Crispin Sartwell has a great new article recently at Splice, on “The Newnew Left and the Principle of Hierarchical Coincidence.” Quoth he:

The classical socialism of people like Corbyn and Sanders had been developed, in detail, by the middle of the 19th century. It was designed as a response to the rise of rapacious industrial capitalism, and it specifically proposed to rein in capital by vast expansions of state power, or the annexation of more and more resources, powers, segments of the culture by government.. . . The concrete proposals amount to increased state control of many or even all segments of human life, from cradle to grave.

I think you're going to need some new ideas, because there's one breathtaking theoretical and practical problem with classical socialism. It proceeds in massive unawareness of a fundamental principle in political theory and political reality, which I call the principle of hierarchical coincidence (PHC): the idea that, in more or less every case and in the long run, political and economic hierarchies tend to coincide. Economic power leads to political power; political power leads to economic power.

. . . For this reason, and for the most part and in the long run, ever-increasing state power as recommended in socialism will tend to increase rather than ameliorate economic inequality. And though governments do sometimes and to some extent reduce economic inequality, they do so in a situation in which the seemingly intractable political/economic structure is largely produced, held in place, and enforced by these governments themselves. The structure of economic inequality rests to a large extent on political and police power, and certainly couldn't be maintained without it.

This is the incoherence at the heart of classical socialism: that intensifying political power, at least of a certain kind, will in the long run reduce economic inequality. But if you start nationalizing or socializing various segments of the economy—that is, if you give these powers to the state–you don't move toward an egalitarian paradise, you simply create a new ascendant class. . . .

–Crispin Sartwell, The Newnew Left and the Principle of Hierarchical Coincidence
SpliceToday, 13 June 2017.

Read the whole thing.

What I want to add here some responses to the pat rejoinders that I think are most likely to get thrown out quickly in response to the problem Sartwell raises, but which are really idle as objections to Sartwell’s point.

First, it is entirely idle to point out that state socialism is intended to combat hierarchical coincidence, and if only it could be properly politically implemented, it would tend to reduce inequality more and more and hence more and more make the problem evaporate rather than stabilizing or spiraling out of control. Whatever its theoretical intent, the effect in actually-existing state socialism is entirely different.

If there were some way to implement state socialist programs exactly to the ideological socialist’s specification, without serious political complication, bureaucratic redirection and mission creep, or unintended consequences, then sure, we’d have to hash out whether the total effects of the system tend to reinforce or to weaken the problem of hierarchical coincidence, on net, over short-term and long-term time spans. But there is no such way.^[1]

Second, there’s a lesson which many socialists today might take from a point like Sartwell’s, which does represent some progress, but which really goes a lot less far than they might think. In particular, it’s really easy to look at Sartwell’s discussion of the problems posed by increased state economic control, and conclude that the easy solution to the problem is to become an anarchistic socialist, instead of a state socialist. No state, no state power to back up economic power. And of course I’d hardly want to ward anyone off of anarchistic socialism — since that is, after all, what I believe in some forms.

But if you think of the structure of a socialistic anarchy as combating inequality with more or less the same sorts of socialization and collectivization proposed by state socialists — just in the hands of grassroots collectives, administered locally and democratically without state power by the same people who work in them — then I would argue that you have not eliminated the problem of hierarchical coincidence by eliminating the state police power, or by moving from electoral power to social capital as your means of administering the distribution of economic resources. Because, of course, there are such things as hierarchies of social power and prestige, even outside of state structures. Substituting social capital for political power brings some obvious benefits, because political power involves greater institutionalization, more formalized excuses for legitimacy, literally lethal repertoires of force to exert, etc. But the ability to wield social power within collectivized economic institutions, and so to continuously reinforce economic and social power, does not easily disappear even with the removal of the state. It becomes easier to combat; and maybe an easier fight is the best we can realistically hope for. But maybe, on the other hand, the goal should be to make sure that realistic alternatives to existing collective entities, dissent, exit, open competition, and other routes for centrifugal economic and social forces to dynamically express themselves, are firmly incorporated into our economic activities and our socio-economic institutions.

1. ^[1]You might say, “but the lack of immaculate conception is a problem for any duty proposing serious changes to the political system — including libertarianism, including market anarchism, including everything.” And you’d be right. It’s a really serious problem for any form of reformist libertarianism, and a major explanation for why it often degrades into standard right-wing business regulation politics. Anarchism doesn’t eliminate the problem; but it ameliorates it, precisely to the extent that the anarchist deliberately breaks from political strategies that open up the largest opportunities for political complication, bureaucratic redirection and mission creep, or unintended consequences. But if solving the problem were easy, revolution would be easy, and it’s no surprise that it isn’t.↩

Every four years there’s a new presidential election in the U.S., and campaign season lasts a good year or so before the election. So for about one out of every four years, you can expect to see an army of people (both professionals and citizen-militias) ready to corral any call for social change into a machine for political campaigning, and to grab hold of the rhetoric and imagery of radicals and revolutions to put it into the service of well-funded, weakly reformist campaigns to elect a Republican or Democrat to office. Just support the right candidate, and we are going to overthrow the powerful, we are going to stand up for the marginalized and oppressed, we are going to change the world together. By electing a better President than the other candidates who are running for the office. A couple days ago, InfoShop.org was circulating a joke image on Facebook to make fun of this tunnel-vision defining-down of radical goals to the limited circle of respectable electoral politics:

Which, as you might predict, caught a lot of flak from commenters deeply invested in the milieu of Progressive reform politics. One commenter, David STwo, offered a well-worn reply:

Revolutionary change… you mean like posting on Facebook, right?

Well, it’s easy enough to make fun of self-indulgent Facebook political signaling. But I’m willing to accept the challenge. David jokes, but posting on Facebook, for all its limits, absolutely has far more potential to practically contribute to long-term transformative social change than voting for long-shot reformist presidential candidates. The reason being that talking to people online is often self-indulgent and often runs in circles, but like any form of communication, it is potentially a medium of cultural pressure and cultural change. And cultural change, while tricky and partial and always highly imperfect, does a lot more to actually change things from day to day than energy-intensive, practically futile utopian schemes like voting for reformist candidates.

With most Leftists — including most anarchists embedded within the broader Leftist milieu — the standard line is that we are supposed to be looking for radical change in the long term, but in the short term supporting practical reforms. And the way we’re supposed to do that in the short term is by offering critical support or lesser evil votes to reformist candidates. If you take a hard stance against voting or electoral politicking, then you can expect to be met with the routine accusations that you’re prioritizing your radical idealism or purism over real people’s chances to achieve practical, short-term improvements. Those improvements, you will be told, are nowhere near enough, but they matter for people’s everyday lives, and we shouldn’t abandon any hope of making practical improvements until some distant day After The Revolution.

And of course it’s true that partial, gradual improvements on the margin matter for people’s everyday lives, and of course it’s true that they shouldn’t be abandoned for the sake of symbolic gestures. But the problem here is that the standard pro-voting line is a call for symbolic gestures, and offers very little of practical use to making those marginal reforms. The problem isn’t that electoral politics is impure; it’s that it’s impractical. The standard pro-voting line is alluring because of the cultural mystique that surrounds democratic politics in the U.S. But in reality its promise of practical gains through reformist electioneering is nearly the exact opposite of the truth. If significant marginal change is what you want, you are almost certainly doing more good towards that by posting radical political jokes on Facebook than by vocally supporting Bernie Sanders.

Voting for reformist candidates has two basic problems: there is an output problem, and there is an input problem.

The output problem is something I’ve written about a lot before.^[1] To justify voting for Bernie Sanders as a strategy for positive social change, you have to have some fairly reliable grounds for thinking that President Sanders will actually govern the way you think he will govern based on his campaign promises and his rhetoric, and that he won’t do anything negative along the way that significantly undermines the positive effects of his platform. I think there are good reasons to consider that hope to be optimistic, or indeed wildly unrealistic. It’s certainly not what the last seven years of Progressive Democratic Party administration would suggest.

But I want to set aside the output problem for a moment. For the sake of argument, let’s grant the most optimistic assumptions, the very happiest hypotheses about how a Bernie Sanders presidency would improve on the status quo in exactly the ways that Bernie Sanders supporters expect.

It doesn’t matter, because even if you assume away the output problem, you still haven’t dealt with the input problem. Whether or not you can count on the output of a political mechanism, even if we assume that a Social Democrat presidency would improve some things over the status quo, you still need to give me some realistic grounds for thinking that my actively supporting Bernie Sanders’ candidacy will somehow, practically, contribute to Bernie Sanders being elected in the first place. I don’t think that anyone doubts that that outcome is still a pretty long shot at best. And whether it is a long shot or a close race or a sure thing, you are going to need to think through the actual practicalities involved in campaigning for votes here, not just bake in a bunch of civics text-book mythology to the effect that Every Vote Is Sacred, Every Vote Is Good.^[2] Realistically speaking, a lot of people in the United States can’t vote at all. An electoral campaign offers no practical opportunities to undocumented immigrants, who cannot vote. It offers no practical opportunities to most documented immigrants. It offers no practical opportunities to disenfranchised felons. It also offers no practical opportunity to me. Any given person’s vote is almost certain to have a statistically neglible effect on the outcome of a big national race. But in my own case, it’s more than just statistical neglibility. In my own case, the practical, real-world situation is that I live in a small, fairly conservative town in east Alabama, and no matter who I vote for, or don’t vote for, I can predict with 99.999% confidence right now that the state of Alabama will still break about 60-40 in favor of whoever the Republican Party happens to nominate, and all of the electoral votes for the state of Alabama will go to that Republican. It’s not just that my vote makes a small contribution to the outcome. It’s that it makes literally no contribution to the outcome. If Bernie Sanders has a shot at winning the election, then I cannot possibly improve his shot by swinging my vote. Even if I convinced every single one of my neighbors for a fifteen mile radius in every direction to vote for Bernie Sanders, I still couldn’t improve his shot at winning the presidency. If he has no shot at winning the election, no matter how hard I might vote in Bernie’s favor, I certainly can’t do anything to chip away at that impossibility from where I am.

It might be nice to indulge in what-ifs about what Bernie might do if elected, but, functionally, telling me to support his campaign is telling me to devote a great deal of my limited time, attention and activist energy to a long-shot political campaign that offers no policy change whatever if it should fail (as it probably will), and whose chances of success or failure my vote cannot possibly influence in the slightest, even if it should succeed. It is not a practical recommendation for me, and it’s not a practical recommendation for any of my neighbors. It is like asking me to campaign against a hurricane hitting Mobile, or voting in favor of Auburn winning all their football games this season. Sometimes rooting and cheerleading are enjoyable ways to spend your time. But if so their value comes from the enjoyment they offer, not the practical advantages they convey, and my support for the Sanders campaign would be, practically speaking, an impractical, purely symbolic gesture in favor of an improbable utopian fantasy.

Now I am an anarchist. I have no problem per se with indulging in symbolic gestures in favor of improbable utopian fantasies. I am accustomed to long shots and unrealistic, utopian dreams. It may be that nothing I could do really accomplishes much, because radical change is hard. But then if I am going to take the time to make a symbolic gesture in favor of an improbable utopian fantasy, then why should I waste my symbolic gestures on hypothetical support for the lesser-disaster virtues of a more liberal state and another Progressive Democrat presidency? I would at least like to make a symbolic gesture in favor of an improbable utopian fantasy that I actually believe in.

Whether or not I should wish for Bernie Sanders to be elected, my supporting or not supporting Bernie Sanders will have exactly a 0% chance of helping Bernie Sanders get elected. Until you have some concrete way of improving on those odds, my view is going to remain that social protest, direct action, honest debate and day to day little pushes on the margin towards radical cultural change are not just more idealistic or pure, but really seriously immensely more immediate, immensely more practical outlets for whatever activist energy I have than cheerleading for yet another long-shot presidential campaign.

Practicality doesn’t come for free with a ballot. Ignoring that doesn’t make you a hardnosed realist, it just makes you another dreamy devotee of American civic religion.

1. ^[1]See for example: Progressive Politics, Direction of Fit, man 5 reformism, Change You Can Believe In, War Speech, etc.↩
2. ^[2]Every vote is needed in your neighborhood.↩

It’s a busy day today, especially on the activist front, so I won’t have much to add by way of comment until I’ve had a bit of time to sit down and breathe. But I just got this news via e-mail and it made me so happy that I had to post something to share the good news as soon as possible:

WASHINGTON – May 23, 2008 – The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and Burger King Corp. (NYSE:BKC) today announced plans to work together to improve wages and working conditions for the farmworkers who harvest tomatoes for the BURGER KING® system in Florida.

BKC has agreed to pay an additional net penny per pound for Florida tomatoes to increase wages for the Florida farm workers who harvest tomatoes. To encourage grower participation in this increased wage program, BKC will also fund incremental payroll taxes and administrative costs incurred by the growers as a result of their farmworkers’ increased wages, or a total of 1.5 cents per pound of tomatoes.

BKC also joins other fast-food industry leaders and the CIW in calling for an industry-wide net penny per pound surcharge to increase wages for Florida tomato harvesters.

Together, BKC and the CIW have also established zero tolerance guidelines for certain unlawful activities that require immediate termination of any grower from the BURGER KING® supply chain. The BKC/CIW collaboration additionally provides for farmworker participation in the monitoring of growers’ compliance with the company’s vendor code of conduct.

John Chidsey, chief executive officer of Burger King Corp., said, We are pleased to now be working together with the CIW to further the common goal of improving Florida tomato farmworkers’ wages, working conditions and lives. The CIW has been at the forefront of efforts to improve farm labor conditions, exposing abuses and driving socially responsible purchasing and work practices in the Florida tomato fields. We apologize for any negative statements about the CIW or its motives previously attributed to BKC or its employees and now realize that those statements were wrong. Today we turn a new page in our relationship and begin a new chapter of real progress for Florida farmworkers.

For more than 50 years, BKC has been a proud purchaser and supporter of the Florida tomato industry. However, if the Florida tomato industry is to be sustainable long-term, it must become more socially responsible. We, along with other industry leaders, recognize that the Florida tomato harvesters are in need of better wages, working conditions and respect for the hard work they do. And we look forward to working with the CIW in the pursuit of these necessary improvements. We also encourage other purchasers and growers of Florida tomatoes to engage in dialogue with the CIW in support of driving industry-wide socially responsible change.

Lucas Benitez of the CIW added, The events of the past months have been trying. But we are prepared to move forward, together now with Burger King, toward a future of full respect for the human rights of workers in the Florida tomato fields. Today we are one step closer to building a world where we, as farmworkers, can enjoy a fair wage and humane working conditions in exchange for the hard and essential work we do everyday. We are not there yet, but we are getting there, and this agreement should send a strong message to the rest of the restaurant and supermarket industry: Now is the time to join Yum! Brands, McDonalds, and Burger King in righting the wrongs that have been allowed to linger in Florida's fields for far too long.

U.S. Senator Richard Durbin (IL-D): I applaud Burger King for announcing today that it will be providing an extra penny per pound to the tomato pickers of Immokalee, Florida and establishing a zero-tolerance policy for worker abuses in the region. Today’s announcement is a major step forward in improving the wages and working conditions of the Immokalee workers. I call on other purchasers of the region’s tomatoes and the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange to join Burger King and do the right thing for these workers.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (VT-I): I have been to Immokalee and seen first-hand the conditions for farm workers there, perhaps the most exploited workers in America. I am very pleased that Burger King has agreed to help the tomato pickers who have worked for too long for too little. I know that this has been a long and hard road for Burger King, and I believe the American people will appreciate what they are doing. I hope now that other corporations will join Burger King, McDonalds and Yum Brands in doing the right thing.

The CIW has ended its campaign against BKC and its franchisees and will work with the company to further foster improvements and sustainable changes throughout the Florida tomato industry. The CIW and BKC will also work together toward development of an industry-wide vendor code of conduct and increased worker wages through encouragement of full buyer and grower participation.

— Coalition of Immokalee Workers Breaking News (2008-05-23): Burger King Corp. and Coalition of Immokalee Workers to Work Together

See also:

• GT 2007-12-06: Solidaridad
• GT 2007-11-30: Coalition of Immokalee Workers marches in Miami
• GT 2007-04-19: ¡Sí se puede! The CIW wins a groundbreaking wages and conditions agreement with McDonald's
• GT 2005-03-31: Anarquistas por La Causa
• GT 2005-03-23: ¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!