Derived from a presentation to the Melbourne Existentialist Society, August 7, 2007 at the Melbourne Unitarian Church
It is over ten years since I have the pleasure of speaking at the Melbourne Existentialist Society and I'd like to thank David Millar for inviting me back again to speak. His work for this informal association over the decades is quite extraordinary. David likes to book well in advance, and initially this presentation was going to be made in my capacity as President of Prosper Australia, once known as the Henry George League. I have since moved on, rather rapidly, from said organisation however not due to any significant departure from its original principles of sound economics and governance.
The initial title of this presentation is the rather clumsily worded "Autonomy and the Phenonmenology of Nature and Property" or something like that. It is preferable to refer to an easier and more comprehensible title: "Towards a Political Economy of Existentialism". It is a subject that has interested me for a some two decades now; whether the insights and focus of existentialist philosophy can be harnessed in such a manner to contribute to the realms of politics and economics. Some steps have been made in this direction of course, especially by those who emphasise the nihilist and absurdist themes in existentialism which the situationist Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, and the postmodernist Jean Baudrillard's, Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, are obvious examples.
It is not these themes of existentialism however which are considered in this presentation, but rather the emphasis on the universal conditions of Being that is common to all, the emphasis on individual and cooperative generation of meaning and purpose, responsibility for free choices and the challenges of "bad faith". Further, the phenomenological approach is deemed particularly useful to derive ontological groundings to justify political and economic rights. The three main points of discussion that will be raised tonight will include (a) Radical Autonomy as Existentialist Political Rights., (b) Geoist Mutalism as Existentialist Economics and the necessity of (c) Anarchist Confederations of Governments.
The principles of "radical autonomy" are similar to those of classical liberalism, various forms of anarchism including various libertarian approaches. The basic proposition is that conscious individuals, adults with adult reasoning, have absolute right over their own body ("self-regarding" acts) upon which no government, State or group may intervene. The mirror of this principle is that said individuals have the right to engage in consensual activity ("other-regarding acts), regardless of our offensive or wrong they may be to third parties. Specific breaches of these rights include acts of force, threat, defamation or fraud.
These propositions are well known; they form the core of modern liberal thought from the early days of John Locke, Adam Smith and through to John Stuart Mill. They are considered to be natural and universal rights as basic ontology. They are natural as part of our Being, and we experience their facticity through the most simple phenomology. The principle is universal and independent of social constructions; "existence preceeds essence". By universal, these rights are independent of local and temporal factors, such as specific legal systems, their nationality, their ethnicity, their "race", their sex and so forth.
Now it is important to recognise that whilst such propositions are supported by a wide range of thinkers, they remain within a minority. As Lawrence Kohlberg pointed out many years ago, only a 1/3 of the adult population end up using principled adult moral reasoning in their lives. The rest, apparently concerned about what others may think of them and apparently unable to distinguish between intersubjective morals and subjective tastes, follow conventional prejudices the sort of the "bad faith" herd mentality which many existentialist authors have commented on in the past.
This is most seriously evident in the fact that these peoples are poorly implemented, if at all, in the various legislative bodies around the world. Universal human rights, autonomy over one's body, and the capacity to establish consensual relations with others is, in many cases, a rarity, although one finds it as an accepted axiom in historical (such as John Locke, Adam Smith, Jeremy Benthem, John Stuart Mill) and contemporary liberal political thought. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that we also encounter in the realm of political economy, that is, the allocation of ownership and resource rights, a similar disparity between the natural experience of our autonomous selves and cooperative action with others and the political reality.
It is not all depressing however; there have been moments when enlightened individuals have framed constitutions which have explicitly limited the reach of government in a lasting manner; such as the rights embodied in the U.S. constitution and the "Rights of Man" in the early French republic. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in her classic text "On Revolution" such statements of permanency represent the most important legal protections individuals have ever received. One can make a quick comparison with temporary standards, such as the Victorian human rights legislation, which is subject to the vagaries of popular will and politics.
Two further issues need to be noted as they are of great import in discussing political economy relevenant to this presentation. The first involves the the expansion of liberalism in the twentieth century; the commitment to personal freedom, the freedom to engage in positive action, developed to include a social and consequentialist perspective, the freedom from negative circumstances. Another perspective in a similar theme comes Isaiah Berlin's classic 1958 lecture "Two Concepts of Liberty" which defined negative liberty as the absence of constrains and positive liberty in terms of self-determination, or if one phrases it in language more akin to an existentialist perspective 'freedom' and 'self-actualisation'.
The second issue is the elaboration undertaken from Locke in his notion of ontological rights of self-sovereignity to political economy and the rights of ownership. Locke claimed that if it is evident that an individual has a right to themselves, then it logically follows that they have right to the products of their labour. This is used to provide a moral foundation for the employment of others - the famous line about "the turf my servant cuts", much ridiculed by Marxists, but also provides a very interesting angle on the political economy of land where the demand is made that private appropriation can only be justified where there is "enough and as good left for others".
It from the challenges raised from these two issues that an initial sketch can be made towards an existentialist political economy that incorporates social relations in a manner that goes beyond the rather obvious and trivial (although politically still extremely important) agenda of self-sovereignity and consensual relations.
The conventional wisdom of economic practise is that some restrictions on negative liberty, in the form of taxation, can be justified if greater positive liberty, in the form of social and physical infrastructure, can be generated. On a surface level the claim seems to have justification, but only on the surface level for what is not evaluated is what element of the forces of production are being taxed, because these make of critical import. The different forces of production - land, labour and capital - influence production in different ways, which is strongly tied to what can be considered a phenomenological relationship of human beings to the respective forces.
All taxation includes a deadweight loss, over and above the actual cost of administration, as they act as a disincentive and restriction on the supply of a good or service. So a tax on labour is a disincentive to engage in labour, a tax on payroll is a disincentive to employ, a tax on capital is a disincentive to invest and so forth. The rate of this disincentive is quite calcuable; the square of the taxation rate itself. This disincentive is reflected in common language, for example an extremely onerous burden is described as 'taxing'.
Widely supported by economists (but notably not politicians) is the idea of using economic land, that which is provided by nature, as the basis for deriving public incomes. This would include rent from land, the broadcast spectrum, mineral rights, airway corridors and so forth. Following Locke, the argument is that a person has ownership to the value of the labour and (to use Marx's definition of capital) "dead labour" but not to the value of that provided by nature. One can, for example, refer to the views of Milton Friedman, Robert Solow, Paul Samuelson, and Franco Modigliani on such matters to reflect the range of views across the political spectrum. Further information and views on this matter can be found at the website Tax Reform Australia.
The economic effects would be to see a shift from attempts to monopolise natural resources and to put financial investment into productive activity; more goods and services, more employment, greater wealth. It would punish those who waste resources, and reward those who do not - a strategy better for our common environment. It is a tested system, with some rather impressive gains made when such a strategy was implemented if only in part. In Victoria the historical adoption of Councils using different rating systems (some site value, others property value) is instructive; those which adopted site rating ended up with more houses, better houses, more economic development and more income for the councils.
Apart from the functional advantages the proposal has a stronger moral foundation within the framework of radical autonomy and, from a point of view from existentialism, it has some interesting correlations. Viewed from a phenomenological approach, economic land is irrationalisable, a part of the "absurd" nature of existence itself which holds ontological primacy. Through the commercial appropriation of land this existence, indeed, Being in the existential sense, becomes alienated from us, very much in the way that the early Marx described, and to use Max Weber's term the experience of the world is "disenchanted".
Another approach that has existentialist relevance is some of the ideas of mutualism, initially formulated by the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The key principles are free assoication, mutual credit (yes, very much like credit unions or mutual associations), confederate contracts and the the process of gradual transformation with mutualist economics operating alongside the capitalist system ("dual power").
The principle of free association for example argues that the most efficient form of organisation is cooperative ventures. In a manner which strongly suggests a phenomenology of work, Proudhon noted, for example, that cooperative ventures were most appropriate where interdependent mass labour was the norm - it was not the case in patriarchial peasant societies. Thus industrial democracy and self-management is advocated as being efficient as a matter of the most experientially relevant to particular social formations.
The proposals of "dual power" and confederacy in mutualism are particularly interesting in reference to the final part of this presentation, that is, the concept of governance by anarchist confederations. Now before one automatically assumes that governance and anarchy are antithetical a distinction must be made between government and the State. Anarchists are not opposed to government, that is, the regulation of the use of things, but rather they are opposed to implementation of class rule through the State's monopoly on violence. The term "anarchism" derives from the Greek αναρχία ("without archons," "without rulers"). Anarchy provides order; it is not a lack of rules, but a lack of rulers.
As already explained, anarchist government would make no rule concerning the self-regarding acts of individuals or consensual agreements between free and reasoning actors as a universal right. Instead, the juridisction would be limited to the Roman concept of the res publica, "the public thing" whereby, to paraphrase Saint-Simon, "the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things", with the most obvious "thing" being that which is not the product of labour or capital, which we have all been, to use the existentialist term, "thrown" into.
Anarchist governance would have to be confederate, for the very existentialist reasons concerning the phenomenology of social relations and need for authentic relations. Representatives, or in the anarchist sense, delegates (who are subject to recall), must have direct connection with the people whom they claim to represent. In 1901, the Federal seat of Melbourne had 13,000 electors - a large number, but perhaps just manageable in terms of being able to have a sense of the will of the electors. John Selden, the British jurist and politician of the 16th and 17th centuries who made the comment that parliament was invented because "the room would not hold us all", thus justifying the move away from direct democracy. However the replacement of mass electorates with mass politics lacks authetincity, lacks a genuine relationship between citizen and delegate. Today the Federal seat of Melbourne it has over 90,000 electors. It is simply not possible in such circumstances for a representative or delegate to be aware of the wishes of their electorate. Politicians, and this may surprise you, are out of touch.
The alternative is an organic form of direct democracy, most stronger advocated by Thomas Jefferson in his elder years, where government is managed as confederacies of "natural republics" of nominally one hundred households, through "breaking Councils into Wards". Such sovereign micro-nations, apart from managing their own affairs, and providing delegation to larger regional groups, who in turn elect to the next tier and so forth, would also be most critical in ending the State monopoly on violence; for as Jefferson suggested, and he had some experience in the matter, the "natural republic" would be responsible for the free and voluntary militia of the community, replacing standing armies, the State's police force and providing the same scope of emergency services. Such militia, as history has shown many times, provides an excellent means of defense, but a extremely poor means to organise into an invading force, as the United States discovered in their war against Canada from 1812-1815, and it was after this war that the United States turned to rely on a professional standing army and the expansionist policy of "Manifest Destiny".
This presentation has provided an initial sketch by which important themes of existentialism can be combined with a political economy. It emphasises the universal and critical over the local, temporal and trivial. It proposes the need for authentic social relations over "bad faith". It expresses the utter necessity of individual freedom and protection from the "tyranny of the majority" over self-regarding acts and consensual mutual action. It advocates a non-alientating (and yet functional) approach to the management of common land and resources and the capacity to establish cooperative ventures.
To be sure, there are some significant vested interests opposed to these proposals. Many, with limited cognitive skills, do advocate that majority tastes should be applied against minorities. There are those, who live in fear of whate others may think of them, who will say what makes them popular, rather than what is right. And there are those who derive their income and wealth from the exclusive possession of natural resources who have a vested interest in maintaining their power.
The greatest challenge however is probably breaking the bonds of "bad faith". Functional advantages and reason can certainly advance a logical claim, and indeed it provides a great personal mental protection against irrational circumstances. But to thoroughly convince others, often providing them with that elusive quality "meaning" is in order. To give up lifestyles of triviality, and concern oneself with matters of the greatest import and greatest justification. That challenge is great; but the rewards are even greater.