Steve Reads

Attention conservation notice: 1,739 words on how we might better serve the downtrodden. Ambles off a little bit into the collective-action problem, touching on a maddeningly clever idea for its solution (someone else’s, I hasten to note).

I picked up Russell’s Proposed Roads To Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism on Cosma‘s advice, to help remedy my woeful ignorance of what “anarchism” used to mean before the right wing hijacked the term. Both left- and right-wing anarchists want to get rid of the state. Left-wing anarchists want to do so out of love of their fellow-men and a desire to see industrial workers treated with humanity; accordingly, they wish to see economic power placed in the hands of the workers, who will own all property collectively. Right-wing anarchists, on the other hand, would see private property expanded as the sole guarantor of individual liberty. At that point right-wing anarchists — the ones I’ve dealt with, anyway — leave aside the most important questions, like how the rights of the weak or the rights of those with poor parents will be protected in a world that venerates private property. But here’s not the place to go into that. Proposed Roads to Freedom isn’t concerned with right-wing anarchism, either:

The modern Anarchism, in the sense in which we shall be concerned with it, is associated with belief in the communal ownership of land and capital, and is thus in an important respect akin to Socialism. This doctrine is properly called Anarchist Com- munism, but as it embraces practically all modern Anarchism, we may ignore individualist Anarchism altogether and concentrate attention upon the communistic form.

It does a good job covering the three isms in the title. Socialism differs from anarchism in that the former wishes an increase in the powers of the state (or maybe the state’s eventual diminution: Russell says Marx isn’t very clear on the point), whereas anarchism desires its eventual and complete disappearance. Syndicalism, in turn, is essentially anarchism organized around industrial unions. Russell’s tone in introducing these concepts is informative, friendly, and never pedantic — the same tone you’d expect from the author of A History of Western Philosophy and The Problems of Philosophy.

The first half of the book is Russell’s survey of the leading socialists and anarchists. The latter half, much the more interesting to my eye, is Russell’s own take on these issues. His method in many of his books is to be a perfectly reasonable man: start with a principle, then hem it in as much as common sense would dictate. In Proposed Roads to Freedom, Russell declares his preference for anarchism, then notes the commonsense objection that it’s probably not stable (nowadays he’d probably say that it’s not evolutionarily stable): other regions not playing the anarchist game would find it easy to invade the anarchists. More importantly, anarchists will have to encounter murderers, rapists, and other violators of the public order. Even if you grant the anarchist premise that much crime is caused by the depredations of the capitalist ruling class, and that prisons are worse than the problem they’re ostensibly curing, you’ll still have to admit that, as Russell puts it, there will be “lunatics in an Anarchist community, and some of these lunatics would, no doubt, be homicidal.”

So Russell is regretfully led to throw over pure anarchism and wish instead for a minimal state. This seems to me entirely reasonable. It does, however, raise the vexed question of how you can keep this minimal state — which will possess guns by definition – from gaining more power. How, in other words, does a “minitarian” state avoid becoming the dictatorship that we were trying to prevent to begin with?

I think we all wish for economic and political systems that are self-regulating: just set the institutions the right way, wind up the clock, and watch everything run perfectly. This is the dream of the anarcho-capitalists, guaranteed by the free market; it was the dream of the Framers of the Constitution, guaranteed by the separation of powers; and for all I know it was Plato’s dream, guaranteed by the Guardians’ (Watchmen’s) golden hearts. (I’m rusty on my Republic, so forgive me.)

At some level it is fundamentally dissatisfying that politics can’t work this way. I haven’t nearly the conceptual arsenal to defend the point just at the moment, but it seems to me that such a self-protected political system may be impossible. Unfortunately, to keep human freedom safe from those who would destroy it, we need to be constantly vigilant; there’s probably no other way. The rules themselves aren’t going to do the hard work for us. I bet that those who have an engineering mentality, especially, find it very hard to avoid dreams of a Final and Lasting Mechanism.

Which is to say that ultimately, I think any successful mechanism design will need to rely on its participants being moral and punishing those who aren’t; when the individuals stop doing that, the collectivity falls. You can’t expect that a system will produce desirable outcomes if all of its members are bastards. I realize that this collides with the 20th-century formulation of the Invisible Hand argument. I’ve not thought through the point terribly much just yet, but it seems right.

Back to Russell. In trying to build his minimal state, he’s most favorably disposed to a system wherein guilds are the centers of political power, with a centralized state to handle things like national defense and public utilities. He comes awfully close to giving a Mancur Olson-style formulation of the collective-action problem. Recall Olson’s argument: when the benefits of a public policy accrue to a small interest group, and the harms are spread widely over the population as a whole, you can expect the interest group to lobby fiercely and face little resistance from the rest of the population. The clearest example here would be free trade: encouraging it may bring great benefits to the society, but it’s far easier for auto manufacturers to measure the benefits of protection. Hence they shape the policy, and the public loses. Russell’s version:

Majority rule, as it exists in large States, is subject to the fatal defect that, in a very great number of questions, only a fraction of the nation have any direct interest or knowledge, yet the others have an equal voice in their settlement. When people have no direct interest in a question they are very apt to be influenced by irrelevant considerations; this is shown in the extraordinary reluctance to grant autonomy to subordinate nations or groups. For this reason, it is very dangerous to allow the nation as a whole to decide on matters which concern only a small section, whether that section be geographical or industrial or defined in any other way. The best cure for this evil, so far as can be seen at present, lies in allowing self-government to every important group within a nation in all matters that affect that group much more than they affect the rest of the community. The government of a group, chosen by the group, will be far more in touch with its constituents, far more conscious of their interests, than a remote Parliament nominally representing the whole country. The most original idea in Syndicalism– adopted and developed by the Guild Socialists–is the idea of making industries self-governing units so far as their internal affairs are concerned. By this method, extended also to such other groups as have clearly separable interests, the evils which have shown themselves in representative democracy can, I believe, be largely overcome.

(This could also be read as a defense of the modern administrative state, where an agency like the FCC has jurisdiction over its areas of specialty and Congress mostly keeps its hands off.)

I’ll have to think hard about this. The solution to the collective-action problem, here, is to grant more power to special interests, not less. Each special interest would have exclusive province over its own issues. It’s intriguing, to say the least, because it would seem to face the special-interest problem head on.

Two problems arise immediately, though:

1. What do we do when the special interests collide? What happens when a tariff favoring the steel industry harms the auto industry, which is then required to charge more for its cars? It’s not at all clear how to resolve this.

2. Who decides which special interests matter? Let’s say we allow steel, automobiles, software and communications technologies to get their own place in the pantheon. What about when a new industry springs to life in 20 years? The existing guilds will hesitate to give up their own power; the structure of the Guild Congress will have to be carefully laid out to encourage new entrants. But again: let’s not assume that a structure will magically save us from each other.

And what makes a Guild Congress any different from the regular U.S. Congress that happens to be controlled by special interests? For that matter, one of the best defenses of the Congress we have, controlled by special interests, is that those special interests are in fact the real representatives: the ACLU, the EFF, the National Association of Manufacturers and so forth all constitute Representative Democracy As She Is Spoke. I doubt Russell would be happy with this in his world of Guild Socialism, however; I think he’d prefer that our political power rest on something nobler than money.

So these are all very interesting principles, and they’re inspiring. But it seems to me that these things always get caught on the details. I don’t deny that socialism, anarchism, or syndicalism could work, but I’d want to see some evidence from, say, another country before I’d consider modifying institutions in the U.S. Ours are imperfect, but, to quote Luther (from “Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved”):

“The mad mob … does not ask so much how things can become better, but only that things may be changed; then if things are worse, they will want something still different. Thus they get bumble-bees for flies, and at last they get hornets for bumble-bees.”