This book is impossible to review, as it’s one subtle argument after another. The main thrust of it is that there had arisen by the time of the book’s publication an academic movement of “analytical Marxism” which attempted to use rigorous philosophy to heal the dying body of classical Marxism. If that required drastic measures such as eschewing the labor theory of value, the dialectic, the inevitability of historical change culminating in communism, and other seemingly essential tenets of Marxism, then very well, no sacrifice was deemed to be too great. The only thing to be preserved was Marx’s contempt for capitalism and the exploitation doctrine, though the means by which workers are allegedly exploited have been suitably modified.
Gordon argues that once these analytic philosophers are done with classical Marxism, there is not much left of it. Their own arguments are dealt with in the book. I shall concentrate on G.A. Cohen’s work as presented by Gordon. What I’ll try to do is to add a few more arguments to Gordon’s own. Where he dances around, I’ll go for the jugular.
1. Initial appropriation is declared to be unjust. I have argued that a teleological approach to claiming unowned objects is superior to the Rothbardian assignment of rights based on the potential owner’s being the efficient cause of a thing’s or a piece of land’s formal cause. Ownership is a legal formalization of one’s control of the thing owned. Hence the first person to control a thing should come to own it.
Now Gordon anticipates my arguments and attempts to rescue the labor-mixing requirement. To see where it goes wrong, however, let’s consider its strongest case, taken from theology. God, according to Christianity, is the efficient cause not only of the form but also of the matter of the world, far more than is required. He creates matter and orders it according to His design: “the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” (Gen 1:2) But God can be thought of as the owner of creation only in an attenuated sense. This is because he has no use for it. He is perfectly happy and does not, in traditional thinking, benefit from the universe. Human beings, on the other hand, must use nature in order to survive and prosper. The “in order to” signifies final causation. We come to own the land and natural resources ultimately because we, unlike God, make use of them for our own profit. That in so doing we also transform them is, in my view, less fundamental than this.
But I digress. Mises cuts through all these intricacies as follows:
Private property is a human device. It is not sacred. It came into existence in early ages of history, when people with their own power and by their own authority appropriated to themselves what had previously not been anybody’s property. Again and again proprietors were robbed of their property by expropriation. The history of private property can be traced back to a point at which it originated out of acts which were certainly not legal. Virtually every owner is the direct or indirect legal successor of people who acquired ownership either by arbitrary appropriation of ownerless things or by violent spoliation of their predecessor.
However, the fact that legal formalism can trace back every title either to arbitrary appropriation or to violent expropriation has no significance whatever for the conditions of a market society. Ownership in the market economy is no longer linked up with the remote origin of private property. Those events in a far-distant past, hidden in the darkness of primitive mankind’s history, are no longer of any concern for our day. For in an unhampered market society the consumers daily decide anew who should own and how much he should own. … Only in a legal and formalistic sense can the owners be considered the successors of appropriators and expropriators. In fact, they are mandataries of the consumers, bound by the operation of the market to serve the consumers best. Under capitalism, private property is the consummation of the self-determination of the consumers. (Human Action, 683)
The point is that we need not care for Cohen’s notions of “justice.” They are utterly irrelevant to any and all present concerns. Where, for example, are land areas or natural resources still unowned (or collectively owned, as Cohen prefers to see matters)? Antarctica? The Sahara desert? This issue is of no practical import. There was a problem with cybersquatters in the early days of the Internet, but it was long ago resolved quietly and peacefully. However things were initially distributed, right now all of that is ancient and unknown history. Even if the initial distribution gave all property to some one person who would call himself king, eventually people would buy up most of the land they were renting from him and normal free market would ensue. And even if the initial distribution were equal, it would become unequal very quickly as different people cultivating different natural resources, selling and buying land and capital goods, etc. would result in a wide variety of incomes and wealth.
Sure, there may still be unowned oil and coal and suchlike. And these resources come to be owned according to some version of “finders keepers.” But the precise way in which initial appropriation takes place pales in importance in comparison with the fact that their becoming owned according to some procedure would be to the benefit of all.
(One way to defend “finders keepers” is to say that the appropriators cannot, usually, be stopped. Think of, for example, an oil rig in the ocean. Who is going to come and challenge the oilman’s claim to his newfound property? This is not conflating an “is” with an “ought” but using “ought implies can.” At any rate, the point is to get the oil to the market as quickly as possible, and this method of gaining ownership of it works.)
2. Workers under developed capitalism are said to be “collectively unfree” to quit working for capitalists and start their own firms or cooperatives. Gordon writes: “Even if everyone who wishes to leave is able to do so, the proletariat collectively cannot. Since only a few exits are available, the fact that an individual is free to leave depends on it being true that most workers do not wish to leave.” (101)
First it needs to be pointed out that there is a distinction between freedom and power. No human being is, by his actions or existence, preventing any worker from leaving. What workers lack, according to Cohen, must be collective power to leave not freedom. This is important, because nobody promised omnipotence to anyone under capitalism, only the normal equal and extensive freedom of action. No defender of the free market said that the market maximizes human power as opposed to human freedom. (In a sense, capitalism does maximize human power over nature. But that is a separate argument.)
Second, workers do not ultimately work for capitalists; they work for the consumers. Mises puts it this way:
The orders given by businessmen in the conduct of their affairs can be heard and seen. Nobody can fail to become aware of them. Even messenger boys know that the boss runs things around the shop. But it requires a little more brains to notice the entrepreneur’s dependence on the market. The orders given by the consumers are not tangible, they cannot be perceived by the senses. Many people lack the discernment to take cognizance of them. They fall victim to the delusion that entrepreneurs and capitalists are irresponsible autocrats whom nobody calls to account for their actions. (272)
Of course, that’s not so, says Mises. Capitalists are subject to the supremacy of the consumers, and so are, through them, their employees. Each worker, in his capacity as a consumer, is keenly interested in the preservation of the system of production under which human effort is most productive and consumers are served most efficiently.
Third, the absurdity of this idea is hinted at by Gordon who, however, does not do it justice: “Cohen might reply here that even if workers will accept lower income, there still will not be enough exits. A developed capitalist economy requires large-scale production; if there were ‘too many’ small businesses, the standard of living would drastically decline.” (105) Exactly! So, why would the workers want to be “collectively free” to exit? Supposing they are not, if they were, wouldn’t an attempt to do so lead to a disaster? Perhaps we want to put artificial obstacles to workers’ leaving! A worker may want to leave, but he cannot want other workers to leave, as well, and not for the reasons (supposed competition due to collective unfreedom) Cohen gives. Therefore, a system in which a worker can leave only if he possesses some rare talent, such as entrepreneurial prowess, is precisely what we want. And that’s capitalism under which this talent is not arbitrary but filters workers who want to become business owners in such a way as to maximize efficiency and human welfare.
For example, workers are collectively unfree all to become landscaping artists. We may or may not lament this on existential grounds, perhaps as a metaphysical evil. But in addition, social cooperation will break down if everyone does become a landscaping artist. So, the fact that there are natural, embedded within the market system, protections against this sort of thing (namely, wage incentives) is perfectly great.
Fourth, Gordon gives an example of two people one of whom specializes in growing wheat and the other, in growing barley. (112) If they exchange part of their products with each other, both benefit and no one is subordinate to the other. We could say that the two farmers in this example both use each other and serve each other. The use each other insofar as division of labor allows both of them to get more goods than they could obtain under autarky. They serve each other insofar as each farmer has an incentive to produce what the other wants. The same relationship occurs in the employer-employee nexus: there is both mutual use and mutual service. In using the other, each is his master; in serving him, each is his servant. Perhaps the two “cancel each other out,” leaving both equal in dignity. Where’s the exploitation?
Finally, suppose that the workers are indeed “collectively unfree.” If it is contrary to the interest of most of them to leave, of what concern is this lack of freedom? As Rothbard argues in an example of a log-shipping business, people may want to remain workers,
[b]ecause (a) they didn’t have the capital; in short, they hadn’t saved up the requisite money by reducing their previous consumption sufficiently below their income to accumulate [enough money]; and/or (b) they wanted money payment while they worked, and were not willing to wait for the number of months it took for the logs to be shipped and sold; and/or (c) they were unwilling to be saddled with the risk that the logs might indeed not be saleable [profitably]. (The Ethics of Liberty, 39)
Not everyone can make the cut as an entrepreneur. And there are advantages to remaining a worker. Also employment is an Artisan-Guardian nexus. Many people are simply temperamentally unsuited either to uncreative work or to creative work and entrepreneurship.
3. Supposing for the sake of argument that capitalism is exploitative, does socialism come the rescue? Gordon brutalizes the system of mass cooperatives under some sort of market socialism on economic grounds. We can safely conclude, as Mises does of the related scheme of syndicalism, that “In short, it is nonsense.” (820)
In sum, this is a highly useful book dealing with an interesting attempt to revive a discredited system of thought. As Gordon proves, this attempt fails. As an aside, I wish I were as capable of the finesse and complexity of argumentation as the author himself is.