G.A Cohen's cretinism

G.A Cohen wites

A person is exploited when unfair advantage is taken of him,

That is true enough. However, without unfairness, per se, an unanticipated or unjustified onerousness of obligation may be resented as exploitative even if it does not benefit the other party.

and he suffers from (bad) brute luck when his bad luck is not the result of a gamble or risk which he could have avoided.

This does not follow. If a person is befuddled by drink and ends up being taken advantage of, he may well resent having been exploited. More importantly, if a person who can beat or kill you or ruin your career harbours such a feeling, it is in your interest to compensate the person so thoroughly that he is appeased. 

I believe that the primary egalitarian impulse is to extinguish the influence on distribution of both exploitation and brute luck.

Exploitation is like unconscionability and thus is justiciable or can be brought under the scope of a tribunal of some sort. Insurance schemes are the remedy for bad luck. The primary egalitarian impulse is to rant and rave. It isn't to do anything sensible. 

To be sure, principled non- and antiegalitarians

are useless and stupid as Cohen 

also condemn (what they consider to be) exploitation,

This causes Exploitation to cry and cry and run home to its Mummy. 

but they do not have the same view of exploitation as egalitarians have, partly because they are less disturbed by brute-luck-derived asset differences which skew distributive outcomes.

Exploitation, as I have frequently explained, arises because Viceroy Sahib is surreptitiously entering the hovels of the poor and draining them of their precious bodily essence through aggravated acts of fellatio and cunnilingus. This is the true cause of poverty and inequality.  

On the foregoing sketch of the primary egalitarian impulse,

which I have far more elegantly expressed 

a statement which purports to express and assert it is exposed to two kinds of challenge. First, such a statement might be criticized for misidentifying what should, in the light of the fundamental egalitarian aim, be equalized.

Dignity? Abolish the distinction between Professor and Student. Given anybody who wants a PhD as many of them as they like.  

I shall myself so criticize Dworkin's equality of resources proposal, since I think that (among other things) it penalizes people who have tastes for which they cannot be held responsible but which, unluckily for them, cost a lot to satisfy.

Which is why other people must be held responsible for supplying those tastes.  

But one might also reject equality of resources on the quite different ground that it conflicts with some important nonegalitarian values.

Like not having your head kicked in by people you hold responsible for supplying your expensive tastes.  

One might say, for example, that while it is indeed brute luck which distributes children into rich and poor families, it would be wrong to seek rectification of the results of that luck, since

you would get your head kicked in. On the other hand, you are welcome to chop off the legs of tall people so they attain height equality with the short. 

that would undermine the institution of the family. In this article I shall not discuss problems for egalitarian proposals of that second kind, problems, that is, of trade-off between equality and other values. That is because I shall treat the various egalitarian proposals to be reviewed below as weak equalisandum claims. An equalisandum claim specifies that which ought to be equalized, what, that is, people should be rendered equal in.

This is the claim made by the vendor of a good or service. Everybody who paid for the thing, got the same thing. If a mistake was made, the vendor apologizes and makes reparations. 

There may be vendors, or potential vendors willing to meet any given equalisandum demand. The question is how much will they charge or, in economic terms- the opportunity cost- i.e. the best alternative foregone. 

Cohen, of course, isn't interested in equalising anything. That's the sort of thing the market, or a  bureaucracy, can do well enough. He is only interested in making stupid demands. Still, he got paid a little money to do so. Why grudge him that? 

An unqualified or strong equalisandum claim, which is the sort that an uncompromising egalitarian asserts, says that people should be as equal as possible in the dimension it specifies.

Thus, McDonalds will sell me the same 'Happy Meal' at the same price as it charges other customers. True, it make me happier than someone else but that is 'consumer surplus'. Marx considered 'profit' to be 'producer surplus'. By the Morishima fundamental theorem of Marxism, if even one enterprise makes a profit, exploitation exists. The Feminist version is that even if one man has a dick, then, because dicks may well enter vaginas, women are being exploited. 

A qualified or weak equalisandum claim says that they should be as equal as possible in some dimension but subject to whatever limitations need to be imposed in deference to other values: those limitations are not specified by the claim in question.

This is mere puffery. McDonalds may say 'we hope all our customers will experience as much joy as possible while eating their Happy Meal.  Sadly, we understand that some of our customers may be dealing with bereavement or other tragic outcomes and thus we cannot guarantee that all customers will experience an equal degree of joy from their Happy Meal. However, we assure you that everybody- rich or poor- will receive exactly the same item. Enjoy!' 

Now, strong equalisandum claims face objections of the two kinds distinguished above, and which I shall now call egalitarian and nonegalitarian objections.

I suppose, some people say they got fewer fries than others in their Happy Meal. That is an egalitarian objection or claim to reparation. The nonegalitarian objection would be that a beejay should be provided to me by a Super-Model while I eat my Happy Meal because I've got a really tiny dick and so the Universe owes me big time. 

An egalitarian objection rests on a view about the right way to treat people equally which differs from the one embodied in the strong equalisandum claim it challenges.

For example, I might demand McDonalds make a Happy Meal for people who want Indian, not American style, fast food. If there are enough Indians in the area, perhaps they will consider doing so. However, it is likely that some other vendor would have already cornered that market. My point is, the market takes care of this objection by itself.

What matters is if there is an incentive to supply whatever is being demanded. If demand is effective- i.e. backed up by money- it will be provided though the quality may be low or non-existent. The fact is you can easily buy a 'Philosopher's Stone' or 'flying unicorn' quite cheaply. Sadly, they are more than a bit shit. But this is also true of places which market themselves as egalitarian utopias.

The egalitarian objector thinks that people should be equal, to some or other extent, in something other than what the claim he opposes specifies, but he does not, qua egalitarian objector, object to the strength of that claim as such.

e.g. McDonalds should supply Samosas as well as Burgers because of the large Indian population in this region.  

By contrast, a nonegalitarian objection to a strong equalisandum claim says that, while the claim might (and might not) correctly identify what should be equalized, it wrongly fails to defer to nonegalitarian values which restrict the extent to which the form of equality it proposes should be pursued: because of those values, so the objection says, the equalisandum proposal is unacceptable (at least) in its strong form.

Gibberish. Strong egalitarianism is everybody getting the same Happy Meal. There is another dimension- e.g. the issue of whether the Indian Samosa is equal to the Burger- which is being invoked by weak as piss palaver. Thus a guy who complains that McDonalds is inegalitarian because it privileges the food of the White Man over the cuisine of the benighted darkie whose ancestors were raped, sodomized and subjected to incessant fellatio and cunnilingus by aristocratic Viceroys. 

An egalitarian objection to a strong equalisandum claim also applies to the weak one correlative to it, whereas a nonegalitarian objection challenges strong proposals only.

Egalitarianism is welcome to have as many dimensions as it pleases. A strong equilisandum objection would point to material evidence that such and such person got less of such and such good or service than other people. A weak one would just waffle on about how there is some other dimension which is being neglected- e.g. why is McDonald's not chopping off the penises of all customers? Don't they understand that no meal can be 'happy' if there is even one penis prowling around which might end up in a vagina?  

Since mine will be a weak proposal,

because Cohen has shit for brains and isn't really interested in equality at all.  

objections of a nonegalitarian kind will not detain me. Taking welfare as a sample equalisandum proposal,

If it is 'strong' then there is a multidimensional configuration space in which it has a representation. This means that any deviation from the prescribed outcome vector for a particular individual, then there is a valid claim of inequality. 

I shall presently illustrate

your own idiocy 

the distinction I have tried to draw by describing supposed objections to the welfare equalisandum which are (a) plainly not egalitarian, (b) arguably, and so I believe, egalitarian, and (c) problematic with respect to how they should be classified. But, before embarking on that exercise in differentiation, a word about what I shall mean by 'welfare' here, and throughout this study. Of the many readings of 'welfare' alive (if not well) in economics and philosophy, I am interested in two: welfare as enjoyment, or, more broadly, as a desirable or agreeable state of consciousness,

which is a matter of psychology, not economics. It may be not just multiply but infinitely realizable. There may be a 'moksha' pill or technique. But whereas a commodity space has a mathematical representation as a multi-dimensional space, 'Enjoyment' or 'agreeable states of consciousness' do not. 

What I mean is this. If I define 'Happy Meal' as a burger of a certain size plus x number of French Fries, then claims about getting an unequal portion can be usefully made. Otherwise, all we have is worthless jibber jabber about the true meaning of Happiness and how anybody can be called happy so long as even one penis is prowling around.  

which I shall call hedonic welfare; and welfare as preference satisfaction, where preferences order states of the world, and where a person's preference is satisfied if a state of the world that he prefers obtains, whether or not he knows that it does

which is why we can argue that the bloke is not happy with his happy meal because his own penis has not been cut off. What if it crams itself up his own arsehole? I tell you penises cause RAPE! They must be banned immediately!  

and, a fortiori, whatever hedonic welfare he does or does not get as a result of its obtaining.

Very true. You may think you aren't getting hedonic welfare from your dick being cut off but, a fortiori, you don't at all. No one can be truly happy till not even a single solitary dick can prowl around imperilling vaginas. 

Egalitarianism may or may not be desirable. However, market or bureaucratic or other protocol bound allocation systems have no difficulty with a strong equalisandum because they benefit by seeking to equalize outcomes- e.g. ensuring the Happy Meal each customer receives is the same. 

Cohen doesn't get this. 

a) Many people think that a policy of equalizing welfare is inconsistent with the maintenance of family values, because, so they say, those values endorse practices of benefiting loved ones which generate welfare inequalities.

But you can still equalize outcomes in the commodity space. Some aspects of welfare- e.g. having a nice Mummy or being pretty- aren't commodities. Yet. Further scientific progress and higher economic productivity may increasingly make them so.  

Now, however penetrating that point may be, it does not represent an egalitarian objection to equality of welfare.

It could do. Maybe there is trade off between increasing equality in the commodity space today but decreasing it in the wider 'welfare' space later on. If we let the Elon Musks of the world control more resources, maybe they will make amazing discoveries such that non-commodity aspects of welfare become more equal. In affluent countries, maybe this is what the vast majority want. They seem to have lost the taste for redistribution by the end of the Sixties. 

One caveat which Cohen & Co ignore is that 'disutility'- which cashes out as opportunity cost- is a sort of 'negative' Welfare. Once that is factored in, egalitarianism is just a Utilitarianism where market-makers enable Hicks-Kaldor improvements- i.e. the world wags on as before. 

Unregulated kinship generosity may be precious on other grounds, but it could not be thought to promote the result that people get an equal amount of something that they should have equal amounts of.

Very true. We should have equal amounts of health and beauty and wit and intelligence. It's unfair that my sister has more of these things that I do. That's why I hate my parents.  

Accordingly, if the family values objection indeed has force against equality of welfare, it is a reason for restricting the writ of that particular equalisandum, or form of equality, and not a reason for proposing another equalisandum in its stead.

Also if any one objects to my shitting on them, then we should restrict the writ of the 'equalisandum' whereby people who haven't shat on me feel it is unfair for me to shit on them.  

Family values do not challenge equality of welfare when the latter is construed as a qualified equalisandum proposal.

Only in the sense that you are wrong to object to my shitting on you.  

Another objection to unqualified equality of welfare

there is only one. Welfare can't be objectively measured 

which is not egalitarian is that implementing it would involve intolerably intrusive state surveillance.

surveillance is useless in such cases 

("Hi! I'm from the Ministry of Equality. Are you, by any chance, unusually happy today?")

Say you are miserable. They may give you some money.  

Gathering the information needed to apply unqualified equality of resources

is impossible. It is only with hindsight that we discover what was or wasn't a resource.  

might well involve less intrusion, and that would be a reason for preferring unqualified equality of resources to unqualified equality of welfare, but not one which impugned the egalitarian character of equality of welfare.

What impugns Cohen's shite is the fact that it involves things which can't be measured and thus partial ordering is impossible.  

G.A Cohen's egalitarian fallacy

The egalitarian fallacy consists in rejecting claims about group differences because of their perceived moral implications. Thankfully, economic egalitarianism need not suffer from this infirmity. Why? Well, productivity is highly plastic. People with very different traits can have the same marginal product. Moreover, there is an endogenous and impredicative aspect to this. You are a painter and are making a good living. Then you see your brother, the poet, has bought himself a nicer house. He explains that he tapped a new market. You do so too. Your marginal revenue product has gone up. There is no reason why productivity in different industries should not rise without any limit save that given by the overall 'general equilibrium'. But that equilibrium is non-unique and can always make room for further Pareto improvement based on increased information or lower transaction costs. Egalitarianism- like any other ism- can be perfectly fine provided it focuses on mechanism design to raise productivity for everyone. 

Sadly, there are those who think that what is truly important is virtue signalling and claiming to feel very very guilty because you have a dick whereas billions of women are having to sit down to pee. In the past some such shitheads did quite well for themselves financially. 

Some 25 years ago, one such shithead, G.A Cohen, wrote a paper titled 'If you are an egalitarian, how come you are so rich?' 

The answer may be that egalitarians have a trait which correlates with earning or inheriting or otherwise receiving more money. Ensuring egalitarians are rich may cause more and more people to seek to become egalitarian.  Philippe Égalité was one of the richest men in France. Sadly, this didn't save him from the guillotine but his son did get to be King for about 18 years. Clearly, being an egalitarian is no bar, it might be an advantage, to being or becoming as rich as fuck or even becoming the ruler of a country.

Egalitarianism can be an optimal ideology for wealth creation and those willing to migrate so as get richer faster. Assuming non-convexities and external economies, this ethic generates push and pull factors and supports 'Tiebout models' (i.e. different mixes of local taxes and local club good provision in different 'Marshallian industrial districts) which are 'separating equilibria'. In other words, people want to go to where their target peer group lives and to do what they do and achieve the same productivity and adopt the same preferences as they have. This is the morally positive aspect of egalitarianism. The negative aspect is that people of lower productivity may be pushed out even if they are the indigenous 'owners' of the land. Still, where there is deep inequality- even slavery- we need to ask if the worst off aren't alive only because of that inequality. Alternatively, Kings and Dukes- or even Dictators- may only be kept around by a class of 'new men' that seeks to mask its rise until it is powerful enough to show its hand.

By contrast, hierarchical ideologies of various types may take as their premise the notion that certain groups can never have high productivity. They need a Gandhian type of leadership which involves those who used to earn good money as lawyers or businessmen, turning themselves into facsimiles of emaciated beggars or starving spinners of cotton yarn or some such shite. 

Marxism was once an egalitarian theory predicated on the rise of the proletariat into a self-managing, highly productive, class who would be strong enough to disavow the control rights of owners of land, and financial capital. This may have involved fighting and defeating an aristocratic military caste which would rally behind 'Church & Crown' to defend the 'rents' that they extract. 

In America, where there was neither an Established Church nor a hereditary ruling class, Egalitarianism could stride forward more rapidly thanks to Henry George's notion of 'value capture'.  Vickrey was a Georgist and the Vickrey/Harsanyi 'original position' yields a perfectly sensible egalitarian utilitarianism once expected utility maximization is dropped in favour of something like regret minimization (because of Knightian Uncertainty). However, the steam was running out of egalitarianism because the world had changed. Some want to be more productive through STEM subject research. Others want to be stupid and prevent productivity increases by talking non-STEM bollocks. Also, drugs are nice. Seriously, have you tried drugs? 

I don't suppose G.A Cohen took a lot of drugs. But he did talk non-STEM bollocks. Thus, he did well enough out of an academic Ponzi scheme which he entered in the early Sixties. Thus, he was entitled to ask why he himself was quite rich even though his stock in trade was some sort of moral egalitarianism or normative Marxism or other such shite. 

I suppose, if you suddenly inherit vast wealth, people would think you a hypocrite if you hang on to it while also claiming to be morally committed to economic egalitarianism. Even if it is important you retain 'control rights' over it because you alone know how best to invest that money, still, you could set up a trust and distribute beneficial rights in an egalitarian manner

 On the other hand, if your income is high, and you use that income to achieve a high material standard of living, there is no great scandal. We would say the outcome you support has to do with disutility- i.e. opportunity cost which has a signalling function for resource allocation. Yours is high. That of a poor, unproductive, person is low. If you live large, this advertises your higher productivity and there is a mimetic effect such that the currently poor raise their productivity so as to enjoy what you have. The categorical imperative at work here has to do with the meta-ethics of egalitarianism being utilitarian. Being more productive entails living larger so there is mimetic effect such that total utility rises

Many people, including many egalitarian political philosophers, profess a belief in equality while enjoying high incomes

as high as those of Tele-evangelists?  

of which they devote very little to egalitarian purposes. The article critically examines ways of resolving the putative inconsistency in the stance of these people, in particular, that favouring an egalitarian society has no implications for behaviour in an unequal one;

Which is true. However, you may have a theory of morality which says you must 'walk the talk' and yourself do what you want to see done by Society at large. But subscribing to a particular moral belief does not entail having that particular theory of morality because the thing may be strategic. Cohen is committing a 'fallacy of composition'. It is not the case that what you want for the whole is also what you want for any particular part of the whole- including yourself.  I am not a Mormon, but I may want to live in a Mormon neighbourhood because I believe there will be little substance abuse and thus much less crime. People will be polite and cheerful. Marriages will be stable. Kids will play actual, not video, games.  

Cohen now raises up a series of strawmen-

that what's bad about inequality is a social division that philanthropy cannot reduce;

some type of philanthropy can reduce any type of inequality 

that private action cannot ensure that others have good lives;

some coalition of private actors can ensure anything that can be ensured by Society as a whole 

that private action can only achieve a "drop in the ocean";

lots of drops create an ocean 

that private effort is not called for, since justice is a matter for the state to enforce;

a big enough private coalition is the State. 

that private effort cannot remove the fundamental injustice, which is inequality of power;

see above 

and that private effort involves an unreasonably large psychological burden.

which seeing a shrink can reduce. 

The steelman argument Cohen steers clear from is the original Utilitarian one which has to do with disutility as opportunity cost and the mimetic effects of showcasing what is achievable through higher productivity- viz. a higher material standard of living.

Cohen believes

justice in personal choice, within a just ethos, is necessary for a society to qualify as just.

Presumably the meaning is 'most people must make the type of choice which is in accordance with the ethos of their society in order for that society to qualify as having that ethos.'

This is obviously false. Suppose our Society is an absolutist monarchy. Its ethos has to do with the Divine Right of Kings. It does not follow that most people in our Society must be Kings and act in a regal manner. Indeed, there may be no King- just a Regency Council.  

But the question: "What does justice demand of individuals in a just society?" is not the same as the question: "What does justice demand of individuals in an unjust society?"

True. But the answer to both may be the same. Justice demands the same thing under all circumstances because there is a Science of Law which is like the Science of Physics which does not demand something different in China from what it demands in Chad.  

And, in the present article, I raise a question related to that second one: I ask whether egalitarians who live in an unequal society

why be an egalitarian in an equal society? That would be like being in favour of saying woof woof if you are a dog. My adherence to 'woof woofism' is only remarkable because I am not a dog. I am actually a cat and should be addressed as Chairman Miaow.  

(one, that is, whose government, for whatever reason, fails to establish the equality that these egalitarians favour)

If there is a government, there is inequality. Indeed, following Dahrendorf, one might say a sufficient condition for social stratification is the existence of the law.  

are committed to implementing, so far as they can, in their own lives, the norm of equality that they prescribe for government.

This does not follow. You can be personally committed to egalitarianism while holding that there should be no government or that it should be a 'night-watchman' concerned only with External Defence.  

There is one thing egalitarians within an unequal society cannot say, in the light of what was shown in "Where the Action Is."

That wasn't light. It was stupid shit. There can be no equality if some shithead gets to tell us what we can or can't say.  

They cannot say that equality is not a goal for individuals to pursue in their own lives in any society (be it just or unjust) and, therefore, more particularly, not something for individuals to pursue in their own lives in an unequal society.

A poor, unproductive, person is welcome to pursue the goal of becoming equal in productivity, and thus income, to anybody she likes. Equally, a person who is highly productive is welcome to start slacking off till her productivity declines to that of whatever peer group she wishes to gain acceptance in. 

But they might, and do, advance other reasons for not pursuing it in an unequal society, reasons which I propose to examine here.

No they don't. Only stupid shitheads teaching worthless shite 'advance reasons' in this connection. But, as I have said, there has always been- at least since the second half of the nineteenth century- one reason viz. using mimetic effects to advertise and broadcast the habitus of higher productivity.

In asking what conduct egalitarians are committed to in an unequal society, I am interested, more particularly, in the conduct of rich egalitarians in an unequal society: it's not so hard for a poor egalitarian to be true to her egalitarianism in an unequal society.

But Society benefits if poor people decide they are just as good as those with high productivity and decide to imitate them till they become their equal. Thus, in rural India or Africa, when the child of a peasant sees the superior material standard of living of educated lawyers, doctors, engineers etc., they are motivated to themselves gain education and much higher productivity than involuted agriculture can afford. The result of this 'Tardean mimetics' is that the whole society is pulled up the value chain. The opposite situation- wealthy Gandhian barristers and industrialists parading around as soi disant peasants of a particularly emaciated type- is bad for Society.  

Or, if you prefer, I am interested in the conduct of rich professed egalitarians, since many people would say that they can't be egalitarians, that they can't really believe in equality, if they're rich, if, that is, they keep their money.

Just as no man can be a feminist till he cuts off his dick and thus has to pee sitting down. But why stop there? No human being can claim to believe in Justice unless they give up territory stolen from Neanderthals or Denisovans or primates more ancient yet.  

Cohen was a British Marxist with an on again-off again relationship with the Labour Party. He appears to have had no understanding of British economic history or its complicated class politics. The fact is, Labour knew that coal mining was becoming unproductive (output peaked in 1913 but employment peaked in the Twenties) but the miner's union was the biggest weapon in its arsenal as Ted Heath learned to his cost. Thus it had to tell stupid lies. Once the voters showed they cared more about cheap holidays in Franco's Spain that punishing the rich with super-taxes, Labour had no ideology, no program, nothing that wasn't bluff and the hope of muddling through. It literally had nothing to put in 'place of strife' while strife was all its financiers could offer. This was a slow motion suicide which only ended when Blair removed Clause 4. Sadly, Blair hadn't the nous to rid himself of Brown and Brown, who has a PhD, worked diligently to make Labour unelectable as did the stupider of Ralph Miliband's sons and then the appalling Jeremy Corbyn whose brother is a climate denier because he thinks the thing is a plot to wean Britain off coal- and thus the miner's unions. In other words, these guys live in a pre 1913 past. Sir Keir, sadly, has turned out to be an utter imbecile. Still, he has lasted longer than Liz Truss. 

We are navigating close to those familiar philosophical rocks that surround the question whether people may truly believe in principles on which they do not act.

The answer is, sure. I believe that super-models want to rape me. However I do not go out of my way to avoid them. This is because I have great faith in the ability of the British Police to defend me from their insensate lust.  

This is the ancient problem of akrasia,

lack of will power 

on which Socrates and Aristotle had opposed views. Socrates thought that it was not possible to do intentionally what you think it morally wrong to do,

or did he merely pretend this was the case for the sake of making conversation?  

and Aristotle held a view that is harder to summarize but which was certainly not that Socratic one. The akrasia problem, or one part of it, is whether this dyad is inconsistent: 

1. A believes that he morally ought (all things considered) to do X.

Since all things can't be considered, there is no moral 'ought' 

2. A does not intend to do X.

There is no inconsistency in having intentions contrary to your morality. If morality prevents you carrying out your intention, your good angel has won. If not, the reverse is the case. The good news is your good angel always wins if you stick with the intention to beat up Mike Tyson or other large muscular men. Here, your moral abhorrence of violence saves you from certain death.

The other point is you can believe something is morally wrong but that purging yourself of that moral wrong is inexpensive. Thus, though homosexual acts are immoral in Hinduism, the expiation for them consists of little more than having a bath and changing your clothes- which you would do anyway because India is very hot.  

 

1. A believes that he morally ought (all things considered) to do X. 

2. A does not intend to do X. 

3. (A believes that) A's behaviour is not out of line with his own moral principles. 

Now that triad undoubtedly represents an inconsistency.

No. It may be that it is only moral to do x if you don't intend to do x. Some extra ingredient, e.g. the intervention of an angel, is required for you to do accomplish what you morally ought to do. 

Thus suppose I feel I have a moral obligation to write a poem about Sir Keir Starmer's victory. Yet I also believe it is immoral to write a poem save when moved by something far beyond my will, or my intentions, or my political loyalties. It so happens that I am also an alcoholic. I wake up with a hangover and find I have written 'The Moon in June is like a lovely prune whom I hope to encounter soon but not in June or on the Moon.' Since Sir Keir became PM in July, which is the month which follows June, it is obvious that this sublime poem is indeed that which I morally ought to have written without intending to do so. Clearly mention of the Moon is a rebuke to the Sun newspaper which only endorsed Sir Keir in July. The meaning is, unlike Blair, Starmer is not obligated to Murdoch. I honestly don't think I could have written a better poem commemorating Labour's victory if I had intended to do so. 

If you leave out what's in the parentheses in 3, the inconsistency is a logical one: it's logically impossible for all that to be true of A.

Nope. Firstly 'all things considered' may mean 'at the end of mathematical time'. Secondly, what is morally right may require the intervention of some power greater than one's own will and intention. Thirdly X may be 'epistemic' and thus not subject to Leibniz's law of identity. Indeed, it may be impredicative- e.g. halachah vein morin kein- i.e. the law which if known forbids its own application. 

The sad thing about logic is that whatever you think it rules out, it actually rules in. 

And if you include what's in the parentheses, then all of 1 through 3 might be all too true, but there's then an inconsistency in A herself, between her beliefs and her behaviour.

Not if the belief is impredicative or otherwise epistemic or involves the intervention of something higher than intention.  

Or, if there is a subtle consistency in the triad that I'm failing to see, then I'm sure it could be eliminated through a (non-tendentious) tightening of one or more of the triad's constituent formulations.

Nope. So long as X is epistemic, there is an intensional fallacy which takes the thing out of the realm of set theory or a logical calculus.  

If Cohen was crap at logic- i.e. had shit for brains- was his heart, perhaps, in the right place? 

I think the rich/poor division is hateful in part because the poor have intelligible sentiments of injustice when they contemplate that division.

According to this logic, if there are people who find the existence of Jews living amongst them to be a terrible atrocity and miscarriage of justice, then their intelligible sentiments- as expressed by Hitler or Hamas- when they contemplate the division between Jews who are still alive and those who have met with the final solution, renders the former group- viz. Jews who are flagrantly alive- truly hateful. 

Thankfully, poor people don't think it is unjust that more productive people have more than they do. What is unjust is to attribute to them the evil opinions of ranting, economically illiterate, nutters or academics. Similarly, it really isn't true that 'Aryans' or Muslims or any other group harbours a wholly psychotic and murderous hatred of any devout or decent set of people- more particularly a talented, humane, community whose Holy Scripture all can profit by. 

Why does Cohen attribute such horrible sentiments to England's poor? He says his parent's were working class Communists. Sadly, they were also Canadian. As has been mathematically proved by Lawvere, Canadians have no souls. The fact that Cohen emigrated to England can't change this brute fact. 

But the anti-division egalitarian who eschews the discourse of justice says that such sentiments are, or (supposing that the poor have no such sentiments) would be, misplaced. He rejects the thought that (at least part of) his reason for hating inequality is its injustice. 

It is unjust that women have to sit down to pee. If you have injustice, you should hate your penis and chop it off immediately. As a Feminist, I chop off my penis up to five times a day. That is why, at any given moment, it is likely to be way smaller than average. I've tried to explain this to various women. If they just stay with me long enough, it will attain a length they find satisfactory. Sadly, females are too stupid to understand this. That is why, as I have often said, Feminism can't be left to women. Men must take charge of it.  

 Within Dworkin's theory of equality,

is a non sequitur. People are themselves a resource. Nothing can grant people equal access to people because every person is more accessible to himself than to anybody else. 

the locus of the norm of equality proper (as opposed to, for example, norms governing duties of compassion to the unfortunate, be they at home or abroad) is in the relationship between the state and those over whom it claims the right to govern.

But those it claims the right to govern, claim the right to make it their bitch. Dworkin- like other such Professors- was as stupid as shit.  

Because it claims that right, the state must treat its citizens with equal respect and concern, on pain of being a tyranny,

but citizens can make the State their bitch and refuse it even the courtesy of a reach-around. Instead they can keep reaming it while screaming 'you like it rough, don't you you little retard?' 

On the other hand it is true that the state must treat its citizens with equal respect, concern, and an  appreciative and undiscriminating appetite for any such turds as they might let fall from their anuses.  How can anyone claim to have shown you genuine respect if they balk at devouring your faeces? A Head of State whose mouth is not the proper depository for every single turd the citizenry produces is nothing but a tyrant! Even Hitler and Stalin eagerly devoured the turds of the proletariat. It is only in soi disant Capitalist 'Democracies' that Presidents and Prime Ministers turn up their nose at such humble fare as emerges from the anuses of the working class. 

and it must therefore distribute resources equally to its members.

Especially reproductive resources- e.g. super models.  

But, if the state fails to do so, then no analogous duty falls on individuals: it is not the individual's duty to treat everyone (relatives, friends, and strangers alike) with equal respect and concern.

Also, they don't have to eat their shit- unless they teach Political Philosophy.  

It does not follow that no related duty falls on the individual when the state fails to be just. For Dworkin, it is then her duty to promote equality by trying to change the state's policy.

By getting the Head of Government to eat everybody's shit.  

For, insofar as government is unjust, then the citizenry whom it represents are, Dworkin thinks, collectively guilty: each therefore has a duty to seek to rectify the state's injustice.

by shitting copiously and forcing the Cabinet to eat that shit.  

So there is indeed a tension between professing egalitarianism and not doing anything to promote equality, by, for example,

force feeding your turds to senior officials.  

contributing money and/or time to an egalitarian political party.

Fuck that. Contribute your turds and force the head of that egalitarian political party to, very respectfully, eat your shit.  

But there is no obligation so to contribute that one ends up as one would in an egalitarian society.

i.e. dead. Death is the great leveller.  

 Nozick said, in Anarchy, State and Utopia, that, if it was of compelling moral concern that the badly off be assisted, then private charity could achieve that.

Or if it couldn't, famine and epidemics would serve as Malthusian checks.  

He claimed that the only reason for preferring to assist them through state-imposed redistribution was that under such a policy people who do not want to give would be forced to give.

Till they figured a way to avoid taxes or emigrate. Only economic rent can be confiscated. As demand and supply become more elastic, less and less is available for redistribution. All that can be achieved is a degree of risk pooling- i.e. transfers within a particular economic class. Sadly, the bureaucrats will take an increasing bite out of it.  

In reply to Nozick, Nagel claimed that there are good grounds for state redistribution of the holdings of those who indeed want to contribute, because a person who is willing and, indeed, eager to contribute through taxation might reasonably be unwilling to give off her own bat.

Actually, people who'd never dream of under-tipping a waiter, gain much satisfaction from bilking the tax-man. After all, the State is rich. What's more it gets to literally print money.  

And Nagel's justification of that unwillingness would, if sound, apply to our case, the case of the rich egalitarian who is asked why he does not contribute massively in a society whose state will not force him to do so. I quote Nagel: Most people are not generous when asked to give voluntarily, and it is unreasonable to ask that they should be. Admittedly there are cases in which a person should do something although it would not be right to force him to do it [for example, to keep an ordinary promise, or to refrain from ordinary lying - GAC]. But here I believe the reverse is true. Sometimes it is proper to force people to do something even though it is not true that they should do it without being forced.

The problem here is that such people may create a countervailing force. If we bang on about how the rich should hand over their cash, they might pay people to bang on about all sorts of wedge issues or create 'scapegoats'- immigrants, drug-addicted criminals, Hollywood paedophiles who have taken over the Post Office- so that our type of crazy gets swamped by all sorts of other types of crazy. 

It is acceptable to compel people to contribute to the support of the indigent by automatic taxation, but unreasonable to insist that in the absence of such a system they ought to contribute voluntarily. The latter is an excessively demanding moral position because it requires voluntary decisions that are quite difficult to make. Most people will tolerate a universal system of compulsory taxation without feeling entitled to complain, whereas they would feel justified in refusing an appeal that they contribute the same amount voluntarily. 

Economists know different. In the short run, under exigent circumstances- e.g. a vital war of defence- tax avoidance may not rise. Medium to long term, everybody does it. This is because the tax-man isn't a starving beggar. He's a fucker who got a scholarship to Winchester and joined the Treasury because his tutor at Baliol told him there aren't any gentlemen left in Merchant Banking. 

Yet another putative rationale for not expecting people to pursue privately the norms that would prevail in what they regard as a just society is that each person has the right to a private space into which social duty does not intrude.

We don't expect people to respect irrelevant norms, e.g. those which apply to safely driving a motor vehicle while taking a shit. On the other hand, certain actions taken in one's private life may be considered inconsistent with the discharge of a particular public office. More generally, advocacy for a particular cause would be negated by inconsistent private behaviour- e.g. demanding the abolition of private schools while sending your own kid to one such.  

But the prosecutor hounding the rich egalitarian

is in the same boat as the self-appointed prosecutor hounding the 'Feminist' who hasn't chopped off his own dick. The problem with being prosecutors of this type is that people run away when they see you approaching.  

need not deny that private spaces are legitimate.

Private enterprise occurs in private spaces. If liberty is protected there, then liberty obtains. The public distribution system has competition from private traders.

Why might we want the State do do certain things which we would not want to do ourselves? One answer is the free rider problem, Another is one's superior ability to escape both paying for and being subject to the action of the State- which is itself a free rider problem. Cohen takes a different view.

Suppose we are on the battlefield, and that a comrade will die unless my leg is cut off (never mind how that's supposed to help him: this is a philosophy paper, not a treatise on interpersonal surgery).

You could volunteer to have the leg cut off. But the army can't have a rule of this type. Desertions would be too great.  

Nagel is saying the analogue of this: I might recognize that it would be right for someone forcibly to cut my leg off, but I can nevertheless protest that it is asking too much to expect me to cut it off myself.

Nonsense! It isn't right for someone else to cut off my leg. You should trust me to do it myself. Also, let me hold your gun while I do it. I promise not to shoot you.  

Let me elaborate my doubt about Nagel's case through closer focus on this analogy. Suppose that the leg is to be removed by a knife, and that there is no anaesthetic available. We need to compare, on the one hand, someone else cutting my leg off, who, like the taxing state, operates independently of my will, and, on the other hand, me having to cut it off myself. The cost that results from the cutting is the same in both cases: pain, and loss of the leg. But, because much pain comes immediately with the cutting, it is fiendishly difficult, will-wise, for me to do the cutting myself, for me to keep myself applied to that ghastly task, so difficult that substantial extra costs of struggle and strain supervene if I do.

Rubbish! Just give me a knife, a bottle of whiskey and trust me to chop off my own leg. I won't get drunk and stab you. Take my word for it.  

Contrast, now, a case where my leg will be severed by an electrically powered knife five minutes after a button is pressed, and I do agree that the button should be pressed: I recognize the validity of my comrade's claim to my leg. Perhaps there is, in addition to the other costs, an extra burden, on the will, if I have to press the button myself, but that extra burden is surely inconsiderable: it will not be a great relief to discover that you are determined to push the button, so that I need not do so. And, so I submit, that second case, not the manual cutting one, is the right analogy here. The rich egalitarian wants the state to press the tax button.

No. A stupid egalitarian may do so. But wealth does not entail stupidity- though it may be associated with hypocrisy. 'I'd be happy to give up my billions if the postman is content to pay more in taxes so as to help the starving drug-addict. On the other hand,  

It may be a bit easier for him if the state does that than if he has to press the standing order button when e-mailing his bank,

Cohen was a technophobe. He knew about standing orders and he knew about email. He didn't know that you can't combine the two things.  

An egalitarian may believe that all people can be equally productive. Anything which prevents them becoming so- even if it is excessive wealth which allows them to be looked after as if they were babies- is bad. For this reason a 'Nanny State' is inegalitarian. It discourages the proper self-development of productive powers and abilities. 

Cohen's paper had no conclusion. My blog does. It is that Cohen was stupid. An 'ism' is about productivity. Nationalism is the notion that people who speak the same religion or who belong to the same creed can be more productive if they rule themselves. Feminism is the notion that women know how to raise their own productivity and everybody benefits if this is done. Capitalism is the notion that financial markets are better at allocating investible funds so that productivity rises faster. Communism is the opposite. It is alleged that irrational speculation and 'wasteful competition' and the inevitability of an 'under-consumption crisis' will cause an economic disaster. Fascism or Corporatism promised to combine the best features of other 'isms' thanks to the genius of the Il Duce or Fuhrer. 

Sadly, these 'isms', even if egalitarian, were liable to point at certain groups as essentially 'parasitic' and not productive. Cohen and his ilk made a different assumption- viz. that 'the poor we will always have with us' because some people are shit. If you aren't shit, and thus not as poor as shit, the least you can do is feel bad about yourself for this reason. Egalitarianism means everybody should be fucking miserable. Either you are shit and thus poor or you are morally shit and therefore you ought to feel really shitty about yourself. Alternatively, you could just tell Rawls, Cohen, Nozick etc. to go fuck themselves. The political tide had turned against them at the end of the Sixties. They would end up teaching imbeciles doomed to themselves teach woke nutters who would publicly shit themselves anytime they were triggered by anything which looked like it might be a dick or might have a dick attached to it. How can there be any type of equality so long as women have to sit down to pee? Also, what if they sit down on a dick? If even one dick is prowling around, there can be no Democracy, no Fraternity and no Equality whatsoever. 

Joseph Heath on why Marxists turned Rawlsian

Joseph Heath, a philosophy professor in Canada, writes in substack  

Back when I was an undergraduate, during the final years of the cold war, by far the most exciting thing going on in political philosophy was the powerful resurgence of Marxism in the English-speaking world. 

In 1979, my tutor at the LSE asked me to write an essay on the Marxist theory of history. I thought this was that Marx believed all countries would industrialize on the British pattern and this would bring about similar political and social changes. The problem was that though Britain's rise as a capitalist industrial power may have been unplanned and the arrow of causation may have been from the economic substructure to the political superstructure, other countries might take the opposite approach- i.e. the superstructure might deliberately change the substructure. In Germany, this was the notion of the 'Sonderweg'  or 'special path' imposed from above which would move the country to a Liberal type of Socialism before there was any 'pressure from below'.

An alternative, more Marixist path, might commence with a 'revolution from below' which deliberately chose a technocratic path to industrialization undertaken by giant state run enterprises. Indeed, this is what we thought Stalin had done- viz transform a backward, superstitious, mainly agricultural country into a ultra-modern 'worker's paradise' which might soon build colonies on the Moon and other planets. The attraction of Marxism was that it claimed to be a purely scientific discipline which could allocate resources efficiently and thus eliminate 'wasteful competition'. Planning would enable Man to take charge of his own Destiny. Soviet men would be as Gods. Once stupid, greedy, capitalists and feudalists and those addicted to Religion's opium had been gently but firmly told to fuck the fuck off, all of humanity would unite to claim its destiny amongst the stars. Scarcity, of course, would disappear. Till then, as Marx said we would have to pay workers according to their contribution. Indeed Soviet factories had a complicated system of working out how much each should be paid. Stakhonovites, who over fulfilled their quota, gained special perks- e.g. Gorbachev, a strong farm worker, got permission to study Law in Moscow. Sadly, he didn't understand that the Soviet economy would collapse if the Party released it from its control. There would be a 'scissors crisis'. The nomenklatura would figure out that the spot price of Russian commodities was higher than whatever 'shadow price' Kantorovich's kooks might calculate. Thus, if they could get 'control rights' over Russia's vast mineral wealth, they would be richer than the Tzars. That story is still unfolding. However, in China, the Party retained 'control rights' (though this was not obvious to optimistic Western observers) and thus it could continue to pursue the older Communist dream of my parent's generation. We don't know for certain if China can move beyond 'catch up growth' but it is certainly possible. What is certain, however, is that the West is too sclerotic to pull itself together and plan for a brighter future. That is the reason the Western Marxist is just a crotchety fellow similar to the crazier type of Feminist or more paranoid type of Religious or Racialist crank. 

In my essay for my tutor, I focused on how a Marxist theory of history could accommodate a reversal of the arrow of causality from substructure to superstructure. Sadly, this involved ignoring the one decent thing about Marx's labor theory of value- viz. the stipulation that the labor numeraire could not fall below the social subsistence level. Obviously, as Stalin's Gulags proved, it could do so for long periods. In other words, Man could indeed take charge of his own Destiny provided a large section of the population was worked to death under horrible conditions.

A more benign possibility was that historically more literate and educated Societies could do Listian 'catch up growth' such that they more quickly gained economies of scope and scale in new technologies. In this case they might develop different 'Tiebout models' (i.e. tax/public good mixes) and this would be reflected in different ideologies and institutions of a more or less technocratic kind. 

Reading my essay, my tutor quickly decided I was an imbecile. Apparently, what I should have been doing was engaging with G.A Cohen's defense of the Marxist theory of history which had come out the previous year. But, it was stupid shit. Marx's determinism had to do with the substructure as defined by relations of production not the technological production possibility frontier. After all, his Doctorate was in Law. In any case technological determinism was off the table because new tech is a 'hopeful monster'- i.e. it can't change the substructure as it is itself being built up. The superstructure could directly intervene, through Listian protectionism & state backed investment, to set off not just a 'catch up' revolution but also the creation of new industries which would ab ovo have 'acquired advantage'. The problem here is that the thing was stochastic. Some might succeed, many would fail.

It wasn't just that Cohen did not understand that Marxism is an economic theory. Philosophically, his enterprise was oxymoronic. You can't have an 'analytical' treatment of dialectical thought because the latter is comfortable with unstable extensions for intensional terms. The latter is founded on stable extensions. I was not then aware of Lawvere's attempt to give a category theoretical treatment of Hegel's dialectic but this would not have mattered. Cohen's error was to think that there is a functional relationship between production relations and the types of technology which can flourish. This was obviously not the case as Stalin's Russia had shown. The case of Japan was equally interesting. We were fortunate to have, at the LSE, Michio Morishima who represented the Japanese Marxist tradition in all its bizarre glory. He did drum the importance of 'duality' into us- i.e. we understood that a modern sector could coexist with a traditional sector- but we understood this as market segmentation or 'discrimination'. Only later on did I understand that there are regret minimizing reasons why coordination games or pooling equilibria would give rise to discoordination games. But this also means more path dependence. There is ergodicity at the global level but I doubt its dynamics could be captured at the local 'political' level. That's why there is little point in being ideological.

Most of this work was being done under the banner of “analytical Marxism” (aka “no-bullshit Marxism”),

it was all bullshit and no fucking Marxism. Why not pretend that Karl Marx was actually Santa Claus and Engels was a flying reindeer?  

following the publication of Gerald Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (and his subsequent elevation to the Chichele Professorship in Social and Political Philosophy at Oxford).

The current occupant is the even more cretinous Amia Srinivasan. 

Meanwhile in Germany, Jürgen Habermas’s incredibly compact Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus promised to reinvigorate Marx’s analysis of capitalist crises in the language of contemporary systems theory.

German pedants can't invigorate shit. 'State Capitalism' or a 'Mixed Economy' doesn't have a problem with legitimacy. It has a problem with incentive incompatibility. Bureaucrats and politicians have an incentive to yield to the most obstreperous bunch of nutters they are faced with. Allocative efficiency goes out of the window. Public sector enterprises- e.g. British Leyland- become loss making while Unionized workers are featherbedded. But this meant that the working class's own pocket was being picked by the tax-man so as to pay zombie enterprises to stay in business. The working-class rebelled against 'stagflation' and voted for Reagan and Thatcher. 

It was an exciting time to be a young radical.

Not in England. Your pals who dropped out of skool at 16 to work in the City were driving Porsches while you could scarcely afford a pint of beer and a packet of pork scratchings.  

One could say, without exaggeration, that many of the smartest and most important people working in political philosophy were Marxists of some description.

They weren't smart. They were stupid and boring.  Marxism was cool when Castro and Che Guevara and Mao were kicking ass and taking names. 

So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It’s the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals.

The actual Marxists had been saying they were nothing else all along.  

Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement – not just Cohen, but Philippe van Parijs,

 universal basic income means our people won't take 'dirty' jobs. But voters won't want to extend this benefit to immigrants who do take those jobs. So, you end up with guest-workers. Congrats! You've just turned your country into Dubai! Why stop there? Why not insist our women not form sexual relationships with those dirty foreigners? How about a nice little system of apartheid? 

John Roemer,

a mathsy guy. His Class Exploitation Correspondence Principle (CECP), states that individuals who optimize by hiring labor are necessarily exploiters, and those who optimize by selling labor are exploited. So retired people are 'exploiters'. Kick granny's head in! 

His approach to 'compensation' falls down because it can be gamed and is likely to be adversely selective. It was probably a mistake to disguise unemployment as disability.

Allen Buchanan, and Jon Elster – as well as inheritors of the Frankfurt School like Habermas, wound up embracing some variant of the view that came to be known as “liberal egalitarianism.”

i.e. they wanted to be very liberal with other people's money. Still, I'm sure they set a good example by sharing their own salaries with the custodial staff.  

Of course, this was not a capitulation to the old-fashioned “classical liberalism” of the 19th century, it was rather a defection to the style of modern liberalism that found its canonical expression in the work of John Rawls.

In other words, they were saying 'guys who vote for Reagan and Thatcher don't want lower taxes. They want everybody to get the same amount of money as the unemployed'. Amartya Sen went the extra mile and said that they wanted less money than the unemployed person because the poor bloke might be a drug addict who could only get hard if two hooker urinated on him. Drugs aren't cheap you know. Also only Vassar graduates have the special skills necessary to pull off a double golden shower. They have to charge a lot of money because they are carrying a lot of student debt. 

If one felt like putting the point polemically, one might say that the “no-bullshit” Marxists, after having removed all of the bullshit from Marxism, discovered that there was nothing left but liberalism.

The Chinese had already discovered that what Marx actually said was 'to each according to his contribution'. This meant that control rights over property should be aligned with entrepreneurial ability. However, since the Party (unlike in Gorby's USSR) retained residual rights over everything, these control rights might disappear. But this led to capital flight.

This is not quite right though, because what they actually discovered was that the new, modernized, reinvigorated liberalism propounded by Rawls was both expressively and rhetorically superior to the reconstructed Marxism they had been trying to defend.

But it cashes out as saying 'be nice to the poor. There but for the grace of God & c'. That aint liberalism. It is Episcopalian pi-jaw as opposed to cool Televangelist pi-jaw- which is about having had sex with a male prostitute and blown millions of dollars of Church money at Las Vegas but claiming to have been absolved of all sin by Lloyd Jesus who has washed you in the blood of some lambs. 

So they switched allegiances (sometimes with fanfare, more often without).

Why put a target on your back? 

I sometimes teach a seminar course in which we read all three of the books that Rawls published during his lifetime.

Canadians still read books. They truly are the most boring people on the planet.  

I always start by cautioning students that the biggest challenge in reading Rawls’s work is figuring out why it is so important – because it seems incredibly dull (normie, basic, etc.).

Rawls is very funny. The cunt didn't get that when faced with uncertainty you go in for risk-pooling- i.e. you buy insurance. You don't agree to share everything with homeless alkies or socioproctologists.  

My best suggestion for overcoming this challenge, when reading A Theory of Justice, is to go into it thinking “this is the book that killed Western Marxism,”

did you know that Nixon was a Communist? Rawls's book led directly to his impeachment. 

One might ask whether Blair and Brown had read Rawls. Was that why they abandoned Clause IV (which called for common ownership of industry)? The short answer is no. They just wanted to reassure voters who had bought their council houses and invested in shares in BT etc, that Nationalization was off the table. 

and then focus on figuring out how it managed to do so. (The fact that Rawls never directly criticized Marx adds to the mystery.)

Capitalists won't hand over their property unless they are compelled to do so by Commissars with guns. However, we can pretend that if they were really rational, they would voluntarily agree to have the same income as a drunken hobo. This is like pretending that what all heterosexual men really want is to suck you off. 

To make this long story short, one must start with the most important piece of bullshit in traditional Marxism. Marx always insisted that the major difference between his view and that of the “utopian socialists” was that he was not engaged in any sort of moral criticism of the capitalist system, nor was he claiming that capitalism was unjust. He was merely predicting the downfall of the capitalist system, based on his scientific understanding of the laws of historical development.

He wrongly believed that the rate of profit would fall to zero. The fact is, even if it is negative, there will still be entrepreneurs, with control rights, tapping into Society's fund of savings.  

So, for example, his use of the term “exploitation” was not intended to imply any sort of moral condemnation, it was merely a technical term used to describe the extraction of surplus value from labour.

Morishima's fundamental theorem of Marxism states that so long as at least one enterprise makes a profit- exploitation exists. The Feminist version is, so long as even one dick enters a vagina, all women are incessantly being raped. Obviously, both these views are false. The fact is, so long as there is even one Iyengar, Iyers are being mercilessly persecuted- e.g. by Leo Varadkar's refusal to allow us to reclaim Iyerland from the fucking leprechauns.  

This was obvious bullshit – indeed, at various points where Marx makes this claim, he sounds like he is, as the British like to say, “taking the piss.”

Not really. By the 1880s many large agricultural estates in England had become loss making. What if the same thing happened to industry? There might be a 'general glut' and 'deflation'- which would lead to what Keynes would later call a liquidity trap. Indeed, that's how the Great Depression was interpreted.  

Nevertheless, early Marxists (and Marxist-Leninists) found it a useful claim to keep around, in order to avoid getting into certain arguments that they didn’t want to get into.

No. At that time, it looked obvious that Capitalism would begin to die if it stopped finding new markets. That's why many agreed that 'Imperialism is the final stage of Capitalism', but since Emperors were bound to fight each other to death, Bolshevism would soon overrun the world which might make everything sweet and nice. 

Over the course of the 20th century, however, the claim became increasingly less useful, because the prospects for the collapse of capitalism came to seem increasingly remote.

No. What changed was that people kept running the fuck away from Communist countries. Also, guys who raved about the Worker's paradise seldom showed any burning desire to move there themselves.  

Most importantly, workers did not become “immiserated,” as Marx predicted, but rather experienced robust wage growth, so that by the beginning of the 1970s it was really not obvious to anyone that workers had reasons of self-interest to support socialist revolution.

Nobody minds getting even richer or enjoying more leisure and better amenities.

By this time most Marxists had also realized that they needed a moral critique of capitalism, because the whole “predicting its downfall” angle had basically outlived its usefulness.

Also the capitalist was actually the worker's pension fund or insurance company. Institutional investment was like 'common ownership' except management had to stay on its toes 

So the number one piece of bullshit that got purged, at the very first meeting of the no-bullshit Marxism group, was the claim that Marxism could get along without a normative critique of capitalism.

Kantorovich had got a Nobel prize. The hope was that a bunch of networked computers could allocate resources more efficiently than financial markets. Sadly, the incentive was lacking. By the end of the Seventies, the reverse game theory of 'mechanism design' had made 'incentive compatibility' central to economic thinking. People realized that the Social Contract must be 'incomplete' because of Knightian Uncertainty. Thus Rawls had been barking up the wrong tree.  

One of the tasks that the group set itself was therefore to offer an analysis and defence of such a moral critique. The obvious place to start was with the concept of exploitation. So they set out to answer a series of questions: what is exploitation?

Unconscionable contracts. The law had already clarified what psilosophers had muddled. 

why is it unjust?

monoposonistic employer's cartels were a 'restraint on trade' and per se illegal and hence unjust. The question was whether the countervailing power of Unions would be enough- as Galbraith suggested. The answer was- 'No! Don't be silly! Trade Union leaders can be self-aggrandizing nutters.'  

does capitalism necessarily exploit workers? what would a non-exploitative economic system look like?

One where I was rich and good looking and had an above average sized dick.  

Over time, however, it became clear that every attempt to answer these questions was running into massive problems. One could write an entire book explaining why, but suffice it to say that several of the greatest philosophical minds of their generation

had shit for brains because they had devoted themselves to a shitty discipline 

took a crack at the problem, and none of them was able to generate a coherent critique of capitalism that took exploitation as its normative foundation. (For an accessible summary of these efforts, see van Parijs’s, “What (if anything) is intrinsically wrong with capitalism?”)

the answer was that people are offered money in return for working. Clearly, everybody should be paid for doing sweet fuck all. 

For me, the watershed event was the publication of Roemer’s A General Theory of Exploitation and Class.

Suppose I promise to get you a place on a spaceship to the paradisal Planet K-Pax just before the Earth blows up provided you work for me for free for the next ten years. If I actually do fulfil my promise, you haven't been exploited. If there is no apocalypse and no spaceship, I have exploited you unless what you would have done with your time would have led to worse consequences for you. It turns out that exploitation is linked to opportunity cost. If expectations match reality and ex ante equals ex post- the equilibrium is not exploitative or intrinsically wrong. It just mightn't be something we find appealing because dicks haven't been banned even though dicks cause RAPE! Normatively, that's simply not acceptable.

For Cohen, by contrast, the problems were caused by Robert Nozick – and since Cohen’s story is the more entertaining one, I’ll focus on that.

The most natural way to specify the wrongness of exploitation is to say that workers are entitled to the fruits of their labour, and so if they receive something less than this, they are being treated unjustly. (This is why Marxists are wedded to the labour theory of value – because it makes this normative claim seem intuitively natural and compelling.)

The problem is Knightian uncertainty which promotes regret minimizing behavior rather than expected utility maximization. There's a reason some people prefer to be employees rather than independent contractors even if their expected earnings are much lower. Essentially, if your company goes bust, you are in the same boat as everybody else. Psychologically, this feels better than knowing you failed where others succeeded.  

But as Nozick observed, if this is your view, then you can’t really complain about certain economic inequalities, such as those that arise when individuals with rare natural talents are able to command enormous economic rents for their performances (this is the famous “Wilt Chamberlain” argument in Anarchy, State and Utopia).

Marx explained that his theory only applied to goods not services.  

Furthermore, taxing away any part of this income looks a lot like exploitation.

Taxing 'rent'- i.e. factors in inelastic supply- is more allocatively efficient provided the Government doesn't piss that money away. The problem is, no matter what economic regime we have, if people do stupid shit, the outcome will be shitty. But Alexander Pope had stated this obvious fact a long time ago.

This argument made Cohen extremely uncomfortable, because it constituted a direct challenge to the normative foundations of Marxism-as-critique-of-exploitation. He spent the better part of a decade agonizing, and wrote two entire books trying to work out a response to Nozick, none of it particularly persuasive. Then one day (as he tells the story) he decided to leave Oxford and spend some time at Harvard. Upon arriving in America, he discovered that none of his fellow left-wing political philosophers had been losing any sleep at all over Nozick’s arguments. Why? Because they were egalitarians. They didn’t care about either self-ownership or exploitation, so they simply rejected the premises of Nozick’s argument. (Unlike Cohen’s sprawling efforts, Rawls’s response to the Wilt Chamberlain argument is less than two pages long and quite persuasive.)

But a similar argument can be made for banning dicks. They are icky. Nobody should have one.  

This created something of a “road to Damascus” moment for Cohen. It forced him to ask the basic question: what is it that I dislike most about capitalism? Is it that, according to some (increasingly arcane) formula, not everyone is getting paid the full value of what they produce?

If they were, they could easily pay for their own defense by buying an ICBM and installing it in their backyard. 

Or is it that some people live in poverty, unable to afford the essentials of a dignified life, in the midst of a society overflowing with riches? What Nozick showed is that fixing the exploitation problem may not fix the inequality problem.

Also, fixing the exploitation problem may get your head kicked in. That's the reason political philosophers aren't rescuing sex-slaves from Mafia run brothels.  

(Roemer actually proves the point more forcefully, constructing a model economy in which the poor systematically exploit the rich, and yet remain poor.)

drugs cost too much. Also hookers.  

So one really is forced to choose which flaw in the system one cares about most.

Dicks. They are icky. Why is Biden not undergoing gender reassignment surgery? Is it because he is a Fascist?  

Why were Cohen’s American colleagues so quick to embrace egalitarianism?

Because the pay gap between an academic and a guy who uses his edumication to some useful purpose is greater in the States. Also, students you sleep with expect to get top grades even if they are as thick as shit.  

Because they were Rawlsians. What Rawls had provided, through his effort to “generalize and carry to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract,” was a natural way to derive the commitment to equality, as a normative principle governing the basic institutions of society.

By ignoring the fact that there is an insurance industry.  

Rawlsianism therefore gave frustrated Marxists an opportunity to cut the Gordian knot, by providing them with a normative framework in which they could state directly their critique of capitalism, focusing on the parts that they found most objectionable, without requiring any entanglement in the complex apparatus of Marxist theory.

In other words, they could switch off their brain.  

This led Cohen to the realization that, when push came to shove, he cared more about inequality than he did about exploitation, because how we relate to one another as human beings

especially human beings in starving shitholes 

is fundamentally more important than our right to exercise ownership over every last bit of stuff that we make. So he switched foundations and became an egalitarian (and – though he would have hated the description – a liberal).

Cohen was notorious for sharing his pay-packet with millions of starving people in shithole countries.  

So nowadays, when kids like Freddie deBoer come along insisting that “Marxism is not an egalitarian philosophy,”

It is also not an anti-racist or anti-misogynist philosophy. Did you know that many men inherit the trait of having dicks from Dad's who had dicks? Elites pretend things like intelligence and gender aren't heritable. Why do so few babies not grow up to be ducks?  

I nod my head in agreement, but I want to respond “Yes! That’s why nobody is a Marxist any more.”

Canadians don't know about a country called China.  

Again, I want to emphasize that several of the greatest minds in political philosophy of the 20th century

which is like saying 'many of the sexiest actuaries'  

spent the better part of two decades working the salt mines of Marxist theory, trying to make the “exploitation” critique of capitalism work and every single one of them gave up and became an egalitarian.

But lawyers continued to work on unconscionability and what equal pay laws actually mean. Economists, too, plugged away at incomplete contract theory using ideas like the folk theorem of repeated games.  

Surely that should count for something! Anyhow, there’s no need to take my word for it, the library is full of books.

It is, of course, a slight exaggeration to say that no one is a Marxist anymore. Some people have not yet received the memo. There are also the “left libertarians,” who are the rump of 20th century academic Marxism (these are people who cling to the self-ownership claim, while seeking to block the anti-egalitarian conclusions that Nozick derived from it). There is also a recent mini-trend of “neo-Republican” Marxists, but they are basically just liberals, who instead of appealing to Rawls’s egalitarianism, instead want to rely on Philip Pettit’s “non-domination” norm (which I take to be just another flavour of liberalism) to reconstruct Marxism.

Why not admit that what we are really speaking of is different flavors of shit?  

But beyond this, the collapse of academic Marxism – as a body of normatively motivated social criticism – has been complete.

Meanwhile the Chinese Communist Party has lifted a billion people out of poverty. In purchasing power parity terms, its GNP is about 20 percent bigger than the US. It may become militarily stronger than the US in 15 years.  

Hence the fundamental unseriousness of contemporary Marxism in public discourse. Popular Marxism (along with the sort of Gramscian or “cultural” Marxism one finds in critical studies departments) has become a religion without a theology.

It has many Popes but no parishioners. 

I can understand why some people might be reluctant to read serious Marxist theory, if the primary upshot is that it turns you into a liberal,

as opposed to a woke nutter 

but if the alternative is the style of aggressive, in-your-face stupidity found in Jacobin magazine (i.e. “I’m going to talk like a Marxist, even though none of it makes any sense, because you can’t stop me!”), then it seems to me a price worth paying.

but that price involves tolerating dicks. That makes you complicit in RAPE!  

Some people have failed to notice these trends, unfortunately, because there was no point at which any one person “refuted” Marxism.

Because they were too busy running away from it.  

Serious thinkers, for the most part, just slowly drifted away from it, the way that guests at a party filter out of the living room into the kitchen, where the conversation is livelier.

or the way smart kids abandoned Philosophy.  

In this case, the conversation that they drifted toward was Rawlsianism.

actually, Rawls was 'anything goes'. You can justify any arrangement whatsoever saying the worst off would be even more miserable under any other system.  

That is how Rawls wound up triumphing over Marxism – by rendering it superfluous, making it so that no one needed to be a Marxist any more.

But, as Reagan pointed out, it was the L-word which dared not speak its name.  

Rawlsians, by the way, are really bad at explaining any of this, which I why I thought I might try.

Sadly, Prof. Heath is still refusing to wipe the bottoms of those drooling cretins. Rawls would so not have approved.