The Poor, The Personal, and the Proletariat

Just a short kvetch about something that I feel often causes confusion among online left wing people and where I feel we could do better if we all were just a bit clearer and more honest with ourselves. It begins with the question: why be left-wing?

An answer: you are a part of a marginalised group in some sense. It is in your self-interest for that group's position to improve. Being left-wing is a means of improving your wealth and status in a fairly straightforward sense; and this is not mere selfishness, because the impediments to your achieving a better state are manifestly social injustices remedying which would be laudable. So this is an admirable project of self-improvement, a communal betterment of which you can reasonably expect to partake. I think a lot of what people call "identity politics" or modern "social justice" politics is focussed on this sort of thing. 

(Just a side note but often people who I think are actually motivated by this sort of thing will say things that sound like they do not mean for their politics to be about bettering one's own condition, for instance they stress the importance of being willing to "decentre" one's-self in various conversations. But in my experience it overwhelmingly turns out this is more that such people are advocating a sort of turn-taking exercise, and they expect that there will be other times and conversations where they will get their turn.)

Another answer: left-wing politics are those of the global majority, advocating for the working class which is after all the huge majority of people in the world.  This can be just the same as the above point - the proletariat are a marginalised group and you are probably in it! - or it can be a distinct more political-realist sort of perspective. On this latter it is more a matter of simply being on the winning side, the side that has the greater part of social forces on its side, and whose victory is more or less assured when and only when that majority comes to see its own strength and act accordingly in its own interest. We are the 99%. Ye are many, they are few.

And another answer: justice or some other other-directed moral concern turns out to pick out left-wing political projects. This is Pope Leo preaching against income inequality, and in philosophy this is famously associated with Rawls' difference principle leading him to liberal socialism. Typically these arguments go via there being some special reason to pay attention to the plight of the poor and downtrod, and making the case that it is left wing political projects that would best manifest appropriate care.

Now I want it to be clear that in a certain sense these do not contradict. (Indeed I think the possibility of them being made consistent and coherent is what produces the temptation to bad practices described below.) So I am not saying you have to choose among them, though I in fact think you do. There can be multiple paths to the right answer, there's no inherent problem with that. And I think many people who are inclined to left-wing politics feel the pull of some combination of all of these. They are advocating for what they see as best for themselves, for the great part of humanity, and for the poor in particular. I certainly have at various times felt the pull of any and all of these sorts of reasons. And because they are all tempting, all have some pull - one can sometimes feel that they are pulling you in different directions, pulling you apart.

But nobody likes being incoherent, and the problem is these motivations obviously might well contradict. For instance it's perfectly possible that, even though you are from a marginalised group when considered as a whole, you personally have made it into the upper echelons of your society's income distribution. In such a case it is obvious how redistributive progressive tax-and-spend measures might be good for the poor, and good even for the group you are from, but bad for you personally. Might be such, not certainly so - perhaps there is a sense of enlightened self-interest in which actually the social stability one gains by well-funded public education systems or quality social provision of healthcare works out best even for those in your position. Or maybe the Stoics (via Nujabes) are right when they say that the ultimate reward is honour not awards and so one should count one's wealth for nought as compared with the opportunity to see justice done. Or cetera. My point is not here to argue that the logical possibility of these perspectives coming apart guarantees they will do so. Only that we can all clearly see how such things might come apart, and certainly how one one might fear they do.

So how to assuage that fear, how to hold off on the nagging worry that one might be forced to either choose between ideals all of which are held dear or accept of oneself that one is incoherent?

I am not sure. It is difficult. I will say more about what I do at the end. (For what it's worth, I actually think Du Bois' The White World, chapter 6 of Dusk of Dawn is a truly wonderful literary exploration of this, if anyone wants to read.) But my real point is just to complain about a certain lazy or all-too-easy route that I see taken on the internet dot com. This is more or less the ostrich approach to all these things. As ever I do not like giving negative exemplars, so if you have not seen this then you shall have to either take my word for it or disbelieve me. Anyway, the ostrich approach is as follows:

However wealthy you are, that is poor. Indeed, the vast majority of persons even in very wealthy nations -- they are all poor. Everyone, in fact, is just struggling to get by. And this is, importantly, not because one had some sort of independent standard of absolute poverty and have found that you and everyone else happens to meet the criteria so defined. No, that would still introduce the possibility that maybe the day will come when one does not meet the definition while others still do. (And in any case, it turns out, there are very few plausible notions of absolute poverty that would make the vast majority of persons in contemporary America, Canada, France, the UK, etc, come out as in fact poor in such terms.) So instead it becomes quasi-analytic -- whatever struggles one faces those just are those of the poor. Whatever the average income or quality of life or amenities people typically have, outside of a very few super-wealthy persons those are just to be understood as the income, quality of life, and level of amenities one would expect the poor to possess. In short, one simply defines away any contradiction or incoherence by treating the three potential sources of motivation as guaranteed in advance to always align because one ensures by one's definitions that they always pick out the same groups of people. Your interest, that of the global majority, and those of the poor we have special moral concern with - all are exactly the same, and all are therefore advanced by the same projects.

This leads to terrible policies ideas and a lot of humbug. For instance the strange phenomenon of the anti-taxation leftist, I think, comes out of this. One in theory supports progressive taxation and redistributive policies. But in practice since one has analytically defined oneself and the vast majority of persons to in fact be among the poor who should be redistributed to, broad-based taxation becomes impossible. Instead fantasies are promoted whereby if only a sufficiently punitive tax on an extremely small class of ultra-wealthy persons were adopted we could in fact fund a social democratic welfare state in perpetuity. This is simply not true, wildly implausible in fact; but it is something like a logical consequence of the ostrich strategy for remaining left wing. I think likewise a lot of stamping one's foot and insisting that one doesn't understand the difference between mean and median incomes (if such a debate means nothing to you then say a prayer of thanks that you have never been on Bluesky Dot Com) comes out of an unwillingness to acknowledge the possibility of the average person in an advanced western economy simply not being markedly poor.

Indeed this way of thinking makes one ultimately very anti-empiricist, anti-materialist, and just plain kinda stupid. One avoids having one's mind divided against itself, sure. It is coherent in that sense. But one has to simply ignore evidence, ultimately rebel against simple mathematics, in order to maintain the increasingly bizarre logical leaps necessary to avoid the plain fact that these groups are not all identical and their interests do not actually align. One can't actually be responsive to real conditions in the world, one has to forever interpret things in an implausible fashion divorced from the evidence. Indeed one tends to become angry and hostile to those around you who are in touch with the evidence, as their attempts to interject with counter-veiling facts will seem not just obstructionist and undermining of the cause but opposed to the entire posture one has adopted to the world, fundamentally at odds with one's preferred way of making one's project coherent. It's no good way to live. And it makes one really annoying on social media.

For my part I think I have just had to be honest with myself that I am personally on the left for moralistic reasons. So I have increasingly come to be rather scathing about anti-moralist approaches to leftwingery that stress the sheer self-interest of the global majority coming to power (for instance I now think I was a bit too rude about Rosa's realism here, but such is the enthusiasm of a new convert). Likewise I must accept this will sometimes come apart from my personal self-interest, and this explains my ironical cynicism about the POC intelligentsia and my place within in this piece here. 

Now, White Psychodrama does also hint at some support for the potential reconciliation of all these things via adopting a sort of left Stoic perspective (I also very much like the other Femi's piece on this theme) -- maybe upon proper ethical theorising being done it will turn out that justice is its own reward. So all of our self-interest, properly understood, is best achieved via carrying out a left wing social project. But, being real, this is more an expression of pious hope of all being reconciled in a Heavenly City beyond than it is any real programme for actually bringing them together in the here and now or analytically well grounded moral-psychological theory of welfare that I could actually defend. In the end I must accept that my convictions, if carried through, would in various intuitive unphilosophic senses make the world a bit worse for me than available alternatives, and I am not the only one in this situation. While the world is a positive sum place and we do well to work together, our interests are not all so perfectly aligned that I do not have to sometimes make genuine sacrifices on behalf of the good. So it goes.

Ultimately I just do think that we have special moral responsibilities towards the poor and that's why I do what I do and think what I think. Resources have increasing marginal utility when directed downwards, and materially inegalitarian societies lock in hierarchies of power, status, and esteem, that I just find per se morally objectionable. Unless we pay special attention to uplifting the poor and removing or ameliorating those hierarchies I do not think we can get what I want. And what I want is for there to be peoples and nations and communities at peace, for all to be able to enjoy the plain joys of daily intercourse among friends, and for everyone to be able to dedicate themselves to fulfilling projects as is their own satisfaction. Simple as this is, getting there will require turning the world upside down. 

I sometimes quip, to nobody's amusement but my own, that I am more digger than dialectical. My reasons for wanting this are moral, personal and maybe even spiritual; I am exactly the sort of utopian socialist that the greats of my own tradition would sneer at. And maybe this is all therefore not something I could really persuade someone of who does not have the same emotional reaction to certain events and persons as I do. But I can at least hope to be coherent in my idiosyncrasy, and work earnestly and with one mind towards a better world.