A Political Fable from Stephen R. L. Clark

-
“There was once a band of brigands, living as predators rather than producers. The brigands formed some friendships with each other, but their relationships were mostly those of dominance and submission. One winter it occurred to them that instead of taking food away from the productive villagers down in the valley they could simply set up residence there. This they did, killing such of the villagers as openly opposed them and telling the rest that they were now their protectors against any (other) robber bands. The villagers, who had hitherto organized their affairs by the laws of free will, were slowly forced into a sly submission. The robbers took the village women, reared children and grew old. Their descendants might have been peacefully absorbed, but it occurrred to that same brigand genius to enlist youngsters in his military elite. At first only their own descendants became nobles, but likely looking villagers were also taken up. After a few hundred years the common people were even allowed some limited say in the question of who should reach the nobility, though it was always understood that no one who advocated any radical change in the organization of the village would be welcome. These elections were held in adversarial rather than consensus style, and power to manipulate 'the people's choice' and determine the event notoriously lay with cabals. All villagers were heavily taxed, and encouraged to accept the situation by being told that some of these moneys would be dispersed on projects of their own choice. It rarely occurred to anyone to note that if Group A and Group B agreed to support each other's projects then the whole community would be pay8ing for both A and B, though no one very much wanted either of them, and either group could probably have afforded its own project were it not also paying for the other. The villagers were always subject to confiscation of their property, to press-gangs (or conscription) and continual propaganda to the effect that they were incapable of governing themselves within their own natural communities. The Spencerian question is, of course, when did these conquered villagers retrieve their freedom? And the answer comes: not yet.”
—Stephen R. L. Clark, “Slaves and Citizens,” The Political Animal: Biology, Ethics and Politics (London: Routledge 1999) 33-4.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians for Redistribution

-
Libertarianism is a redistributive project. That’s another way in which radical market anarchism is rightly seen as part of the socialist tradition. Statists on both the left and the right favor the redistribution of wealth. Libertarians, by contrast, are often assumed to be dead-set against all varieties of redistribution. But it’s important to see that whether this is really the case or not depends on how we answer several questions: Agent : who effects the redistribution? Rationale : what justifies the redistribution? Means : how is the redistribution accomplished? Statist Redistribution For statists, the agent of redistribution is the state. The rationales for redistribution are primarily consequentialist —it’s seen as designed to bring about some favored end-state—though it may also be used to punish the putatively undeserving and to reward the arguably virtuous. The means ? The creation of monopolies, the enactment of regulations, the confiscation of proper...
Read more

Nicholas Lash (1934-2020)

-
I learned a few minutes ago that Nicholas Lash had died earlier today. Nicholas was a brilliant, incisive philosophical theologian who was by far the most formidable member of the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge during the time I was a PhD student. He was, as far as I'm aware, the first Catholic to hold a chair in the Faculty since the Reformation. (A laicized priest married to a former nun, he was not, like many people with similar profiles, an enemy of his church. He remained unapologetically and obviously Catholic.) Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and the holder not only of a PhD but also of an earned DD from the university, he was an elegant prose stylist whose work was rarely simple—he sought to remind us repeatedly of the complexity of thought, language, and the human situation—but always stimulating and insightful. He engaged with a broad range of topics and figures—from Newman (the subject of his dissertation and first book) to Marx to William Jame...
Read more

Socialism revisited

-
I'd like to try to tie together and expand my observations re. the great “socialist”/“capitalist” terminological debate that’s been proceeding at C4SS and AAE . “Socialism” as Genus; “State-Socialism” as Species I think there is good reason to use “socialism” to mean something like opposition to: bossism (that is to subordinative workplace hierarchy); and deprivation (that is, persistent, exclusionary poverty, whether resulting from state-capitalist depredation, private theft, disaster, accident, or other factors . “Socialism” in this sense is the genus; “state-socialism” is the (much-to-be-lamented) species. Indeed, using the “socialist” label provides the occasion for a clear distinction between the genus “socialism” and the species “state-socialism.” Thus, it offers a convenient opportunity to expose and critique the statist assumptions many people reflexively make (assumptions that make it all-too-easy for political theory to take as given the presupposition that its subject...
Read more