness cannot self-ground. Reflective self-consciousness, let's say, cannot ground itself. This is because, as Schelling points out, egoic consciousness is a consequence of a process which precedes it. His whole inquiry, like in The Ages of the World and in other texts, is asking: what is the antecedent of this reflective consciousness that makes us feel separate from the world and even from our own souls?

Kant begins with consciousness reflecting on itself and the appearances of objects to it—the thing in itself is unknown, but it's appearing to us nonetheless, taking the determinate form that our understanding and intuition allows it to. And so, it's as if in Kant’s transcendental philosophy, conscious self-reflection begins downstream, turned away from the source of the stream, and tries to figure out how its split nature—ego and world—might fit together. But it ends up only being able to construct an apparent world, not a real world. So, Schelling goes back to Kant and says, "Wait a minute. Nature—real Nature—is not even available to you. Nature as a creative living process can't even occur to you, because you won't look back to the origins of your own consciousness. You're thinking of consciousness as the origin. It's not."

But how do we go back? This is Schelling's discovery. He initially begins like Fichte, and then, later, in a way like Hegel, trying to go back logically in a negative philosophical way. But then he comes to realize, with his philosophy of mythology, that human consciousness is a product of myth. And so myth becomes our portal back into this preconscious experience before reflection severed us from reality. And it turns out that that mythic experience is our own human participation in the way that nature created itself. The cosmogonic powers manifest to our humanness as mythic powers, gods and goddesses, and these mythic powers created our consciousness over the course of history''.

Matt Segall

"Mutual Aid is a collective coordination to meet each other's needs,

it's based on an ethos of direct action and a shared understanding that the
conditions we are currently living in ain't it. This not the same as charity work

which is a sneaky little invention where elites provide aid for problems that they're
responsible for and we thank them by promising to stay poor forever, anything
for the team. I'm sorry if I'm the first person to break this to you but charities are

never going to be able to fix the underlying issues of the causes they promote and
I'm not going to say that that's entirely their fault but it's not
something that they can really help, it's baked into their model. It's because the
charity model perpetuates a dynamic of dependency where poor people rely on
external aid from upper class people who then don't address the root of the
challenges the poor people are facing. You know it's kind of funny how rich
people solutions to global poverty always seem to involve managing the poor
and never redistributing the wealth, shocker. In contrast
Mutual Aid emphasizes empowering communities to support each other
directly fostering self-reliance and autonomy, this can create a domino effect''.

COLORMIND

MATTHIES-BOON

 

Breaking Intersubjectivity

VIVIENNE MATTHIES-BOON

Trauma is commonly understood as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Yet, as this book explains, the concept of PTSD is problematic because it is rooted in a solipsist Philosophy of the Subject. Within such a philosophical perspective, it is not only impossible to account for trauma’s causality, but the traumatic ‘event’ is also prioritised over traumatic social and political structures as trauma is depoliticised as an (individual) internal cognitive object.

Rooted in Frankfurt School critical theory, this book thus urges us to rethink the concept of trauma: trauma should not be understood as impaired subjectivity but rather as broken intersubjectivity. Hence, it not only presents a critique of the notion ‘PTSD’, but – drawing on the philosophies of Jurgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Rahel Jaeggi and Heideggerian trauma theory in particular - it argues that trauma entails the violent imposition of traumatic status subordination. In traumatic status subordination, intersubjective parity (the counterfactual presupposition of being treated as an equal human being) is so violently betrayed that the symbolic realm of the lifeworld collapses. As the lifeworld collapses, one suffers an atomized state of speechless disorientation, wherein the potential of creative collective becoming is destroyed. In this sense, human induced trauma should thus be understood as a political tool par excellence.

As this monograph indicates, traumatic status subordination was a tool which the Egyptian counter-revolutionary actors (consisting of the Egyptian military, and its temporary subsidiary the Muslim Brotherhood) used unsparingly as they attempted to put the revolutionary genie back into the bottle. Importantly, the Egyptian military not only sought to destroy the object of revolutionary politics, but rather the underlying existential structures of the possibility of its very existence as such. And thus, in the violent instrumental pursuit of economic and political power, the counter-revolution inflicted multileveled status subordination. It did so through a consistent tripartite structural mechanism: the infliction of grave (deadly) violence, the procedural colonisation and repressive juridification of the public sphere, and the acceleration of neoliberal economic rationalism. This not only accumulated in Sisi’s prisonification of society and his politics of death, but rather also threw activists ever deeper into an atomized state of demoralized silence as it destroyed the very potential of revolutionary and transformative becoming'.

Wilde

The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.

There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.

Oscar Wilde

“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.  The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice. Being first virtues of human activities, truth and justice are uncompromising.”

Rawls

Bruenig

It is on this point that I think John Rawls’ taxonomy of political economic systems can help to clarify what democratic socialism is about. In his book Justice as Fairness, Rawls discusses five political economic systems. They are as follows:

1. Laissez-faire capitalism. This is what we might think of as libertarianism. It makes no effort to hold down inequality in wealth or income and, as such, makes no provision for genuinely equal electoral systems (in Rawls’ view).
2. Welfare-state capitalism. This system has potentially quite generous welfare systems that “guarantee a decent social minimum covering the basic needs” but nevertheless “permits very large inequalities in the ownership of real property (productive assets and natural resources).”
   

3. State socialism. This is your typical “command economy” system with an authoritarian one-party regime.
   

4. Property-owning democracy. This system features private ownership of production, but that private ownership is very dispersed. I read this as being basically similar to distributism and mutualism. One could also read this as being kind of in the spirit of what people who are really into antitrust are in favor of (whether they actually could achieve it is another matter).
5. Liberal or democratic socialism. In this system, the means of production are owned by society, but planning is done in a more dispersed way by the multitude of socialist firms. This system respects basic liberal rights and features democratic elections. Rawls himself has in mind a market socialist order, but you might be able to imagine non-market socialist forms that fit this general category as well.

Rawls believed only property-owning democracy and liberal/democratic socialism satisfy his particular egalitarian philosophy.

Matt Bruenig

Rawls

Welfare state capitalism also rejects the fair value of the political liberties, and while it has some concern for equality of opportunity, the policies necessary to achieve that are not followed. It permits very large inequalities in the ownership of real property (productive assets and natural resources) so that the control of the economy and much of political life rests in few hands. And although, as the name ‘welfare-state capitalism’ suggest, welfare provisions may be quite generous and guarantee a decent social minimum covering the basic needs, a principle of reciprocity to regulate economic and social inequalities is not recognized.

John Rawls, Justice as Fairness; A Restatement 

McManus

Rawls points out that in fact most of the reasons people fall ahead or behind have little, if anything, to do with our individual merits. They are “morally arbitrary” at best, and we could even go further and suggest the project of overt historical prejudice and tyranny at worst. Firstly, many people are initially disadvantaged by the arbitrary distribution of “natural talents” that results from a genetic lottery. Some are born with serious physical disabilities, while others are born with a predisposition for athletic excellence. Secondly, people may endure serious trials growing up within difficult social circumstances which inhibit their life prospects. These can range from having an inferior diet and education, to living in sub-par housing or even having parents unable or unwilling to read to them. 

Later in life, it is no coincidence that more students at Ivy League institutions come from the top 1 per cent than the bottom 60. And thirdly, even if we have natural talents we had the social opportunities to develop, being able to profit from those depends a great deal on them being valued by society. If I happen to have a genetic gift for playing hockey and practice 50 hours a week, that will only turn out to profit me if I happen to be born in Canada rather than South Sudan. Taken all together, the moral arbitrariness and historically determined injustices affecting marginalized groups gives the lie to the possessive individualist account of merit in a market society. 

Not only is a meritocracy morally undesirable, it could never even exist given the enduring reality of moral arbitrariness. Consequently Rawls thinks it is long past time we abandon it as another quaint mythology, rather like the Medieval notion that God appointed lords and kings to their place because they happened to be more righteous and effective. Instead of asking what do unequal people deserve, we should ask what it required for those whose lives are just as real as our own to thrive? Critics like Thomas Sowell contend that this is fanciful; a yearning for the state to achieve a kind of “cosmic justice” between fundamentally unequal people. Rawls’ counter claim is that inequality is indeed both natural and socially prevalent. These are simply the facts of our world today. But what makes a society just or unjust aren’t the stark realities it faces, but how it deals with them:

We may reject the contention that the ordering of institutions is always defective because the distribution of natural talents and the contingencies of social circumstance are unjust, and this injustice must inevitably carry over to human arrangements. Occasionally this reflection is offered as an excuse for ignoring injustice, as if the refusal to acquiesce in injustice is on a par with being unable to accept death. The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts. Aristocratic and caste societies are unjust because they make these contingencies the ascriptive basis for belonging to more or less enclosed and privileged social classes. The basic structure of these societies incorporates the arbitrariness found in nature. But there is no necessity for men to resign themselves to these contingencies. The social system is not an unchangeable order beyond human control but a pattern of human action.

In Justice as Fairness Rawls doubles down on the egalitarian dimensions of this argument, by adding a further and intriguing twist. He argues that not only would possessive individualist classical liberalism and even welfarism be inadequate in how much attention they paid to the last well off. They would be politically illegitimate since a concentration of property in the hands of a wealthy elite would have the effect of ensuring political and economic power rests largely in their hands. This would result in the state ultimately working in their interest first and foremost, rather than for all. Let alone the least well off, who would have very little political and economic power given their situation at the bottom of an unjust social hierarchy. They would not enjoy “fair value” from their “equal” political liberties, since in reality some people’s “liberties” would matter a great deal more than others. 

Matt McManus

“But is the spirit of the people an infallible, a permanent reliance? Is it government? Is this the kind of protection we receive in return for the rights we give up? Besides, the spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.”

Jefferson

"But the worst and final form of alienation, toward which indeed the others tend, is man's alienation from his own self. In a society that requires of man only that he perform competently his own particular social function, man becomes identified with this function, and the rest of his being is allowed to subsist as best it can - usually to be dropped below the surface of consciousness and forgotten."

William Barrett

Rawls

3.1 Legitimacy: The Liberal Principle of Legitimacy

In a democracy political power is always the power of the people as a collective body. In light of the diversity within a democracy, what would it mean for citizens legitimately to exercise coercive political power over one another? Rawls’s test for the acceptable use of political power in a democracy is his liberal principle of legitimacy:

Our exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to their common human reason (PL, 137).

According to this principle, political power may only be used in ways that all citizens can reasonably be expected to endorse. The use of political power must fulfill a criterion of reciprocity: citizens must reasonably believe that all citizens can reasonably accept the enforcement of a particular set of basic laws. Those coerced by law must be able to endorse the society’s fundamental political arrangements freely, not because they are dominated or manipulated or kept uninformed.

The liberal principle of legitimacy intensifies the challenge of legitimacy: how can any particular set of basic laws legitimately be imposed upon a pluralistic citizenry? What constitution could all citizens reasonably be expected to endorse? Rawls’s answer to this challenge begins by explaining what it means for citizens to be reasonable.

3.2 Reasonable Citizens

Reasonable citizens want to live in a society in which they can cooperate with their fellow citizens on terms that are acceptable to all. They are willing to propose and abide by mutually acceptable rules, given the assurance that others will also do so. They will also honor these rules, even when this means sacrificing their own particular interests. Reasonable citizens want, in short, to belong to a society where political power is legitimately used.

Each reasonable citizen has her own view about God and life, right and wrong, good and bad. Each has, that is, what Rawls calls her own comprehensive doctrine. Yet because reasonable citizens are reasonable, they are unwilling to impose their own comprehensive doctrines on others who are also willing to search for mutually agreeable rules. Though each citizen may believe that she knows the truth about the best way to live, none is willing to force other reasonable citizens to live according to her beliefs, even if she belongs to a majority that has the power to enforce those beliefs on everyone. After all, Rawls says mentioning the Inquisition, oppressive use of state power will be necessary to unite a society around any comprehensive doctrine, including the comprehensive liberalism of Kant or Mill (PL, 37).

One reason that reasonable citizens are so tolerant, Rawls says, is that they accept a certain explanation for the diversity of worldviews in their society. Reasonable citizens accept the burdens of judgment. The deepest questions of religion, philosophy, and morality are very difficult to think through. Even conscientious people will answer these questions in different ways, because of their particular life experiences (their upbringing, class, occupation, and so on). Reasonable citizens understand that these deep issues are ones on which people of good will can disagree, and so will be unwilling to impose their own worldviews on those who have reached conclusions different than their own.

3.3 Reasonable Pluralism and the Public Political Culture

Rawls’s account of the reasonable citizen highlights his view of human nature. Humans are not irredeemably self-centered, dogmatic, or driven by what Hobbes called, “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power” (1651, 58). Humans have at least the capacity for genuine toleration and mutual respect.

This human capacity raises the hope that the diversity of worldviews in a democratic society may represent not merely pluralism, but reasonable pluralism. Rawls hopes, that is, that the religious, moral, and philosophical doctrines that citizens accept will themselves endorse toleration and accept the essentials of a democratic regime. In the religious sphere, for example, a reasonable pluralism might contain a reasonable Catholicism, a reasonable interpretation of Islam, a reasonable atheism, and so on. Being reasonable, none of these doctrines will advocate the use of coercive political power to impose religious conformity on citizens with different beliefs.

The possibility of reasonable pluralism softens but does not solve the challenge of legitimacy: how one law can legitimately be imposed on diverse citizens. For even in a society of reasonable pluralism, it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to endorse, say, a reasonable Catholicism as the basis for a constitutional settlement. Reasonable Muslims or atheists cannot be expected to endorse Catholicism as setting the basic terms for social life. Nor, of course, can Catholics be expected to accept Islam or atheism as the fundamental basis of law. No comprehensive doctrine can be accepted by all reasonable citizens, and so no comprehensive doctrine can serve as the basis for the legitimate use of coercive political power.

Yet where else then to turn to find the ideas that will define society’s most basic laws, which all citizens will be required to obey? For Rawls, there is only one source of fundamental ideas that can serve as a focal point for all reasonable citizens of a liberal society. This is the society’s public political culture.

Since justification is addressed to others, it proceeds from what is, or can be, held in common; and so we begin from shared fundamental ideas implicit in the public political culture in the hope of developing from them a political conception that can gain free and reasoned agreement in judgment (PL, 100–01).

The public political culture of a democratic society, Rawls says, “comprises the political institutions of a constitutional regime and the public traditions of their interpretation (including those of the judiciary), as well as historic texts and documents that are common knowledge” (PL, 13–14). Rawls looks to fundamental ideas implicit, for example, in the constitution’s list of individual rights, in the design of the society’s government, and in the historic decisions of important courts. These fundamental ideas from the public political culture can be crafted into a shared political conception of justice.

3.4 Political Conceptions of Justice

Rawls’s solution to the challenge of legitimacy in a liberal society is for political power to be exercised in accordance with a political conception of justice. A political conception of justice is an interpretation of the fundamental ideas implicit in that society’s public political culture.

A political conception is not derived from any particular comprehensive doctrine, nor is it a compromise among the worldviews that happen to exist in society at the moment. Rather, a political conception is freestanding: its content is set out independently of the comprehensive doctrines that citizens affirm. Reasonable citizens, who want to cooperate with one another on mutually acceptable terms, will see that a freestanding political conception generated from ideas in the public political culture is the only basis for cooperation that all citizens can reasonably be expected to endorse. The use of coercive political power guided by the principles of a political conception of justice will therefore be legitimate.

The three most fundamental ideas that Rawls finds in the public political culture of a democratic society are that citizens are free and equal, and that society should be a fair system of cooperation. All liberal political conceptions of justice will therefore be centered on interpretations of these three fundamental ideas.

Because there are many reasonable interpretations of “free,” “equal” and “fair,” there will be many liberal political conceptions of justice. Since all the members of this family interpret the same three fundamental ideas, however, all liberal political conceptions of justice will share certain basic features:

1. A liberal political conception of justice will ascribe to all citizens familiar individual rights and liberties, such as rights of free expression, liberty of conscience, and free choice of occupation;
2. A political conception will give special priority to these rights and liberties, especially over demands to further the general good (e.g., to increase national wealth) or perfectionist values (e.g., to promote a particular view of human flourishing);
3. A political conception will assure for all citizens sufficient all-purpose means to make effective use of their freedoms.

These abstract features must, Rawls says, be realized in certain kinds of institutions. He mentions several demands that all liberal conceptions of justice will make on institutions: a decent distribution of income and wealth; fair opportunities for all citizens, especially in education and training; government as the employer of last resort; basic health care for all citizens; and public financing of elections.

The use of political power in a liberal society will be legitimate if it is employed in accordance with the principles of any liberal conception of justice. By Rawls’s criteria, a libertarian conception of justice (such as Nozick’s in Anarchy, State, and Utopia) is not a liberal political conception of justice. Libertarianism does not assure all citizens sufficient means to make use of their basic liberties, and it permits excessive inequalities of wealth and power. By contrast, Rawls’s own conception of justice (justice as fairness) does qualify as a member of the family of liberal political conceptions of justice.

SEoP

Deuber-Mankowsky

 Agamben follows Carl Schmitt in his definition of the sovereign act; as already indicated, however, he adds to the combination of appropriation, distribution, and production —wherein Schmitt saw the function of the nomos as mediating between the state, the judiciary and the economy— the creation of a state of exception, which would take place simultaneously to the establishment of the legal order. This allows Agamben to shift Schmitt’s focus from the State to the camp. For the exception materializes in spaces that stand outside the law, as he points out in his interpretation of the ban as the original act of the sovereign. On the other hand, these spaces assume different forms in the course of Western history. They change in parallel to the relation in which “bare life” stands to the sovereign or the exceptional case stands to the rule. Now, according to Agamben, it is decisive for modernity that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life —which is originally situated at very space in which the juridico-political order can have validity. In this sense, the sovereign exception is the fundamental localization (Ortung), which does not limit itself to distinguishing what is outside and inside, the normal situation and chaos, enter into those complex topological relations that make the validity of the juridical order possible”. 3 Cf. For different ways of conceiving of the law, see Bär and Deuber-Mankowsky, “Wie viel Glaube ist im Staat? Ein transdisziplinärer Austausch zwischen Kultur- und Rechtswissenschaft”: 89-111. Acta Poetica 361, 2015, pp. 49-69 59 the margins of the political order— gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction (9). The conclusion is that sovereignty —whose original function of decision consists in the discrimination between “bare life” and the political, zoe and bios, or more simply, nature and culture— switches from the State to the camp. Agamben interprets the camp as the territorialization of the exception. This explains the claim that the camp is the nomos of modernity. It is, of course, assumed that one shares Agamben’s diagnosis according to which the exception increasingly becomes the rule; only then is one in a position to grasp the whole scope of Agamben’s apocalyptic vision. Behind the evocation of a “biopolitical catastrophe” hides the same anxiety which drove Schmitt to defend the state of order —the fear of the intermingling of nature and culture, death and life, the fear of anarchy and chaos. The elevation of the camp to the matrix of modernity rests upon the thin basis of Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of justice as nomos and the claimed nexus of justice, order and territory. The additional interpretation of the sovereign act as the original political relation of the ban, opens up a narrow range of combinatory possibilities out of which Agamben delineates the history of the West. This history follows the logic of violence inscribed in the ban and is correspondingly a history of decline.4 4 The first possibility consists in the success of the state of indifference which accompanies the exception through the differentiation of inside and outside and private and public (in Hannah Arendt’s sense). This is the case in the Greek polis, in which, according to Agamben, a differentiation was made between the domain of the oikos as the domain of zoe, appearing here as “bare life”, and that of the polis as the domain of political life. “In the classical world, however, simple natural life is excluded from the polis in the strict sense, and remains confined —as merely reproductive life— to the sphere of the oikos” (Agamben 1995: 2). Agamben refers to Aristotle’s differentiation of the “oikonomos (the head of an estate) and the despotes (the head of the family), both of whom are concerned with the reproduction and the subsistence of life (2) from the politicians, who are concerned with the political. The contribution of women to the preservation of life is not taken into account, and the question of a possible overlap of gender differences with the differentiation of nature and culture is ignored. In modernity, the “taking-of-land” in the “exception” [Ausnahme], quite literally, is materialized in the establishment of camps. With this, Agamben also claims, the exception becomes the rule. The modern is characterized by the unmediated elevation of political space above that of bare life. I quote from Homo Sacer: One of the theses of the present inquiry is that in our age, the state of exception comes more and more to the foreground as the fundamental political structure and ultimately begins to become the rule. When our age tried to grant the un-localizable a permanent and visible localization, the result was the concentration camp. The camp —and not the prison— is the space that corresponds to this originary structure of the nomos (20). In this perpetual state of exception, we are all, according to Agamben, virtual “homines sacri” (115), all potential Jewesses and Jews, whom the author designates as “the representatives par excellence and almost the living symbol of the people and of the bare life that modernity necessarily creates within itself, but whose presence it can no longer tolerate in any way” (179). The second possibility is that the differentiation is not wholly successful and that a zone comes into being in which this indistinguishability is materialized. This is the case in the constitution of the so-called “homo sacer”. Homo sacer is the abbreviated formulation for a much-discussed and variously interpreted sentence from archaic Roman law. In the law of Twelve Tables (8, 21), he who as patron deceives his clients is declared to be sacer, outlawed, without peace. Agamben bases his interpretation of homo sacer on Pompeius Festus’ lexicon, according to which homo sacer is a man who is condemned for a crime and killed but may not be sacrificed. The homo sacer is, in a sense, free game. Agamben equates him with the condemned and interprets him as the representative, the embodiment, of “bare life”, of the bare life released in the sovereign act of constituting the law. This historical phase begins with archaic Roman law and lasts until institution of the Habeas Corpus Act in 1679. This act allowed anyone under arrest to bring his case before the court within three days. The goal was to limit arbitrary arrests. Literally, it means that everyone who holds someone under arrest is required personally to bring the arrested party before the court within three days. For Agamben, with this legal formulation, which is focused on physical presence, the body becomes a political subject. The role of representing bare life is transferred to this body, and with this, according to Agamben, begins the last phase of Western history. Acta Poetica 361, 2015, pp. 49-69 61 Once again, this passage clearly shows how the thinking of the state of exception functions and where it leads. The orientation around the extreme promises the highest concreteness but leads to empty abstraction, as the sweeping generalization that we are all potentially homines sacri makes clear. As such, it is not only an affront to the concrete sufferings of the victims and their relatives. It does not only level out the differences between victims and perpetrators, between witnesses and those born afterwards. It also effaces existing and —through the implementation of globalization— increasing class differences between rich and poor, north and south, between those who fulfill and those who deviate from the norm. It is as if Agamben were playing into Foucault’s hands, for Foucault criticises the concentration on the theory of sovereignty precisely on the grounds that through an ideology of a fictive unity of power, it renders invisible actual relations of domination and difference, as well as the perpetual struggles for power. Both the category of the state of exception as well as the concentration on the camp as the “taking of land of the exception” refer back to the origin of Agamben’s theory in Carl Schmitt’s doctrine of sovereignty and his concept of the nomos. Finally, he is Schmittian in his interpretation of the collapse of inner and outer as the irruption of a catastrophe, a catastrophe Schmitt compares to the coming of the Antichrist. Thus, according to Agamben, the catastrophe of modernity is the consequence of the dissolution of the distinction between political existence (bios) and bare life (zoe), in so far as bare life, rather than being differentiated from the political, becomes the foundation of the political in the camp. While, for Schmitt, the distinction between friend and enemy represents a necessary category for the construction of the political, Agamben replaces these categories —in explicit analogy to Schmitt— with the distinction between “bare life” and “political existence” (8). Of course, Agamben aims to expose the violence characteristic of, and essential to, the Western politico-juridical model of power from its beginnings. He traps himself, however, in a circle of violence, culminating in the story of decline presented here, by ontologizing and thereby dehistoricizing it. The Critique of Michel Foucault By focussing on Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, Agamben claims to re-introduce questions of legal theory into the discussion of biopolitics. Precisely this legal theoretical aspect is supposedly neglected by Foucault in his concentration on a dynamical model of power. Does, however, Agamben’s reconnection of biopolitics to sovereign authority in fact represent a correction to Foucault’s limitation of sovereignty and biopower? I would like to close by pursuing this question. Agamben first reproaches Foucault for having failed to find a link between his investigations of the “techniques of the self” and the political strategies of biopower (5f). Then he reproaches him for neglecting to provide an analysis of modern totalitarianism and the concentration camp (119). Agamben seeks to address both points with his reformulation of biopolitics. However, he reduces the complex and far-reaching first question of how the intermingling of the techniques of the self may be thought along with the processes of the totalization of power, to the sole aspect controlling his own epistemological interest: how the biopolitical model of power interferes with the juridico-institutional model of power. Thus power is no longer thought of as a complex relation of forces, as in Foucault, but appears as the formation of two blocks. This has as a consequence, first, that the whole complex of struggles, and with it the question of oppositional movements, remains unthought. Second, Agamben omits precisely the interest in epistemology which had guided Foucault in his research on the techniques of the self: the question of how, in view of the disciplining and subjugation of the subject, to explain the development of an art of critique. His answer to the question of how the biopolitical model of power interferes with the juridico-institutional one is simple: there is no difference between sovereign authority and biopower, for the biopolitical body is nothing other than the production and therefore the original activity of sovereign power itself. Thus he arrives at the statement that biopolitics has always been an integral aspect of sovereign authority and therefore just as ancient as the sovereign state of exception itself. The modern state consequently represents nothing new, but in making Acta Poetica 361, 2015, pp. 49-69 63 biological life the center of its calculations, it merely brings to light the secret tie that always already binds power to bare life (6). Thus, the modern state is tied to the immemorial of the “arcana imperii” according to Agamben’s law of a “tenacious correspondence between the modern and the archaic, which one encounters in the most diverse spheres” (6). In fact, Agamben’s reformulation of the concepts of sovereign authority and biopolitics results not only in a monolithic, static model of power but also in a similar move that blocks any view of the historically efficacious forces of resistance. By bowing down before the sovereign authority to which he attributes, as the “supreme power”, the “capacity to constitute oneself and others as life that may be killed but not sacrificed” (101), Agamben reinstalls the ominously remaining sovereign as the solitary actor and motor of history. Unlike Agamben, Foucault conceives of power as a relation of forces and thinks of it from the bottom up. For Foucault, it is a matter of encouraging the sort of knowledge he calls buried or subjugated (2003a: 8). Accordingly, he grants the highest importance to the requirement not to read into history what one already knew beforehand. The buried historical knowledge he sought to unearth concerned the historical knowledge of struggles, precisely the knowledge a monolithic model of power relegates to the darkness of forgetting. It obstructs a view of the actual and possible historical forms of resistance. Starting with the Enlightenment conceived of as a relation of forces, Foucault develops in his late work the possibility of an ethics in the form of an “aesthetic of existence”. He links this with the answer he gave in a 1977 lecture to the self-posed question “what is critique?” Critique is, as he formulated it in 1977, an attitude and, as such, a virtue; according to the now famous general characterization, critique is: “the art of not being governed” (2003a: 265). Foucault locates the “core” of this art of critique, which he equates with the art of self-legislation, in three places: First, the Bible: emerging out of the question of how to interpret the Holy Text, and whether in general the Bible corresponds to the truth. Second, the juridical: arising from the impulse to no longer accept existing laws because one senses that they are unjust. Agamben as Master Thinker Third, the epistemological: the development of the sciences led to the renunciation of obedience to an authority that determined what was true and what was untrue. From this tripartite origin of critique, Foucault describes the “core of critique” as the “the bundle of relationships that are tied to one another, or one to the two others, power, truth and the subject”. Critique therefore questions the “truth on its effects of power and questions power on its discourses of truth” and now allows itself to be specified as “the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability” (266). It is no accident that Foucault approaches the question of resistance via the language of law. The art of “self-legislation” is another word for autonomy —giving law to oneself—. Now, for Foucault, the investigation of the techniques of the self is connected to the question of the conditions that would give the most space to the art of critique. Techniques of the self are therefore not only techniques of subjugation but mean every form of creating a relation of the self to itself. Also belonging to this is the form that Foucault, in one of his last lectures from 1983-1984, calls the parrhesiastic relationship of the subject with himself (Foucault 2001: 13). Parrhesia may be translated as “speaking freely” but also as “speaking truly”. It designates a relation of the subject that speaks with itself. And it does this in such a way that the subject binds itself both to the enunciation and to the enunciating itself. In this “parrhesiastic enunciation”, Foucault discovers a technique of the self which can be regarded as the condition of possibility of critique. Through the double relation contained in the parrhesiastic utterance, the subject enters into a binding relation with himself and, as such, practices the art of critique: In parrhesia the speaker emphasizes the fact that he is both the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciandum – that he himself is the subject of the opinion to which he refers. The specific ‘speech activity’, of the parrhesiastic enunciation thus takes the form: ‘I am the one who thinks this and that’ ... the commitment involved in parrhesia is linked ...to the fact that the parrhesiastes says something which is dangerous to himself and thus involves a risk (13). Acta Poetica 361, 2015, pp. 49-69 65 Through this double relationship, the subject enters into a binding relation to that which he has enunciated as truth. This relation enables him to be released from the authority of the accepted form of justice and to contradict an authority felt to be untrue and thus unjust. The parrhesiastic utterance, which Foucault explicitly distinguishes from the performative utterance, is taken as a point of departure for the art of self-legislation. The risks indicated, which the subject takes upon himself, extend to the penalty of death. In the passage cited, Foucault introduces as an example, the subject who “rises up against the tyrant and speaks the truth under the eyes of the whole courtly state”. Hannah Arendt poses the question underlying Foucault’s investigations concerning the techniques of the self, though in another terminology, in her essay Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship (cf. Arendt). In this essay, Arendt refers to the question of the (absent) resistance to National Socialism. Arendt objects that one should not question why so many cooperated but rather why some did not cooperate, thereby incurring the risk of all sorts of consequences. The discovery and determination of these traces of an “art of not being governed” presupposes a form of thought which neither understands history as mono-causal nor power as monolithic. It is a form of thought that understands itself rather as a historical, philosophical praxis and as such “a practice of the self ”, and in this sense as a “technique of the self” (Foucault 1985: 13).

Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky

"How, then, does Foucault describe the relation of biopower and sovereign authority, and which consequences does he draw for a possible explanation of National Socialism? In contrast to Agamben, Foucault understands biopower decisively as an historical phenomenon. Its emergence is tied to the development of the modern sciences. If one divorces the concept of biopolitics or biopower from the development of statistics, modern medicine, biology, evolutionary theory, and the interpenetration of the apparatuses of knowledge with the institutions of the state, it then becomes an empty concept. As opposed to Agamben, who seeks to ground politics philosophically, Foucault conceives of politics as the relationship between power, truth, and the subject. Thus he does not understand truth as a transhistorical phenomenon but as the effect of concrete historical techniques linked to the history of the sciences. Unlike Agamben, Foucault does not reason from philosophy but from epistemology. From this perspective, one of Agamben’s central claims appears to be pure speculation. That is the claim that the modern state is nothing new, but the fact that it places biopolitical life at the center of its calculations only reveals the secret bind which has always already linked power and “bare life”. For “life itself ”, just as much as biopower, does not exist before the politics of the population. Biopolitics is based on the “societal body” developed in the 19th century, which is itself an effect of the apparatus of knowledge that developed alongside the modern sciences. Thus, as early as The Order of Things, which appeared in 1966, Foucault emphasizes that the concept of life in itself, or bare life, is the product of a science which has only existed for the past 150 years: Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do not realize that biology did not exist then (...). And that, if biology was unknown, there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself did not exist. All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history (Foucault 1973: 129f). In his analysis of totalitarianism presented at the close of his lectures at the Collège de France in 1975/6,5 Foucault starts from the question of how it is possible that a political authority can exercise the function of death if it is true that disciplinary and regulatory bio-power always seeks more power for itself. In other words, how is it to be explained that under the dominance of a biopower whose function consists in the optimization of life, not only millions of people but whole peoples were murdered? 5 This concerns the lecture delivered on March 17, 1976 (Foucault 2003b: 239-264). Acta Poetica 361, 2015, pp. 49-69 67 The link between sovereign authority and biopower is, as Foucault convincingly shows, not the sovereign but state racism. “In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable” (Foucault 2003b: 256). Out of this results the analysis of totalitarianism: first, that it is only explicable under the condition that biopower and the power of sovereignty are understood as distinctive forms of power. That, second, biopower is conceived of as a recent historical form of power linked to the development of the modern scientific apparatus. That, third, this power has as its aim the optimization of life, where life is related in this context to the “social body” or race. And that, fourth, the power of sovereignty did not abdicate, but rather, in the course of these modifications, changed itself by bringing forth state racism in order to continue to exercise its function. Thus, totalitarianism can only be understood with recourse to racism. Summarizing, Foucault describes the National Socialist State as follows: The Nazi State makes the field of the life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people. There was, in Nazism, a coincidence between a generalized biopower and a dictatorship that was at once absolute and retransmitted throughout the entire social body by this fantastic extension of the right to kill and of exposure to death. We have an absolutely racist State, an absolutely murderous State, and an absolutely suicidal State. A racist State, a murderous State, and a suicidal State. The three were necessarily superimposed, and the result was of course both the “final solution” (or the attempt to eliminate, by eliminating the Jews, all the other races of which the Jews were both the symbol and the manifestation) of the years 1942-1943, and then Telegram 71, in which, in April 1945, Hitler gave the order to destroy the German people’s own living conditions (260). The self-obligation to differentiate belongs to the task of a critique of violence; for the task of the critique of violence, as Benjamin establishes in the first sentence of his essay, can only be defined as “that of expounding its relation to law and justice”, since a “cause, however effective”, only becomes violent “only when it enters into moral relations” (Benjamin: 236). Agamben’s elevation of the camp to the matrix of modernity, his globalizing explanation of the state of exception to the rule, removes itself from history. In this very abstraction, an abstraction that carries with it a further abstraction from “ethical relations”, he carries out the violence which he purports to criticize''.

Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky