Debate from the blog post on "The real class warfare"

[Erec]

Hello all. I am posting a reply to the conversation the RPGPundit and I were having at his blog regarding this blog post, just in case anyone else finds it interesting and would like to join in (tried posting this earlier today but I can't find the thread, don't know why it didn't go through).

I'm replying to his latest comment first so he can read it in case he wants to reply (will quote both the original post and our replies below).

RPGPundit, you say:

As to the rest of your points: the "productive class"/"political class" distinction was (if I'm not mistaken) first explicitly put in those terms by Charles Comte, though it may actually have been Dunoyer, who was writing at the same time. Thierry and Say also wrote about it.

In the United States the Jeffersonian school (Taylor, Calhoun, Leggett, etc) wrote about it, using similar terms. Both the French school (the very people Marx referred to when he wrote about how 'bourgeoise historians and economists that recognized class warfare') and the Jeffersonians were influenced by earlier work from people like Benjamin Constant and Thomas Paine, and their fully-formed theories emerged out of those influences.

Since you seem to be unaware of these writers, it makes sense that you'd think that the marxist model would make "more historical sense", but it doesn't. It doesn't account, for example, for the fact that there were non-labor members of the 'industrial class' who were engaged in struggle against other moneyed interests whose profit was born out of the hindering of economic growth while living uproductively off of the labor of others.

The Productive Class is then ALL people who create utility through voluntary exchange. The Parasite class are those who create no utility and profit from involuntary exchange of wealth.

I am aware of the authors, you just didn't happen to name them at the post, so that's the reason I asked for them. And yes, the ideas on the topic of Mills, Say, Taylor, Calhoun, Comte, Thierry are all based on the ideas by Adam Smith and owe a great deal to his thoughts about productive/unproductive labour that I mentioned to you, so your argument remains unconvincing, I'm afraid. No wonder even Roderick T. Long, the libertarian philosopher groups all of them in what he calls the Smithian theory of class.
Non-labour members of the industrial class engaged in the struggle against moneyed interests was something that Smith recognized. As a representative of the classical economists he criticized the feudal mode of production by pitting it against the newborn capitalist mode of production. His objection to feudalism as a social order was not inefficiency, but profligacy and waste. It was the way that
the nobility wasted labour in prodigal displays of luxury that held back progress.

Smith says:

The proportion between capital and revenue, therefore, seems
every-where to regulate the proportion between industry and
idleness. Wherever capital predominates, industry prevails:
wherever revenue, idleness. Every increase or diminution of
capital, therefore, naturally tends to increase or diminish the
real quantity of industry, the number of productive hands,
and consequently the exchangeable value of the annual produce
of the land and labour of the country, the real wealth
and revenue of all its inhabitants

.

Most of those following Smith's conception were aiming the bourgeois criticism of feudalism at landlords, aristocrats and all those representing roughly the ancien regime: right by inheritance, control of the state and its coercive strength in order to subjugate those individuals who were participating in productive labour (in order for unproductive members of society to live off that productive labour of others).

This is why I didn't understand your theory of class warfare from the post. You say:

It is inevitable that the Parasite Class, achieving their goals, will bring down whatever polity they've managed to subvert to the level of harm that there will be a revolution against them from the people of the productive class: actual workers, actual farmers, actual businessmen, actual artists, actual intellectuals, actual aristocrats, etc.

I'm left scratching my head when you say that "actual aristocrats" are members of the "productive class". Aristocrats were the target of the criticism of both Smith and of many of those influenced by him who you cited, and were, by definition, living off the use of the coercive state (which is the apparatus that holds their birthright, their land titles, their authority). It's not that I support the ideas of Smith or of any of those authors you cited, mind you, but at least they are consistent. This lumping of "actual aristocrats" with "actual workers" is nowhere to be found in Smith, and I highly doubt in any of the other authors (I don't know, maybe there's some writing by Calhoun supporting aristocrats to couple his fawning over slavery somewhere).

Your definition of "the productive class" as:

The Productive Class is then ALL people who create utility through voluntary exchange. The Parasite class are those who create no utility and profit from involuntary exchange of wealth.

Is thus difficult to understand. When an "actual worker" works he is not "exchanging" anything "voluntarily": if he doesn't work, he doesn't it, simple as that. That is not "voluntary exchange" from which you can withdraw. An "actual aristocrat" can choose to exchange the rent he collects from his land or not, but how does the rent he is collecting "create utility"? It is actually the opposite of it: he is charging because there is an authority (the state) which protects his private property over it.

It gets even more confusing when you say that the "parasite class" is composed of:

The Rich Rockefeller Republicans, the Hippie bullshit-selling academics, the Celebrities, the Lobbyists and 'career Activists', and the people who work that very special type of corporate job that involves making money without creating anything and often without even selling anything.

The last line is ironic, as that is exactly what "actual aristocrats" make. It is also weird to separate "actual businessmen" and "Rich Rockefeller Republicans" with no objective basis (who's to say which is one and which is the other). Exactly the same as "actual intellectuals" and "bullshit-selling academics". At the end, it looks like you separate between "people from X profession or group that I like vs people from X that I don't like". The thing gets even more convoluted when you think that many of those you describe as the "parasite class" are fulfilling the criteria you yourself set for the productive class. I might despise bullshit-selling academics as much as you do, but by your own criteria (which leaves the market to validate what is productive and what not), they are productive. Con artists pitching TED talks about postmodernism, why the West is so evil, and all those SJW things we don't like are doing it because it pays to do so. People pay for it, and they get "utility" from "voluntary exchange": they pay money to hear someone tell them they are evil because they were born in some country and they should "check their privilege".


Why do you then exclude them from the productive class when they fulfill the criteria you yourself set? It's one way or the other: either the market validates or it doesn't, but you can't then no Scotsman

I'm guessing you're quite a bit younger than me. Otherwise you would remember that there was a time when it was the Left who were notable for supporting Israel, and the Right were the ones who had undercurrents of anti-semitism. Naturally, one of the reasons for this was that Israel had a center-left socialist government for many decades of its early history. Another part, however, was that Israel was seen as a great success of largely liberal western values: it was the righting of terrible wrongs committed against Jews not just by Nazis but by (often religious) conservatives and outright authoritarians for centuries. And Israel was a great, western-inspired, democratic state with western-liberal values in a region where democracy was weak and unstable.

But that was all back when the Left mainly believed in the West and western values.
This does not address my question which was why do you think "support for Israel" was supposed to be an intrinsic part of the left that it "abandoned". There is nothing that support that. If anything, you can say that, as during the Cold War the international stance of different political factions mirrored what the power they adhered to (the US and the USSR, with some leftists factions following China) did. In that case, most countries aligned with the Soviet Union cut ties with Israel after 1967. It could be that you were old enough to have memories from before that time, which would put you in the 60's range, I guess. The actual tradition of a big part of the  left, especially after that,  is more in line with support for colonized peoples like the Palestinians (see for example Irish Republicans in Ireland, the French Communist Party, etc.).
But that is not related to the question, as what you said is that "support for Israel" put you "squarely on the left", and there is simply nothing that makes it an intrinsic leftist feature (nor is not supporting  it a requisite either).
Also, I am a leftist and I very much support some western values (I don't really think that you should support values just because of their place of origin, as, like I said, some "western values" positive and some negative; it's absurd to need to adhere to some "geographical values" in bulk).

Also, in the blog entry you're referring to (http://therpgpundit.blogspot.com/2017/09/when-did-i-choose-to-leave-left-i-didnt.html) I didn't state "minimum government intervention" but rather "against large government interference in the form of social engineering". I'll grant you that there was always (at least, since the 1930s or so) a significant part of the left that was a fan of Big-State answers to social ills. But this didn't use to be a universal value of the Left, because a large part of the left used to be extremely mistrustful of government (who were, after all, the architects of things like Segregation, the HUAC, and the War on Drugs).

I stand corrected in the quote then. And the idea that the left considered the need for a collective actor (the state) to solve social and economic problems predates the 1930's by large. Just consider that the debates economists were having about how to organize production usually involved either leaving everything to the market or using a planning agency (be it worker councils, the state) in order to achieve maximum social efficiency (revolutions were happening way before the 1930s in order to attempt to do so).
The part of the left mistrustful of government were either mistrustful of particular governments (as a socialist, you had every reason to mistrust the government of a capitalist state trying to jail you for political activities) or anarchists (who were largely associated with the left, but who are not all of the left; and as I mentioned, there are right-wing anarchocapitalists, and in general libertarianism is the current more obsessed with governments being something bad "per se").